The cartographic afterlives of a river and a guide on the Silk Road

On June 12, 2025, I delivered a conference paper based on my doctoral research on archaeological maps of the Silk Road.¹ I tried to answer two cartographic questions:

First, what were routes from an archaeologist's maps doing in a confidential British intelligence handbook from 1926? This "route book"² was top secret, but many of its routes came from openly published maps and reports by Sir Aurel Stein (1862-1943), an internationally famous explorer and archaeologist who worked closely with officials in British India. Intelligence officers drew on his maps since they offered detailed marches through the deserts of what is now the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China, which was the site of political maneuvering between China, Russia, and the British Empire.

Second, how did Stein learn of these routes? Partly from guides and partly from his own explorations, but certain key routes came from a local guide and "treasure-seeker" (Stein's words), Turdi. Stein paid Turdi in 1900-1901 for artifacts and for leading him to ruins, which Stein excavated. Later, Turdi fell into trouble with the law, fled along a dry riverbed, was caught, jailed, sickened, and died. In 1907, Stein followed Turdi's footsteps along this dry riverbed; his survey of this route appeared on his 1918-1922 maps and, from there, the route book described above.

But Turdi was no mere informant; he and Stein were friends. They shared a tearful farewell and Stein later expressed his deep sadness at learning of Turdi's death. As Stein retold Turdi's story across publications and genres, however, he gradually omitted Turdi, instead emphasizing the potential of dry riverbeds as routes across the desert. 

In many imperial encounters, we know little about guides; by tracing Stein and Turdi's encounters, I tried to show how Turdi, and people like him, contributed - in highly asymmetrical ways - to modern western knowledge about Asia. I also tried to recenter the story away from a celebrated explorer and onto his late friend, showing the human face of what became geographical, and later military, knowledge.

Notes:

1. I delivered this paper at CARTO 2025 at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. This paper is the latest version of findings from my 2024 dissertation; see pp. 46-47, 99-116. This paper, and my dissertation, draw on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
2. For more information on "route books" and on early twentieth-century British intelligence efforts in Asia, see Hevia, 2012. The Imperial Security State. I discovered this route book (Routes in Sinkiang. Simla: General Staff India, 1926. Source: British Library, L/MIL/17/14/76.) via the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a text analysis platform with digitized historical documents. It is available to current U of T students, staff, and faculty. See our Gale Digital Scholar Lab tutorials for more information.

Image: detail from Sheet 14, from Stein's 1918-1922 maps of Xinjiang and Gansu, with ruins, rivers, and routes across the desert.