The Emirate of Bukhara: A Short History
The Emirate of Bukhara from the Manghit dynasty to the Red Army in 1920: the Russian protectorate years, the last emir, and what survives in the city.
In 1911 a Russian photographer sat the Emir of Bukhara on a stool in a courtyard and made one of the earliest colour photographs in existence. Alim Khan looks straight down the lens in a blue silk robe embroidered with irises, hands on a sabre, absolutely still because the process required three separate exposures through three filters.
Nine years later he was on a horse heading for the Afghan border with the Red Army behind him. That gap — from a ruler posing for the newest technology in the world to a deposed exile in under a decade — is the whole late history of the Emirate of Bukhara.
Where the emirate came from
Start with a date that isn't as simple as it looks.
You'll see the emirate dated from 1785, and you'll also see the Manghit dynasty dated from 1753. Both are right, and the difference is the interesting part. The Manghits — an Uzbek tribal lineage — held real power in Bukhara from the 1750s, running the state as ataliq, the power behind a nominal Chingisid khan. What changed in 1785 was the title: Shah Murad dropped the pretence and ruled as emir in his own name.
That switch mattered because the Manghits could not claim descent from Genghis Khan, which was the traditional basis for the title of khan across the steppe. Calling yourself emir instead — a title grounded in Islamic rather than Chingisid legitimacy — was a way around the problem. Bukhara's rulers leaned hard on religious authority from then on, and the city's reputation as Bukhoro-i sharif, Bukhara the Noble, did a good deal of political work.
The closed decades
The emirate's nineteenth century before the Russians is the period that produced the stories: an isolated Islamic state with a slave market, a formidable reputation for cruelty in the treatment of foreign visitors, and rulers who regarded European envoys as supplicants rather than equals.
Nasrullah Khan, who ruled from 1827 to 1860, is the emir most visitors will have heard of, because he was the one who executed two British officers in front of the Ark. That episode is covered in our piece on the Great Game in Bukhara, and it did as much as anything to fix the emirate's image abroad.
Worth keeping in proportion: most of what English-speaking readers know about this period comes from British accounts written to justify a forward policy. The emirate was also a functioning state with a tax system, a judiciary, a scholarly tradition and a madrasah network that drew students from across the Muslim world.
1868: losing Samarkand
Russian expansion reached Bukhara in the 1860s. The war of 1866–68 went badly, and it went badly quickly.
Russia occupied the middle Zarafshan valley and took Samarkand — the emirate's second city and the burial place of Timur. The peace terms granted trading privileges to Russian merchants and turned Bukhara into a vassal.
The settlement was formalised in 1873. That treaty opened the Amu Darya to Russian shipping, obliged the emir to extradite Russian fugitives and to abolish the slave trade, and confirmed the loss of Samarkand. In exchange, the emir kept his throne and his internal authority.
What that produced was a protectorate: internally self-governing, with Russia controlling foreign policy and defence. The emir went on collecting taxes, appointing judges and running the country. He simply no longer decided anything that touched the empire's interests.
What a protectorate looked like on the ground
The clearest surviving evidence is the railway, and the story behind it is very Bukharan.
The Trans-Caspian line reached Bukhara in 1888. The emir would not have it pass close to the holy city, and insisted on a distance of around ten miles. So the Russians built their station, their settlement and their administration at Kagan, some 16 kilometres out, and called it New Bukhara.
That town is still there, and it is the physical form of the arrangement: a Russian colonial settlement with its own railway offices and a palace, parked at arm's length from a city that had kept its religious character. The emir's palace at Kagan is worth the short trip out. So is Sitorai Mokhi Khosa, the summer palace the last emirs built on the edge of Bukhara, where Russian plate glass, parquet and cast iron sit inside a Central Asian plan — a building that cannot decide which century or which empire it belongs to.
Uzbekistan's national railway operator keeps a history of the network's construction on its official site, which covers the Trans-Caspian line's arrival.
What the treaties changed, and what they didn't
The 1873 treaty abolished the slave trade on paper. On the ground, enforcement was another matter, and abolition in a protectorate depended on an emir who had every reason to move slowly and a Russian administration that mostly cared about trade and the frontier.
Trade is the better guide to what actually shifted. Once the railway arrived, Bukhara was plugged into an imperial economy that wanted raw material: cotton for Russian mills, and karakul lamb pelts, which became one of the emirate's most valuable exports. Money moved, a Russian merchant class established itself at Kagan, and the emir's own wealth grew — Sitorai Mokhi Khosa was built on it.
So the protectorate years were not stagnation. They were a sharp economic reorientation, away from the east–west caravan trade the city had lived on for a thousand years and towards a single market to the north. When that market collapsed in 1917, the emirate had very little left to fall back on.
The Jadids, and why the emirate fell from inside
By the early twentieth century Bukhara had a reform movement. The Jadids — modernist Muslim intellectuals arguing for new-method schools, a press, and constitutional limits on the emir — were a small urban minority, and the emirate treated them as a threat.
Alim Khan, who came to the throne in 1910 and was educated in St Petersburg, began with gestures towards reform and abandoned them. Repression followed. By 1917 the reformists had nowhere left to go politically, and after the Russian Revolution some of them — the Young Bukharans — looked to the Bolsheviks.
This is the part worth holding onto: the emirate did not simply fall to an invasion. It fell to an invasion that a domestic opposition had invited, for reasons that made sense to them at the time. Eurasianet has a good piece on how contested the legacy of 1920 still is in Uzbekistan.
September 1920
Red Army forces under Mikhail Frunze attacked Bukhara on 28 August 1920. The assault used artillery and aircraft against a walled city, and it took four days.
Alim Khan left on 31 August for Dushanbe, in the eastern part of his territory, and from there eventually crossed into Afghanistan. The city fell on 2 September. The Ark was shelled and burned, which is why the citadel you walk around today is substantially a ruin with museums in the surviving portions — our guide to the Ark explains what is original and what is reconstruction.
The Bukharan People's Soviet Republic replaced the emirate and lasted until the Soviet redrawing of Central Asian borders in 1924, when its territory was divided between the Uzbek and Turkmen republics. Bukhara stopped being a capital of anything.
Alim Khan died in Kabul on 28 April 1944, aged 64, having spent his last two decades in exile. There's a thoughtful account of those years at Peripheral Histories.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Emirate of Bukhara exist?
From 1785, when Shah Murad took the title of emir, until 2 September 1920, when the Red Army captured the city. The Manghit dynasty that ruled it had held effective power in Bukhara since around 1753, governing through a nominal khan before dropping the arrangement.
Was Bukhara part of the Russian Empire?
Not formally. After the treaties of 1868 and 1873 it was a Russian protectorate: the emir kept internal government, taxation and justice, while Russia controlled foreign relations and defence. That is a different legal status from Tashkent or Samarkand, which were annexed outright into Russian Turkestan.
Who was the last emir of Bukhara?
Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan, who ruled from 1910 to 1920. He was educated in St Petersburg, resisted the Jadid reform movement, fled the Red Army assault on 31 August 1920, and died in exile in Kabul on 28 April 1944. The famous 1911 colour photograph of him is one of the earliest in existence.
Why did the emirate lose Samarkand?
Military defeat. Russian forces occupied the middle Zarafshan valley including Samarkand during the war of 1866–68, and the 1873 treaty confirmed the loss. It also handed Russia control of the water supply feeding the lower Zarafshan — including Bukhara's own — which made further resistance impractical.
What can I still see of the emirate in Bukhara?
The Ark citadel, the zindan prison beside it, the summer palace at Sitorai Mokhi Khosa, and the Kagan palace out by the railway. The old city's madrasahs and trading domes are older than the emirate but were functioning institutions under it. Our Bukhara travel guide sets out a route.
How to read the city with this in mind
Do the Ark and Sitorai Mokhi Khosa on the same day, in that order, and the century between them does the explaining for you. One is a mud-brick fortress from a world where the emir's authority rested on being unreachable. The other has Russian mirrors, a European ballroom and a pool the last emir is said to have watched from a balcony.
Nothing about the second building is what a Bukharan emir of 1820 would have built. That is the protectorate, in architecture. For the longer sweep, our Silk Road history of Uzbekistan picks the story up a thousand years earlier.
Featured image: Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons.