“Conquerors of The Künlün”? The Schlagintweit Mission to High Asia, 1854–57

Abstract

at Denver "Every industrious and ambitious man of science ... is Humboldt's son; we are all his family." Emil du Bois-Reyrnond to Carl Ludwig, 26 June 1849 "That's always been my dream. To have the latest scientific equipment in the middle of nowhere." Michael 1. Balick, in conversation with Claudia Dreifus, "New York's a jungle, and one scientist doesn't mind", The New York Times, Tuesday, 6 April 1999, F5 "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust THE PICTUREAdolph Schlagintweit began his last watercolour on 5 August 1857. It took him five hours to finish, though he had been careful to get up early enough to fix the light of his painting at half past nine in the morning, a good time for depicting the slopes and contours of the mountains around him. He worked with his habitual care in rendering the details. of the landscape in the panorama before himthe rock outcrops, the sparse vegetation, the fresh snowfall. From his vantage at the crest of the pass he could make out a line of peaks marking the Kunlun mountains stretch away from either side of him. Below that the plain of Eastern Turkestan remained hidden by fog. It was a fitting scene. No European since Marco Polo had crossed through this region of Central Asia, and that was more than five hundred years ago. Schlagintweit aimed to be the first Westerner to revisit the legendary city of Kashgar. If his goal was clear, his motivation was not. It is not enough for us to say, echoing G. T. Mallory, "Because it is there", Much like the entire enterprise of scientific exploration, the meaning of Schlagintweit's three-year trek through India and High Asia is anything but self-evident. It really makes sense only against the background of history, where, like Schlagintweit at his painting, we can locate and map and consider. This essay will illustrate the Schlagintweits' mission by positioning it within three contexts: one of aesthetics, one of politics, and one of religion. In this way the story of the Schlagintweits can help reveal some of the strangeness and fascination behind the image of nineteenth-century science.

Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

“…Nain Singh, for example, originated in the Kumaon Himalaya in Northern India and was clearly not "indigenous" to the vast territory in Tibet through which he traveled, often incognito, covertly collecting the geographical information so precious to the British authorities, and indeed relying heavily on local informants and intermediaries. And his experience in working for successive European travelers in the trans-Himalayan region, beginning with his employment by the Schlagintweit brothers on an expedition across the region sponsored by The East India Company and the king of Prussia in the mid1850s (Finkelstein, 2000), suggests that his personal knowledge was far from merely "local." Indeed, seen in the broader context of late-Victorian ideas about race and culture, the presentation of locally created knowledge as "indigenous" or "native" could be considered from a postcolonial perspective as a deeply colonial move.…”

Indigenous Intermediaries: New Perspectives on Exploration Archives

“…Perhaps they achieved little in the way of genuine scientific discovery; perhaps, as has recently been suggested, their nationality was a hindrance to a more generous endorsement. Certainly the death of the celebrated geographer Alexander von Humboldt in 1859 removed their most influential patron, and influential voices in the London geographical community 3 On the collections, see Armitage 1992; on the urge to collect, see Finkelstein 2000. subsequently moved against them. 4 A particularly scathing review of their work was published in the Athenaeum in the summer of 1861, singling out the above account of the expedition establishment for stinging criticism: 'there are actually biographical sketches, written in the most matter-of-fact style, of all the observers, interpreters, collectors and servants, filling seven quarto pages'.…”

Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition

“…In the course of selecting suitable case‐studies for the exhibition, it became clear that certain kinds of non‐European agency, such as those of the ‘pandits’, were recognised, even in the nineteenth century: and moreover that the knowledge of many of the identifiable guides, interpreters and field assistants encountered in the RGS‐IBG collections in many different contexts, from the Arctic to Amazonia, could hardly be characterised as ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ in any straightforward sense. Nain Singh, for example, originated in the Kumaon Himalaya in Northern India and was clearly not ‘indigenous’ to the vast territory in Tibet through which he travelled, often incognito , covertly collecting the geographical information so precious to the British authorities; and his experience in working for successive European travellers in the trans‐Himalayan region, beginning with his employment by the Schlagintweit brothers in the 1850s (Finkelstein 2000), suggests that his personal knowledge was far from merely ‘local’. Moreover, seen in the broader context of late‐Victorian ideas about race and culture, the presentation of locally created knowledge as ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ could be considered from a postcolonial perspective as a deeply colonial move.…”