Free The Emperor Far Away by David Eimer

enabled them to provide daily updates to their followers. Compared to their wired journey, I felt like a Victorian traveller setting off into the interior armed only with a pen and paper.
    After three hours, I arrived at the front of the queue and came face to face with the Kyrgyz consul, an unhappy-looking middle-aged man. My request for a same-day visa was greeted with a flat nyet . It would take him five days to issue an express one. I told him I needed to be in Bishkek the next day. He shrugged. I offered to pay extra to get the visa today. ‘500 tenge,’ was the reply. I handed over the money, about £20, the visa fee and my passport. He slapped a sticker in it which said ‘Kyrgyz Republic’, scribbled my passport number on it and handed it back.
    By lunchtime the next day I was in Bishkek, after another high-speed drive through endless grasslands, where goats and sheep grazed, that ran towards the mountains in the far distance. Along the way, I asked the Kazakh driver if Bishkek was nice. ‘No,’ he replied. At passport control on the Kazakh side of the frontier, the official paused before stamping me out of the country and asked me if I was sure I wanted to leave.
    I was beginning to detect a theme. As we drove into Bishkek’s eastern suburbs, bouncing down crumbling roads lined with decaying apartment blocks and swerving past cars dating back to the time of Gorbachev and glasnost , I wondered if I was in the right place. ‘It doesn’t look like the capital, does it?’ said the driver. Even in the centre of town, only a few statues and a couple of forlorn squares offer a clue that this is Kyrgyzstan’s first city.
    Bishkek never managed to dispel my first impressions of it as an extended, unlit sink council estate. It is small and undeveloped, a city of corner shops and kiosks, with far fewer ethnic Russians than Almaty. At night, much of it becomes an open-air pub. Groups of men in the tracksuits which have supplanted traditional nomad garb as the national dress in urban areas gather to swig vodka in parks and squares, or wherever there is space to sit. Anyone unable to afford the £1.50 needed to buy a bottle can slake their thirst with a 10p shot of firewater at a street stall.
    Getting drunk is what many people do in Bishkek. But there are different ways of achieving oblivion. So while the poorer locals drink outside, richer residents can imbibe in a handful of bars that charge western prices. They exist primarily to fuel the US Air Force personnel based at Manas, Bishkek’s airport. Since 9/11 and the NATO intervention in Afghanistan, Manas has become a gateway for the men and supplies needed to combat radical Islam in the region.
    Both Kyrgyzstan’s former masters in Moscow, who also maintain military bases in the country, and the Chinese are disturbed by the US presence in Bishkek. The fact that there are significant numbers of American soldiers in two countries bordering China – Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan – only reinforces the paranoia that is deeply embedded in the CCP’s psyche. Ever since the former colonial powers forcibly established mini-colonies in ports like Hong Kong and Shanghai in the nineteenth century, Beijing has been wary of any foreign activity close to its frontiers, seeing it as a potential prelude to another attempt to carve up the Middle Kingdom.
    But the ’stans of central Asia have always been a crossroads of conflict, an area where major powers tussle for power and influence. In the nineteenth century, they were one of the battlegrounds for what Kipling called ‘The Great Game’, the tug of war between the British and Russian empires for control of the region and so of India. The game had reached into Xinjiang, and now history is repeating itself. This time around, it is a three-sided fight, with the combatants being the US, Russia and China. The prizes are the oil, natural gas and minerals the ’stans hold.
    Sandwiched between Russia and China, and with Washington