When I was 18, I spent a summer in Kyrgyzstan working as a volunteer with street orphans. This sparked a romantic flame in my heart for Central Asia which, although dimmed by time, has never been extinguished.
For a person from a small, wet, green and crowded island on the edge of a continent, there is something unspeakably exotic about the Eurasian landmass to begin with - the empty vastness of it is about as distant from one's geographical experience as it is possible to get without going under the sea, or to the South Pole. Everything about Britain is modest. Our highest mountains are really just big hills. Our biggest lakes are mere ponds. Our mightiest rivers would barely register as minor tributaries of an Amazon or a Mississippi or a Volga or a Nile. Our summers are not hot. Our winters are mild.
Central Asia is the opposite. Never mind the scale of the mountains, the hugeness of the steppes, the lakes (Baikal, Balkash, Caspian) which dwarf entire countries. The sky itself is bigger there: a great blue gulf that hangs above you, distant and endless and coldly beautiful, under which your affairs can only feel as though they have the most trivial significance if any at all. It's no wonder the steppe peoples of long ago - and today, indeed - made it into their god. How could one not, when it is so manifestly and ineluctably there wherever you go?
Finding oneself unmoored in this colossal ocean of land, one has the sense of entire societies, peoples, civilizations (Tocharia, Dayuan, Kwarezm, Massagetae, Alans, Xiongnu...) becoming lost in its emptiness, like flotsam borne away on the surface of the sea - slowly but inexorably growing ever distant from each other and all around them as the decades, centuries, millennia unfold. A feeling that human history is nothing more than the comings and goings of items borne on tidal currents washing from East to West and back again, a process with neither beginning nor end nor meaning in between. Scythians, Greeks, Sogdians, Mongols, Turks; there and back again, and the earth enduring under their hooves. This is the truth of it everywhere, of course, but it is only on the galling scale of the Eurasian landmass that one cannot escape it by losing oneself in the crowd, as we in Western Europe do.
This map above all excites me. The Eastern hemisphere in 200 AD. Who needs a fantasy setting when this lies before you?
But these images manage to do it too:
“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky."
ReplyDelete― Willa Cather
Though that quote was originally about Arizona (I think), it certainly seems to apply here as well.
Growing up on the flat prairie of Illinois, along the Mississippi River, and then living among the cramped mountain valleys of Japan and Korea, I totally get that feeling of vastness from the sky whenever I return home for a visit.
ReplyDeleteI have a significant number of Uzbek students at my university, and their descriptions of the nation have convinced me to add Tashkent to my list of travel destinations after covid is dealt with.
Samarkand and Bokhara are the ones to visit. Khiva is supposed to be wonderful as well but very far off the beaten track in a country which is off the beaten track to begin with.
DeleteYeah, that prairie. I'm a coastal guy, but vividly remember my first prairie thunderstorm (at a wedding in Missouri). Had never seen anything like it. The sky is enormous. Huge pillars of cloud. Like the whole fetch of the continent was roaring down on you. Just a different scale.
DeleteAs someone who has worked in Mongolia, I very much appreciate and agree with this post. Thank you. From a gaming point of view, I've been collecting a Steppe Nomads fantasy force to play the Warhammer 2nd edition scenario "The Dolgan Raiders". However, although I'm happy enough with the miniatures I've chosen I don't feel like I've been able to get even remotely close to the sense of romance you describe. (Even though I was quite literally painting it at a time of longing to be back there!) I think what I'm lacking is that sense of space and big sky and I don't know how I can harness that.
ReplyDeleteI get the feeling I'm asking too much of my toy soldiers!
Yeah, I actually think GRRM does a reasonable job capturing it in the first of ASoIaF. Kim Stanley Robinson also in The Years of Rice and Salt.
DeleteI recently reread Dan Abnett's Riders of the Dead - which is (at least in part) a story of a Western European (or the equivalent thereof) plunged into and adapting to life on the steppe.
DeleteThe Pacific Northwest can feel quite as cramped and green as the UK with its forests and mountain ranges, so I completely understand the romantic notions of wide-open flatlands. Having made twice annual pilgrimages to Montana most of my life, I am well acquainted with the majesty of Big Sky Country, if not the scale of the Eurasian steppes.
ReplyDelete[that being said, living in pancake flat Paraguay for years was grueling and I really longed for different terrain]
For a time in the late 1990s, my romantic notions of Eurasia led me to a burning desire to run a BECMI campaign set in the Ethengarian Khanates of Mystara. It never got terribly high off the ground, unfortunately, but I do consider that Gazetteer to be one of the better ones, and it occupies a soft spot in my heart to this day.
I'll have to track it down.
DeleteI'll be in Paraguay for work next year. Give me the skinny on Ascunsion.
Mmm...what do you want to know? I lived there for around 3 years, and can recommend several good restaurants. Will you be staying at the Sheraton? "The skinny" differs depending on whether or not you intend to be there long-term.
DeleteThe people are very nice and friendly. Single guys find the sexual mores to be fairly permissive, so I've heard (on the other hand, women from 1st world countries will find the place pretty rough, especially in the work place. The machismo scale is off the charts, even for Latin America; that can be a culture shock). There are gaps between the rich and poor, as in all developing countries, but the disparity in Paraguay feels particularly large, as much of the wealth (and there's a LOT...many billionaires and the lowest tax rate in South America) goes OUT of the country rather than being invested in infrastructure and whatnot. The rich can afford to go elsewhere and so they do, meaning that even Asuncion feels "rinky dink" despite being the country's largest city. I mean, they even lack paved roads in many of the best neighborhoods, parks are rundown and overgrown, sewers drains are open and stinking, and every time it rains people are literally washed away (i.e. drowned).
That being said (and there's a lot more I could say), the economy's on stabler footing than Argentina, the crime rate is far lower (and less violent) than Brazil, and the food is much better than Uruguay. Depending on your needs and preferences, those things make a big difference.
Not sure where I'll be staying yet. It's just for a couple of weeks - big conference and some meetings and (hopefully) sightseeing. Ironically your description sounds a lot like Bishkek as I remember it.
DeleteWow!! What an amazing experience that must have been. Hard agree on the romance of it all, on the Marco Polo feeling of endlessness.
ReplyDeleteGood post. I believe that the map is for @ 200 B.C.
ReplyDelete