Foreign Devils of the Silk Road
Setting the East Ablaze
The Great Game
On Secret Service East of Constantinople
By Peter Hopkirk
Published by John Murray, 2006

A bag of books about Europe’s 19th-century covert warfare and sneaky expeditions in the sands and snows of Asia reveal much about modern times. And they’re fun to read. My review for The Nation, published on June 17.

Any book that begins with a map is a pretty good bet for adventure, and that’s true of all four of Peter Hopkirk’s histories about Europeans getting up to brave, bold and often crazy things in Asia a century ago.

Re-released in a batch last year, this quartet began with “Foreign Devils of the Silk Road” in 1980 and rolled out through 1984’s “Setting the East Ablaze”, “The Great Game” in ’90 and “On Secret Service East of Constantinople” in ’94. There are two others by him in the same series, “Trespassers on the Roof of the World” and “Quest for Kim”, and he more recently wrote “Like Hidden Fire” – about Mongols attacking Russia.

The four under review here are all great reads – populated by characters heroic, tough and foolhardy, or all three – and are interwoven because they all come from the same sources. Hopkirk delved deeply into government archives and personal memoirs to assemble a wonderfully detailed account of the military and political machinations that gripped the region between Constantinople and Xian in the years before, during and after World War I.

The books teem with events that are still reverberating today, particularly in and around Tehran and Baghdad. Shahs, sultans and emirs bicker with and cajole equally manipulative envoys from Britain, Germany and Russia sent to secure oil supplies and strategic outposts. Hopkirk, a former reporter for London’s Times and ITN, generally marshals his mammoth research well into a fascinating and easy-to-follow chronicle. The history is enlightening and the anecdotes that fold themselves into history almost always engaging.

Fans of espionage tales will enjoy “The Great Game – On Secret Service in High Asia”, which covers the primarily Anglo-Russian cold war that ultimately brought the imperial rivals within a few kilometres of one another at the Indian frontier. Those who like war stories will go for “East of Constantinople”, whose subtitle, “The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire”, refers to audacious German efforts to push Muslims into a holy war against the British and thus help Berlin claim India.

Readers with a yen for Soviet history might find some surprises in “Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia”, which tracks ambitious Bolshevik adventurism from India into a barbaric world of desert warlords and civil war.

If it’s grand old adventure you seek, you won’t be disappointed in any of these books, nor with “Foreign Devils of the Silk Road – The Search for the Lost Treasure of Central Asia”, which is more for the artistically and scientifically inclined since it’s about digging cultural prizes from the sands of the Taklamakan Desert, the Gobi’s meaner little brother in what is now Chinese Turkestan or, officially, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

Here a handful of astonishingly hardy explorers – from Sweden, Britain, France, Germany, America and Japan – fought the brutal elements and each other in a bid to be the first to uncover long-lost Buddhist frescoes and sculptures, known as Serindian art today, the original East-West cultural collision, monks and Macedonians meshing together over revealing manuscripts that now flake into shards.

China, as Hopkirk makes clear, considers these excavators’ “successes” outright theft and wants all of its treasures back from museums around the world, but those who carried them off in the first place insist they were preserving the art from nature’s destruction – and less careful looters.

India does indeed loom large in all of these books, the British Raj being the big thing in those days, but the tales are mostly emitted from the obscure corners of imperial history. Burma is here as a buffer zone, and Thailand pops up as – what else – a gateway for smuggled arms.

Curiously, the quality of the books varies considerably due to the writing – or is the editing? The first two are lean and succinct, the latter two fat and repetitive. On a single page of “East of Constantinople” you can find “a bitter blow”, “a severe blow” and “a devastating blow”. Hopkirk also uses the tired trick of ending each chapter with a teaser for the next.

Worse, although he’s overall respectful to the citizens of the lands where the action occurs, he occasionally lapses into generalisations like “the Persian character”, meaning the perceived nature of the Persian people as a whole, a sweeping approach long ago denigrated as chauvinist stereotyping.

It is, after all, Westerners looking down their imperial noses at “the little people” of the orient that got the world into its current mess. Having given us a glimpse of the sort of nonsense that was going on in Asia Minor and Asia Major all those years ago, however, Hopkirk can be forgiven. Now we can understand things a little better.