Mihr ‘Ali (attrib.), Fath ‘Ali Shāh at the Hunt with Twenty-two Sons, c.1810

New Delhi, The President's Secretariat, Rashtrapati Bhavan

Image here via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fath_Ali_(1797-1833)_and_his_twenty-two_sons,_gift_to_King_George_IV_of_England,_Rashtrapati_Bhavan.jpg

Asia is big. Very big. The largest continent. It confounds and perplexes many Europeans even today. Our tiny world, with its dozens of countries, cultures, and languages, would all fit comfortably into modern-day Kazakhstan!

And yet visitors from the West there always were. Starting in the Tudor age, with the first English merchants trying to find a way past Hanseatic blockades into the land of Muscovy, all the way to the Great Game of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, during which British and Russian empires eyed one another suspiciously over vast swathes of Central Asia… the West has been fascinated by Asia – and, frankly, by the riches it might offer.  

On this course, we will follow the Cossacks into Siberia, watch the Persian army be trained by an Elizabeth aristocrat, and travel with the Jesuits into China and the locked land of Tibet.

Every week’s session will be its own travelogue and thriller!

RJW F2524 Online course (via Zoom)

Please note that we cannot have the half-term break for this course in the usual week, so the hiatus will be in week 3 instead.

7 weeks, Monday 22 September - Monday 10 November (incl., with an early “half-term” break on 6 October).

£80 (individual registration); £144 (for two people sharing one screen).