The Great Game in Bukhara: Stoddart and Conolly

Arthur Conolly invented the phrase "the Great Game". He then rode into Bukhara to rescue a colleague, was thrown into a pit full of vermin, and was beheaded in a public square. There are few tidier illustrations of what the Great Game actually involved for the people playing it.

You can stand in both places on the same short walk in Bukhara, and most visitors do so without knowing what happened there.

How Stoddart got himself imprisoned

Colonel Charles Stoddart arrived in Bukhara in December 1838, sent by the British East India Company. The brief was diplomatic: persuade the emirate into an alliance against Russian expansion into Central Asia.

He handled it catastrophically. The accounts agree that Stoddart rode into the presence of Nasrullah Khan rather than dismounting, failed to bow, and brought no gifts of the weight a ruler of Bukhara expected from a foreign envoy. He also carried no letter from Queen Victoria, only from a company official, which the emir read as an insult about his own standing.

Whether Stoddart was arrogant, badly briefed or simply unlucky is arguable. What isn't arguable is the result. Nasrullah, who ruled from 1827 to 1860 and had a reputation for cruelty that was substantial even by the standards of the period, had him imprisoned.

The bug pit

The zindan — the prison beside the Ark fortress — held a deep pit reached only by rope. The British accounts describe it as deliberately stocked with vermin: ticks, lice and assorted biting insects kept fed for the purpose.

Treat the more lurid details with some care. They come almost entirely from British sources writing for a British audience about an oriental despot, at a moment when that was a politically useful story to tell. That the pit existed and that men were kept in it in appalling conditions is not in doubt; the specific inventory of insects is harder to stand behind.

Stoddart spent roughly three years in Bukhara, moved in and out of the pit at the emir's whim, at one point converting to Islam under duress, at another being housed in relative comfort. The uncertainty was the punishment.

Conolly rides in

Captain Arthur Conolly reached Bukhara in November 1841, intending to negotiate Stoddart's release. He had spent years arguing that Britain should build an alliance of Central Asian khanates as a buffer against Russia, and it was in his correspondence that the phrase "the Great Game" first appears.

His timing could not have been worse. The British position in Afghanistan was collapsing — the retreat from Kabul came that winter — and an emir who had been weighing British power against Russian could now see the answer. A British officer in his capital was no longer a risk worth managing.

Conolly was arrested and put in the pit with Stoddart.

The execution, and what the sources disagree about

Both men were beheaded in the square in front of the Ark, in front of a crowd, in June 1842, on charges of spying.

The date is not settled. Published accounts give 17 June and 24 June 1842, and you will see both stated with equal confidence. The detail that they were made to dig their own graves first appears in several accounts and is impossible to verify. What is solid: the place, the month, the year, and that neither body was recovered.

What happened next is the part worth knowing. An eccentric missionary named Joseph Wolff travelled to Bukhara in 1843–45 specifically to establish what had become of them, was himself detained, and got out alive — reportedly because the emir found him funny. His published narrative of the mission is digitised by the Library of Congress and is the closest thing to a contemporary account of the affair. It is also very readable, which nineteenth-century mission narratives generally are not.

What you can actually see

Three places, all within a few minutes of each other.

• The zindan. The prison still stands next to the Ark and functions as a small museum. The pit is there, with mannequins in it, which is as tasteful as it sounds. Go anyway — the dimensions are the point, and no written description prepares you for how small it is.
• The Registan of Bukhara. The open square in front of the Ark fortress, which is where the executions happened. There is no marker. You are standing on the spot and nothing tells you so.
• The Ark itself. The emir's citadel, where Stoddart made his entrance on horseback. Our guide to the Ark covers the throne room and the museums inside.

Entry to the zindan is cheap and it takes twenty minutes. Combine it with the Ark in a single morning, then walk down into the old town — the trading domes are ten minutes away and the contrast in mood is useful.

Why this story still gets told

Partly because it is genuinely dramatic. Partly because it served a purpose: two officers murdered by a Central Asian ruler made an excellent argument for the forward policy that followed, and Bukhara fell under Russian control within three decades anyway.

It is worth holding both halves. Stoddart and Conolly were real men who died badly, and they were also agents of an empire operating uninvited in somebody else's country. Bukharan accounts of the period, unsurprisingly, do not treat them as martyrs. The Royal Society for Asian Affairs has a useful piece on how the Great Game narrative was constructed after the fact.

For the longer arc — how Bukhara went from independent emirate to Russian protectorate to Soviet republic — start with our history of the Silk Road in Uzbekistan, and the city itself is covered in the Bukhara travel guide.

Read this first

If you're going to read one thing before visiting the zindan, make it Wolff's account rather than a modern summary. He was there, he spoke to people who had watched it happen, and he wrote it down within two years. Everything since is a retelling of a retelling — and standing over that pit having read the original is a different experience entirely.

Featured image: David Stanley (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons.