Peter Hopkirk · 1990 · global

Peter Hopkirk's history of the nineteenth-century contest between Britain and Tsarist Russia for Central Asia, told through the young officers who played it. When it began the two empires were two thousand miles apart; by the end the gap was twenty. It was conducted by spies disguised as horse-traders and holy men, and most of them died doing it.

1. 1
   St Petersburg

   From the Tsar's capital, successive governments look south at the khanates and beyond them at India - and send envoys, surveyors and eventually armies into country nobody in Europe had mapped.

2. 2
   Orenburg

   Orenburg on the steppe frontier is where the Russian advance starts, the jumping-off point for expeditions that repeatedly freeze, starve or simply disappear into the Kirghiz country beyond.

3. 3
   Khiva

   The khanate of Khiva holds Russian slaves and defies three expeditions - and it is to Khiva that Captain Burnaby rides in 1875 against explicit orders, and writes it up in a bestseller that infuriates his own government.

4. 4
   Bokhara

   At Bokhara the Emir keeps two British officers in a pit full of vermin for months and then beheads them in the square - Stoddart and Conolly, the second of whom had come to rescue the first, and who gave the Game its name.

5. 5
   Kabul

   British fear of Russian influence produces the First Afghan War and its ending: an army of sixteen thousand destroyed in the passes in 1842, with one man riding into Jalalabad to report it.

6. 6
   Gilgit

   On the Pamir and Karakoram passes the two empires finally come within a few marches of each other, and the surveying is done by officers travelling alone under cover - the pundits, walking Tibet with prayer wheels full of notes.

7. 7
   Lhasa

   The last move is Younghusband's march to Lhasa in 1904, forcing a treaty on a country that had wanted only to be left alone - undertaken on a suspicion of Russian influence that turned out not to exist.

8. 8
   Calcutta

   From Calcutta the whole thing was directed on the British side, by viceroys who alternated between forward policy and masterly inactivity - and it ended with a convention in 1907 that simply divided the board.