GREAT GAME.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Large military wall map of Central Asia and the Turkestan Military District, revised and corrected up to 1881. Second edition, significantly improved from the first edition (1877) to incorporate the latest military intelligence from field surveys. This magisterial work of "great game" cartography was presented at Russia's Tashkent military headquarters to the daring French explorer Stanislas Benoist-Méchin, during his epic 1881-3 overland journey from Beijing to Europe. We have traced no other copies.A presentation inscription on the verso of the map reads, in French, "To Mr Baron Benoist-Méchin, from Generals Kouropatkine and Levaschew, October 1882, Tashkent." Benoist-Méchin (1854-1923) began travelling the world as a young man and then served as the French cultural attaché in Tokyo, 1880-1. In 1881, he decided to return to Europe via the daring route through Central Asia. Leaving Beijing on 15 September with his regular travelling companion, Comte Humbert Adrien de Mailly-Chalon (1853-1921), he journeyed through Manchuria and across Russian Siberia. In 1882, having reached Kashgar, they received permission to cross Russian Turkestan, spending six weeks in Tashkent as the honoured guests of General Mikhail Tchernayev, the architect of Russian's expansion across Central Asia, General Aleksey Nikolayevich Kuropatkin (1848-1925), and the aforementioned General Levaschov (likely the artillery officer Vladimir Levaschov, 1834-1898). After reaching Samarkand, they travelled in ex

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