Central Asia | A box of 72 glass magic lantern slides of Charles Howard-Bury's Tian Shan Mountains expedition, 1913

Central Asia—Charles Howard-Bury

A box of 72 glass magic lantern slides of Charles Howard-Bury's Tian Shan Mountains hunting expedition. 1913

72 diapositive glass lantern slides (82 x 82mm.), each slide with manuscript caption in a contemporary hand, housed in a contemporary fitted wooden box, some slides cracked

[with:] Charles Howard-Bury. Mountains of Heaven: Travel in the Tian Shan Mountains, 1913. London: Hodder and Stroughton, 1990. 8vo (234 x 156mm.), 176pp., original wrappers, wrappers slightly worn at extremities, [and:] modern laminated ringbound booklet with photographic reproductions of slides

Charles Howard-Bury's expedition to the remote Tian Shan Mountains in Central Asia is part of a "grand tradition of imperial restlessness". The expedition's eccentric leader held both a keen interest in big game hunting and an encyclopedic knowledge of natural history. These slides reinforce an image of Howard-Bury as a figure "more concerned with animals and plants than [...] politics and urban society", though they also reveal something of his fascination for the "habits of country people" (Foreword, Mountains of Heaven).

Subjects include evocative views of mountain scenery and of animals shot on the expedition. A powerful portrait of Howard-Bury shows the soldier-explorer sitting with the antlers of a large deer (captioned "Wapiti Head"). In his diary, Howard-Bury recalls with triumph shooting this "enormous animal with a very good head" on a wooded hillside at 11,000 feet, noting that the horns were a colossal fifty-two inches in length (cf. Mountains of Heaven, p. 123). Another slide, captioned "Bear riding a pony", depicts the bear cub Agu which Howard-Bury bought whilst on the expedition, and which he would eventually bring back to his country house in Westmeath as a pet. Other slides depict local dwellings and sites of interest along the expedition route. A number of these images are reproduced in Mountains of Heaven.

LITERATURE:

Howard-Bury, Mountains of Heaven, 1990