Travellers in the Great Steppe

The vast plain stretching from the Volga to China through modern Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan was and remains a mystery to outsiders. Nick Fielding, who has travelled extensively in the region, retells the accounts of early adventurers, including John Castle, an Englishman who joined a Russian expedition in 1734; Victorian explorer Lucy Atkinson; and pioneering Tsarist and Soviet engineers.