![]() ![]() The Khalifa and his state in the Sudan, the Mahdiyya, held a similar position in the late-Victorian consciousness as the Taliban and Al Qaida do today. Holmes’s presence in Lhasa in the 1890s disguised as Sigerson was more likely to be read as groundwork for Younghusband’s invasion than disinterested exploration or an extreme method of lying low. He entered the country in December 1903 with a force of 10,000 and reached Lhasa in August 1904: it was an invasion in all but name, the final episode in what Kipling dubbed “the Great Game” in which Britain and Russia fought a cold war for control of the Asian lands that lay between their two empires. ![]() By 1903, Francis Younghusband’s “expedition” to Tibet was in full swing. ![]() But it was another explorer of Tibet who was really making the headlines, and which alerts us to the imperialist sub-text of the story. ![]() ‘Sigerson’ is perhaps an allusion to the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, whose groundbreaking explorations of Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau – his findings first published in a British and American edition in 1903 – had begun to excite interest and admiration. These three sentences contain a wealth of allusions to imperial exploration and conquest. ![]()
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