Heroes Sung and Unsung: Explorers’ Narratives of Mongolia, 1890s to the 1930s

Petr Kuzmich Kozlov and Roy Chapman Andrews were well known figures in the world of popular culture, exploration, and science of their respective homelands, Imperial Russia and America. In the early years of the twentieth century, both were famous for spectacular discoveries in the deserts of Mongolia – Kozlov in archeology and Andrews in paleontology. Both were celebrity explorers in their native countries when they met in Mongolia in 1922, and both kept field journals and notes from which they produced popularly published accounts of their travels and exploits. Like all the great explorer-adventurers, Andrews and Kozlov made themselves the hero of their own narratives (Maclulich 1977). And yet, neither could have achieved what he did, nor likely have met, had it not been for a third individual, one who was indispensable to both explorers, but an individual who has nearly disappeared from the historical record. Tsokto Garmaevich Badmazhapov, a native of Buryatia, in Siberia, acted as an intermediary for both Kozlov and Andrews. He played a central role in the stories of the two explorers, the unsung hero in their narratives, but he was a remarkable individual in his own right – a successful and polyglot commercial agent, a go-between, an explorer, and a Mongolian government official. In the early 1920s all three individuals were prominent figures in Mongolia, and yet by the mid-1930s, all three had been excluded from the lands that drew them. This article explores the interaction of these three, the visions of Inner Asia that motivated and separated each, and the circumstances – scientific, geo-political, and personal – that both produced and then discarded these remarkable people.