Macartney at Kashgar

Macartney at Kashgar
Author: Pamela Nightingale
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136576096

First published in 1973. This book describes the career of Sir George Macartney, who spent twenty-eight years at the turn of the nineteenth century as British representative in Sinkiang, China's most westerly province. Macartney was in a unique position to observe political and diplomatic manoeuvres by the key players trying to establish a sphere of influence in China's strategically vital hinterland before and during the Chinese revolution.

Macartney at Kashgar

Macartney at Kashgar
Author: Pamela Nightingale
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136576169

First published in 1973. This book describes the career of Sir George Macartney, who spent twenty-eight years at the turn of the nineteenth century as British representative in Sinkiang, China's most westerly province. Macartney was in a unique position to observe political and diplomatic manoeuvres by the key players trying to establish a sphere of influence in China's strategically vital hinterland before and during the Chinese revolution.

The Diplomat of Kashgar

The Diplomat of Kashgar
Author: James McCarthy
Publisher: Proverse Hong Kong
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2015-10-02
Genre:
ISBN: 9789888228140

The subject of this biography, Sir George Macartney, was of mixed Scottish-Chinese parentage. Based in remote Kashgar on the famous Silk Road, he was caught up in the great 19th and early 20th century power-struggle between Britain, China and Russia over control of Central Asia in what came to be known as 'The Great Game'. Here he met the scheming Russian Consul Nicolai Petrovsky who was to prove a cunning adversary in the political contest for control in this turbulent region. Much of the book is concerned with Petrovsky's devious machinations to outflank the British agent. Macartney's wife, Catherine, has provided intimate descriptions of their domestic life and some of the hazardous journeys they made with their family when travelling to and from the United Kingdom on leave. Her very few visitors were unstinting in their praise for her courage and adaptability, not least when seriously threatened by revolutionaries. They also recognised that only George Macartney, with his renowned tact and diplomacy, allied to steely determination, could have maintained the British position with so little external support. His dangerous encounter leading a mission to the Bolshevik revolutionaries in Tashkent made for a dramatic finale to his extraordinary career in a restive region now causing concern to the Chinese government.

Law across imperial borders

Law across imperial borders
Author: Emily Whewell
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2019-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1526140047

This book is the story of British consuls at the edge of the British and Chinese empires. By embracing local norms and adapting to transfrontier migration, consuls created forms of transfrontier legal authority.

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

Foreign Devils on the Silk Road
Author: Peter Hopkirk
Publisher: John Murray
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2011-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1848546327

The Silk Road, which linked imperial Rome and distant China, was once the greatest thoroughfare on earth. Along it travelled precious cargoes of silk, gold and ivory, as well as revolutionary new ideas. Its oasis towns blossomed into thriving centres of Buddhist art and learning. In time it began to decline. The traffic slowed, the merchants left and finally its towns vanished beneath the desert sands to be forgotten for a thousand years. But legends grew up of lost cities filled with treasures and guarded by demons. In the early years of the last century foreign explorers began to investigate these legends, and very soon an international race began for the art treasures of the Silk Road. Huge wall paintings, sculptures and priceless manuscripts were carried away, literally by the ton, and are today scattered through the museums of a dozen countries. Peter Hopkirk tells the story of the intrepid men who, at great personal risk, led these long-range archaeological raids, incurring the undying wrath of the Chinese.

The Silk Road

The Silk Road
Author: Frances Wood
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780520243408

This gorgeously illustrated oversized book brings the history and cultures of the Silk Road alive -- from its beginnings to the present day -- covering more than 5000 years.

The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds

The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds
Author: Eric Enno Tamm
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 523
Release: 2012-04-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 158243817X

On July 6, 1906, Baron Gustaf Mannerheim boarded the midnight train from St. Petersburg, charged by Czar Nicholas II to secretly collect intelligence on the Qing Dynasty's sweeping reforms that were radically transforming China. The last czarist agent in the so–called Great Game, Mannerheim chronicled almost every facet of China's modernization, from education reform and foreign investment to Tibet's struggle for independence. On July 6, 2006, writer Eric Enno Tamm boards that same train, intent on following in Mannerheim's footsteps. Initially banned from China, Tamm devises a cover and retraces Mannerheim's route across the Silk Road, discovering both eerie similarities and seismic differences between the Middle Kingdoms of today and a century ago. Along the way, Tamm offers piercing insights into China's past that raise troubling questions about its future. Can the Communist Party truly open China to the outside world yet keep Western ideas such as democracy and freedom at bay, just as Qing officials mistakenly believed? What can reform during the late Qing Dynasty teach us about the spectacular transformation of China today? As Confucius once wrote, "Study the past if you would divine the future," and that is just what Tamm does in The Horse that Leaps Through Clouds.

Ruins of Desert Cathay

Ruins of Desert Cathay
Author: M. Aurel Stein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 797
Release: 2014-10-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1108077528

In this 1912 two-volume work, Hungarian-born archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein describes his second expedition to the deserts of Chinese Turkestan.