This week’s newsletter is a little different. Free to all (as is the case once a month with Journeys Beyond Borders) and therefore hopefully reaching a larger audience, I wanted to write about a book that is important to me and that should be on your radar if you have even a passing interest in Central Asia. Do feel free to share this week’s instalment if you find it interesting.
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A couple of years ago the publisher John Murray asked if I knew of a travel book that had fallen into obscurity and ought to be revived with a new edition. A couple came to mind but one was obvious: Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand, Ella Christie’s book that recounts her two adventures through Central Asia, in the years leading up to the First World War, in 1910 and 1912.
I’d written about Ella in Red Sands and, before that, had carried her book with me through Uzbekistan. She deserved the John Murray treatment. To be included in their ‘Journeys’ collection which features ten adventures by ten remarkable authors. As the publisher puts it, the series “celebrates John Murray’s history of publishing exceptional travel writing by rediscovering classic journeys from the past, introduced by some of today’s most exciting writers.”
I was thrilled when they agreed and got to work on writing the introduction. The fresh edition was published two summers ago, with a wildly impressionistic cover designed by a printmaker in Istanbul. I’m telling you about it now as it is a book that I still think ought to be more widely read. It is a time capsule, and offers rare insight.
But above all, the great appeal of this book is simple: there is nothing else like it. It stands magnificently alone.
Back in 2018, I heard directly about Ella’s life when I was invited to have lunch with her great-nephew, Robert Christie Stewart, at his home in Clackmannanshire, Scotland.
At the dining table, we flicked through boxes of her black and white photographs, most no bigger than a playing card, while little trunks were also brought out of souvenirs and ikat textiles that Ella had also collected.
Robert remembered his great-aunt Ella as a generous woman. But, he added, she loathed social chitchat. As we ate, Robert explained that once a man on the platform at the nearby railway station in Dollar had casually asked if she was going to Edinburgh for the day. “No”, Ella shot back. “I am going to Samarkand!” I wrote about this encounter for the London Review of Books.
Here is a photo taken by Ella in Samarkand in 1912:
For the remainder of this newsletter I’d like to share an edited down version of the introduction I wrote for John Murray. I hope it might spur you on to read Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand in full…
Isabella (‘Ella’) Robertson Christie (1861-1949) was a shrewd traveller of rare spirit, born close to my adopted city of Edinburgh. After the death of her father, whom she had cared for until her forties, she set off to explore, fully breaking with ideas of what women should be at that time. Long trips took her into Tibet, Borneo and Kashmir where she travelled by pack horse and cart to camp in the snow at the Chorbat Pass.
Ella was the first British woman to visit Khiva, then a remote desert slave trading town notorious for raiding Turkmen tribesmen, and she was also a member of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for 44 years. Tenacious then, yes, but unlike many other travellers of her era she never set out to break records, to spy, to climb mountains or gain accolades. This separates her work from the gung-ho ambitiousness shown by male travelling writers of her generation, such as Arminius Vámbéry, Captain Burnaby, Aureil Stein and Francis Younghusband, many of whom covered similar terrain and were wrapped up in the Great Game, the 19th century clandestine struggle between the tsarist and British empires.
In her introduction, she states her ambition: “first, the extreme desire to see for myself what lay on that comparatively bare spot on the map east of the Caspian Sea ... and secondly, the lure of those magic names, Bokhara and Samarkand.”
What we witness, as we follow her from Turkmenistan into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, is a series of slow-paced expeditions, examining everyday life both high and low, presented in language that is refreshingly inviting, curious and clear-eyed.
What we quickly ascertain is that Ella cared about, and was captivated by, how people were cooking, what they were bartering for at Silk Road marketplaces and what they were wearing. Topics far more relatable, for most readers, than dusty Great Game politics. She tries the fermented drink kvass, made from rye bread, makes a note of seven different types of raisin at the a bazaar, remarks upon how the Turkmen’s beloved horses may share their master’s meals and declares Turkmen pears to be far better than “the finest French ones.” It is kaleidoscopic detail such as this, born of genuine inquisitiveness, that puts you firmly in her leather boots and carries you back in time to faraway cities and desert landscapes. Ella gathered her impressions, whether lounging at a chaikhana or aboard a steamer on the Oxus, by purposefully not rushing through and instead relishing in the joys of simply ‘being there.’
Back in Scotland, her home may have been Cowden Castle (thirty miles north-west of Edinburgh and sadly demolished in 1952), but there is a modesty to her.
“I never had an article stolen or pocket picked. But then perhaps I had nothing worth stealing”, she muses at the end of one chapter.
Regularly, she makes charming connections back to her homeland. A sandstorm appears like “genuine Scotch mist” while cast off camel wool woven into winter robes reminds her of “the thrifty days in Scotland long ago, when sheep’s wool was carefully collected off hedges and bushes and spun into material”.
Zigzagging and unpredictable, Through Khiva to Golden Samarkand is a rare and satisfying book filled with surprise. And it is one that inspires in quite unexpected ways. Just before Ella crossed into Uzbekistan in 1912, travelling by steamer on the Oxus River from Turkmenistan, she made note of a curious carrot preserve. Having never seen such a thing on my own travels, but motivated by her encouraging description, “a special kind of marmalade made of finely chopped carrots in honey”, I recreated a version of it in my kitchen at home in Edinburgh, adding a hint of cinnamon. Not very jammy, but delightful on hot heavily buttered toast.
The recipe for the jam features in my book Red Sands which you can buy in the US here and here in the UK. Ella’s book is available via the same outlets.
Loved reading this... And even more so because I actually read this book as I travelled through Uzbekistan... I'd sit on the train and imagine her journey... Or be in khiva and think how life was all about to change and she was right there... Brilliant 🙏
Interesting woman, I liked that she was just there to see and enjoy. Also nice to see daily scenes of Uzbekistan from her time. Thank you.