Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia Karl Meyer & Shareen Brysac Date: 25 October, 2000   —   $13.57   —   Book product page Rating:

Tournament of Shadows traces the exploration and domination of central Asia by the major powers from the 1700's to the 1960s, or so - Britain from India in the south, Russia from the north, and China from the East. Several Americans, including some Roosevelts, also put in an appearance. The epic story is told in a series of short biographies of little-known explorers, adventurers, mystics and charlatans, Nazis, spies, diplomats, armies and officers, all inexorably drawn to the region.

Some were pure scientists and geographers looking to fill in blank spots on the map and explore the long-buried cities of the fabled Silk Road. Others were chasing a spiritual awakening in Tibet or the Buddhist Eden of Shamballah. Still others, more pragmatically, saw central Asia as a buffer zone between empires or as a jumping-off point for expansion, giving rise to the science of geo-politics.

A really interesting chapter details the Nazi's interest in securing Aryan artifacts and spiritual objects from the region they saw as the birthplace of their "master race". These adventures later became the inspiration for a couple Indiana Jones movies. Another really interesting chapter (for me) deals with the CIA's training of Tibetan freedom fighters in the 50s and 60s, and the subsequent screwing they got when the US never stepped in to help them against the Chinese, as some American diplomats and operatives had implied would happen.

For a fairly thick book, it went pretty fast. It reminded me of another excellent book on exploration and colonial expansion, "The Scramble for Africa", by Thomas Pakenham, which is slightly better. But if you're interested in central Asia, this is a well-written and fascinating tale.