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Petr Petrovich Semenov's Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 1856-1857 - Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857 (Hardcover, New Ed)
Loot Price: R2,114
Discovery Miles 21 140
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Petr Petrovich Semenov's Travels in the Tian'-Shan', 1856-1857 - Travels in the Tian'-Shan' 1856-1857 (Hardcover, New Ed)
Series: Hakluyt Society, Second Series
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In the mid-nineteenth century the eyes of western European
explorers were firmly fixed on advancing inland from former
maritime colonies in the Americas, Africa, the Indian sub-continent
and Australasia, their motives often being inextricably bound up
with concerns of imperial politics and commerce. Simultaneously,
further east, Russians resumed their perceived mission to civilise
Asia, following their own country's humiliation during the Crimean
War. From a springboard of Siberian territories acquired gradually
over the previous three centuries, discovery and expansion radiated
from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, founded in 1845 and
incorporating initiatives drawn from descendants of immigrant
French and German scientists who themselves inspired a new
generation of liberal intellectuals. A key personality in that
movement was the Society's librarian and secretary of its physical
geography section, P. P. Semenov (1827-1914), a member of a minor
gentry family who had been tutored by a pupil of Linnacus and who
had studied under Ritter and von Humboldt at Berlin during a tour
of Europe in 1853-4. From them he conceived the notion of
travelling to the virtually unknown lands of Central Asia,
ostensibly to verify opinions on the existence there of active
volcanoes and glaciers. In reality his ambition was to penetrate
beyond the Kazakh steppe and to reach the fabled Celestial
Mountains, the Tian'-Shan' range, which constituted the politically
sensitive border between Russia and China and the equally hostile
buffer zone of Muslim kahnates. Accompanied only by a serf servant,
in May 1856 Semenov embarked on a 18-month journey from St
Petersburg through Kazan' to Semipalatinsk, and thence via the
Altai to the newly established Russian settlement of Vernoe (later
Alma-Ata, now Almaty). Subsequently he received a Cossack escort on
his trek into the high plateaus and ridges surrounding Issyk-kul',
to 'the very heart of Asia'. Throughout his
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