This book is the first comprehensive military and diplomatic history of the conquest to be published for over a hundred years. The Russian conquest of Central Asia was the 19th century's most dramatic and successful example of European imperial expansion, adding 1.5 million square miles of territory and at least 6 million people - most of them Muslims - to the Tsar's domains. These fill an important gap in the literary history of Central Asia and hopefully will stimulate further interest in this remarkable man. It includes several of his most important works, including the report on his visit to Kashgar and a number of essays on the history and genealogy of the Kazakh people.

This is the first collection of his writings translated into English since four essays were published in 1865. Despite his remarkable insights, Valikhanov is not well known in the English-speaking world. Wherever he went he made his mark, striking up strong and lasting friendships with the likes of the great Russian explorer and geographer Petr Petrovich Semenov Tian-Shansky and the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Nonetheless, he was elected to membership of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and spent time in St Petersburg, where he was given a private audience by the Tsar. Journeys to Kuldja, to Issyk Kol and to other remote and unmapped places quickly established his reputation, even though he always remained inorodets – an outsider to the Russian Establishment. His famous mission to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan that began in June 1858 and lasted for more than a year saw him in disguise as a Tashkent merchant, risking his life to gather vital information, not just on current events, but on the ethnic make-up, geography, flora and fauna of this unknown region. Soon after graduating from Siberian Cadet School at Omsk, he was taking part in reconnaissance missions deep into regions of Central Asia that had seldom been visited by outsiders.

Born in 1835 into a wealthy and powerful Kazakh clan, he was one of the first ‘people of the steppe’ to receive a Russian education and military training. Set against his remarkable output of official reports, articles and research into the history, culture and ethnology of Central Asia, and more importantly, his Kazakh people, it remains an entirely appropriate accolade. When Chokan Valikhanov died of TB in 1865, aged only 29, the Russian Academician Nikolai Veselovsky described his short life as “a meteor flashing across the field of oriental studies”.

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