CHINESE CENTRAL ASIA BY HENRY LANSDELL

Henry Lansdell, D.D., M.R.A.S., F.R.G.S. (1841-1919) was an English clergyman and explorer. Having explored Russian Central Asia in 1882 and published two volumes about his travels there, he returned in 1888 to explore the neighbouring and even more inaccessible Chinese Central Asia. The latter consisted of Chinese Turkistan in the north, since 1884 a single province of China named Xinjiang (meaning “New Frontier”), and autonomous Tibet in the south. Lansdell was thwarted in his attempts to gain access to Tibet, but he wrote about Xinjiang in Chinese Central Asia – a Ride to Little Tibet, published in two volumes by Sampson Low & Co. in London in 1893. Presented here is everything in them of Greek love interest. The illustration is from the book.

Chapter IV.  From Merv to the Oxus

On the new Emir of Bokhara (in Russian, not Chinese, Turkistan), Seid Abdul Ahad and what the Russian Political Agent in Bokhara, Colonel Nicholas Tcharykoff, told Lansdell about him:

The new Emir was said to have made other attempts to improve public morality. Mr Curzon, who accompanied a party of tourists to Bokhara at the time of the opening of the railway, writing afterwards of the Emir’s court, says: “Batchas, or dancing boys, are among the inseparable accessories of the palace, and represent a Bokharan taste as effeminate as it is depraved.”^[1]

But Colonel Tcharykoff informed me, in answer to my question on the subject, that the new Emir, instead of providing boys with their tambourine music for the public entertainment of guests as did his father, had forbidden batchas, and ordered them to enlist in the army, though it might be that they were in some cases tolerated in private.^[2] [I 52]

Chapter XXV.  The Inhabitants of Chinese Turkistan

On the Khirgese in Chinese Turkistan:

Crime, as we understand the word, is comparatively rare among them. Murder is not common, and suicide seldom heard of; and then generally among women, whose lot is frequently a hard one.^[3] [I 404]

Chapter XXXIV.  Our Stay in Yarkand

On the Uyghur city of Yarkand in Xinjiang:

“The natives in everything imitate the Chinese, whom they hold in great respect. […] Manners are dissolute, and unnatural crime very common, just as in Fuh-kien and Kwantung.”

The foregoing is a picture of Yarkand during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it agrees fairly well with the description of “the good old times” under the Chinese, given to Forsyth’s party during the stricter reign of Yakub Khan. [II 103-4]

Chapter XLII. Some Remarks on the Political Condition of Chinese Turkistan

On the local Chinese population:

A prophet of their own, Tchuen-yuen, mentions as existing in his day, in some of the towns of Chinese Turkistan, crimes natural and unnatural ; and one of the English officers named above similarly describes Lan-chow at the present day as full of abominations that cannot be mentioned. [II 240]

^[1] Russia in Central Asia, p. 200. [Author’s footnote]
     This Mr. Curzon was the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, the future Vicceroy of India, British Foreign Minister and Marquess, who visited Bokhara in the summer of 1888. [Website footnote]

^[2] Something similar may be said with regard to prostitution in Bokhara, for, whatever may be done secretly, the Muhammadan law regarding its prohibition remains in force ; and a case having at the time of my visit recently come to light of two parents selling their daughter for an immoral purpose, the father's throat was cut, and the mother shot, which in Bokhara is a common method of capital punishment for olfences of this class. [Author’s footnote]
     If this “reform” of abolishing bachas was genuine, it was not at any rate long-lasting. See The Diary of a Slave by Rustam Khan-Urf (1936) and two books by Fitzroy Maclean about the Emirs of Bokhara, for the open enthusiasm of the same Emir’s successor, Mohammed Alim Khan, for his harem of dancing-boys. [Website footnote]

^[3] Rape occasionally occurs, but Dr Secland says that prostitution and unnatural offences are unknown, tlioug'h the last, in Russian Turkistan, are largely practised by the Sarts. [Author’s footnote]
     “Unnatural” crimes or offences is a common Victorian English euphemism for homosexual acts, though such acts were not in fact crimes in most of the lands where the English described them as such. In the case of 19^th century Chinese, it is only because pederasty was far more prevalent amongst them than androphilia that one may guess Lansdell is more likely to have been referring to the former. [Website footnote]