(which some Russians were bold enough to covet), but also a possible pathway to a warm-water outlet on the Persian Gulf. Russian strategy was purely aggressive; British, defensive, or rather, defensively aggressive.

With an open map before his eyes, the reader may see the situation at a glance. The story is a chess-game of the giants, with countries for squares. The game grew interesting in the latter part of the nineteenth century, after Russian armies, followed by colonists and railways, had moved across the Kirghiz steppes (north of the Aral Sea), southward into Western Turkestan. Slowly but surely they pressed on. In the sixties and seventies they conquered, one after another, the petty principalities or khanates of Turkestan. They began to encroach on the northern borders of Persia and Afghanistan, while British statesmen became increasingly nervous, especially about Afghanistan.

If once the Russians crossed the mountainous barrier of Afghanistan, no buffer would remain to shield India from their advance. To safeguard India, British armies were sent into Afghanistan, in 1878-81, and a puppet ameer (prince) was placed on the Afghan throne, in England's pay, and, as regards foreign policy, under England's control. But still they were nervous. An acute crisis between England and Russia arose in the years 1884-85, when Russia moved into the town of Merv, and then marched south to Penjdeh, in northwestern Afghanistan. Queen Victoria appealed to the Tsar to restrain such dangerous aggression; and a British army was prepared to oppose the Russian advance. Gladstone, however, was unwilling to fight, and allowed the Russians to keep their gains. Again war threatened in 1895, when the Russians moved up into the high Pamir plateau, in the northeast of Afghanistan, where only a thin strip of Afghan territory separated them from India.2

With the dawn of the twentieth century the conflict grew keener. While England was occupied with the Boer War in South Africa, Russia stealthily resumed her progress in Central Asia,-in Persia, in Afghanistan, in Tibet. In Persia, the Russian bank made another loan to the Shah, and a Russian

A good account of this episode is given in Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, III, pp. 72-90.

'See Parl. Papers, 1895 (Cd. 7643).

warship attempted to establish a coaling depot on the Persian Gulf at Bandar Abbas. British statesmen were acutely alive to the situation. The British viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, had written home to London in 1899: 1

She (Persia) is one of those countries which must inevitably have attracted the attention of Europe, partly from increasing infirmity, but still more from the opportunities suggested by their latent though neglected sources of strength. Closely pressing upon Persia and Afghanistan is the ever-growing momentum of a Power whose interests in Asia are not always in accord with our own. The advance of Russia across the deserts that form the natural barrier between West and East Persia could not be regarded without uneasiness by the Government of India. . . .

...

2

After she had disposed of the Boers, Great Britain could take steps to counter Russia's moves. Lord Lansdowne could declare, in May 1903, that the establishment of a naval base in the Gulf by any other power would be resisted by England; Lord Curzon could visit the Gulf, in November, 1903, with a formidable array of warships to impress the natives, and declare that British influence must remain supreme; and British officials could decide that the southeastern corner of Persia was essential to British security. Both Great Britain and Russia, watching each other's every move, waited; sooner or later Persia must fall to one or the other.

Simultaneously matters seemed to be coming to a head as regards Tibet. This vast table-land, lying west of Afghanistan, between India and China, was a tributary vassal state of the Chinese Empire; its ruler, the Dalai Lama, was supposedly a reincarnation of Buddha, and its governing hierarchy of Buddhist priests or lamas was so fanatically inhospitable to aliens that few Europeans had ever ventured into the bleak plateau, or to its forbidden sacred city of Lhasa. This seemed a secure enough buffer for the protection of India, but in 1901 the British heard, to their dismay, that a Russian who had been tutor to the Dalai Lama was in Petrograd as the Dalai Lama's envoy.3 Was Russia about to establish a protectorate over Tibet?

Lord Curzon, the same imperious viceroy of India whom we encountered in the Persian Gulf, felt that Russia should be

Parl. Papers, Persia No. 1 (1908).

"The statement was in answer to a question on German plans for a railway terminus at Koweit (cf. supra, p. 247), but it could cover Russian designs as well.

Parliamentary Papers, 1904 (Cd. 1920).