The Syr Darya: Lost Cities Along Central Asia’s Secret River
The Hugh Leach Memorial Lecture – Nick Fiedling, 18 November 2026 14.00 GMT at the Royal Astronomical Society and Online
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On Thin Ice: An Explorer’s Memoir of Siberia, Surveillance and Survival
Charlie Walker is an award-winning British explorer and writer Everyone remembers where they were at the exact moment they heard the news on 24 February 2022. For many, it will have been in bed, waking up to find their phone exploding with alerts: “BREAKING NEWS: Russia launches full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” I was in the…
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Douglas Carruthers and the Outer Mongolia Expedition of 1910-1911
Douglas Carruthers, born in London in 1882, was an explorer and naturalist who went onto become a member of the Royal Central Asian Society (precursor to the RSAA). As a boy he was desperate to be able to explore Africa, Central Asia and the ruins of the ancient world, all of which he managed to achieve before he was twenty-six. As a young man he travelled through Arabia, represented the British Museum while travelling across Africa, followed the course of the Congo River and explored Central Asia.
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Great Game manuscript gifted to RSAA: George Hayward
Dr Rosie Llewellyn-Jones MBE, RSAA Archivist, writes on the gift by Kathleen Hopkirk, widow of the author Peter Hopkirk, to the RSAA of a 19th century notebook written by George Hayward, one of the early players of the Great Game. He fell among thieves was a favourite Victorian poem by Sir Henry Newbolt, recited in drawing…
