THE EMIRS OF BOKHARA
BY FITZROY MACLEAN

Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet, (1911-96), was a British brigadier, writer and politician sometimes thought to have been a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Presented here is everything of Greek love interest in two of his books. All of it concerns the pederastic liaisons of the Emirs of Bokhara in Central Asia.

Eastern Approaches

From 1937 to 1939, Maclean served as an attaché in the British embassy in Moscow, during which time he travelled into forbidden zones of Soviet Central Asia, including Bokhara in late 1938, leading him to report on fairly recent events there hitherto little known to the outside world in a memoir, Eastern Approaches, published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1949.

Part One: Golden Road:  X.  Bokhara the Noble

With the capture in 1868 of Samarkand and the upper reaches of the Zaravshan by the Russians, who thus gained control of his water supply, the Emir of Bokhara was obliged to accept the suzerainty of the Tsar and Russian control of his relations with the outside world; but inside his own dominions he maintained his own army and enjoyed absolute power of life and death over his unfortunate subjects. The Russian population was limited to a few officials and merchants, while the Emir excluded other Europeans from his domains with a jealousy which has been emulated by his Bolshevik successors. Bokhara thus remained a centre of Mohammedan civilization, a holy city with a hundred mosques, three hundred places of learning, and the richest bazaar in Central Asia. It was not until 1920, three years after the downfall of his imperial suzerain, that the last Emir, after vainly invoking the help of both the Turks and the British, fled headlong across the Oxus to Afghanistan, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope of thus retarding the advance of the pursuing Red Army, who, however, were not to be distracted from their purpose by such stratagems.^[1] [pp. 148-9]

A Person from England and Other Travellers

A Person from England and Other Travellers, published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1958, is Maclean’s account, based on their own writings, of travellers’ adventures into the lost world of the khanates of Turkestan in the century down to their absorption into the USSR.

1  A Person from England

This chapter is about the extremely dangerous mission of Joseph Wolff (1795-1862) to Bokhara in 1843 to discover the fate of two British officers who, it transpired, had recently been put to death by the Emir, Nasrullah Khan (reigned 1827-60).

Bokhara in the year 1838 was ruled over by the Emir Nasrullah, who had ascended the throne twelve years earlier, having first murdered his father, his elder brother and, as an added measure of precaution, his three younger brothers. After this somewhat lurid start, Nasrullah is said, during the early years of his reign, to have displayed a certain moderation, both in his dealings with foreigners and in his private life. ‘Before he came to the throne,’ wrote a young Indian who visited Bokhara in 1832, ‘he loved boys, but now religion.’ It was not long, however, before his behaviour again reverted to normal.^[2] Ever more tyrannical towards his subjects and ever less restrained in his personal habits, he became increasingly truculent both in his relations with his lesser neighbours and with the great powers, with whom he now imagined himself able to deal on equal terms. [p. 29]

He [Wolff] met, too, a number of people who told him much that was to the credit neither of the Emir nor of Abdul Samut Khan^[3]; who told him, for example, about the Dastar Khanjee, who, at the age of twenty was in charge not only of the Royal Kitchens, but also of the Customs and Excise Department and occupied in fact the position of King’s Vizier. This promising young statesman had, it appeared, been raised to the high office which he now held ‘for demerits unmentionable in any journal or narrative’. But, Wolff tells us, ‘when he is older, it is generally hoped by the inhabitants and confidently expected by them, that the King will decapitate him and seize on his enormous wealth’. [p. 88]

6  Superior Person

The “superior person”, a mocking allusion to his alleged perception of himself, was the Hon. George Nathaniel Curzon, later a Marquess, British Foreign Secretary and Viceroy of India, who visited Bokhara in the summer of 1888, when it was ruled by Seid Abdul Ahad, the grandson of Nasrullah Khan (since whose time the whole of Turkestan had fallen under Russian domination).

In some respects, however, foreign influence in Bokhara was less immediately noticeable. The Bokharan Court was still surrounded by all its old pomp and mystery. The Emir, Seid Abdul Ahad, a young man of twenty-eight or twenty-nine who had succeeded his father Mozaffur-ed- Din in 1885, was still treated as a sort of demi-god whom inferior beings might only admire from a distance. Once Curzon encountered him, tall, black-bearded and dignified, clad in magnificent robes, riding through the bazaar at the head of a long cavalcade. No glimpse, the travellers were told, was ever caught of the royal harem and they were shocked to learn that batchas or dancing-boys ‘were still among the inseparable accessories of the palace’. [pp. 297-8]

8  A Rendezvous with Death

But now, in 1922, the Emir, Abdul Said Mir Alim Khan^[4], no longer lived in his summer Palace outside Bokhara. His sojourn there had been brought to an abrupt end some two years earlier in the summer of 1920, when, snatching up as much of the national treasure as he could conveniently carry with him, he had fled headlong from his capital before the advancing Red Army, and a revolutionary government had been installed there in his stead. Pursued by the Red Cavalry, His Highness had taken refuge in the mountains of Eastern Bokhara, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope, it was said, of delaying his pursuers, to whom he rightly or wrongly attributed his own deplorable tastes. [p. 334]

^[1] A more detailed account of the boy harem and flight into exile of the last Emir of Bokhara had been given earlier in The Diary of a Slave by Rustam Khan-Urf (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1936) p. 41.

^[2] A notable manifestation of this is that when Dost Mohammed, the emir of neighbouring Afghanistan, took refuge with him following his overthrow in 1839, Nasrullah demanded and eventually took by force his guest’s beautiful youngest son, aged 14, for which see J. P. Ferrier, History of the Afghans (London, 1858) p. 336, and Arminius Vámbéry, History of Bokhara (London, 1873) pp. 390-1.

^[3] Abdul Samut Khan, Commander of the Royal Artillery, was a treacherous Persian who pretended to befriend Wolff.

^[4] Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bokhara, reigning from 1911 to 1920, was the son and successor of Seid Abdul Ahad, described in the preceding excerpt. A more detailed account of his boy harem and flight into exile had been given earlier in The Diary of a Slave by Rustam Khan-Urf (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1936) p. 41.