何伟亚An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game_Thomas Francis Wade in China.pdfVIP

An Imperial Nomad and the Great Game: Thomas Francis Wade in China James L. Hevia Late Imperial China, Volume 16, Number 2, December 1995, pp. 1-22 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/late.1995.0003 For additional information about this article /journals/late/summary/v016/16.2.hevia.html Access provided by Bristol University (7 Oct 2013 17:42 GMT) AN IMPERIAL NOMAD AND THE GREAT GAME: THOMAS FRANCIS WADE IN CHINA* James L. Hevia In the second half of the nineteenth century, Great Britain was engaged in strategic warfare on the Asian land mass. This was not a shooting war, but a cold war, a war of position designed to check or contain imperial Russia and protect British interests that stretched from the Caucasus, around the southern edges of Eurasia, to the eastern provinces of China. In the Far East theater of operations, the worst case scenario for British strategists would be the collapse and partition of the Qing empire, with the Russians the only conceivable beneficiary in such a catastrophe.1 More than a struggle of muscle or military technology, this sort of lim- ited warfare was a contest of wits, what Arthur Conolly dubbed the Great Game,2 later immortalized by Rudyard Kipling in Kim.3 Played out in that vast expanse of territory stretching in an arc from the Amur River region of Manchuria to Afghanistan in the southwest, the Great Game required a vigi- lant and scrutinizing eye 4 capable of gathering in and evaluating information *I wish to thank Judith Farquhar, Tani Barlow, John Henderson, Lionel Jensen, and this journals reviewers for many helpful suggestions. Portions of this article were