The Great Game Revisited: Three Empires Collide in Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang)

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British and Russians fought, sometimes violently, in an Asian front that ranged from the Caucasus Mountains to the west to China's Xinjiang Province to the east. This rivalry, known as the Great Game, nearly erupted into a full-scale war in 1885. Following the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the rivalry between the Soviet Union and Great Britain re-emerged. This article describes the Anglo–Soviet rivalry in troubled, war-torn Xinjiang during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when Britain was a declining power and the Soviet Union a new ascendant power.