Matthew Leeming

TRAVEL AND INTERNATIONAL PROPERTY: Where no birds sing

Matthew Leeming traces the source of the mysterious River Oxus

issue 01 March 2003

Very few white people have seen the source of the Oxus in the Great Pamir. This vast Central Asian river that never meets an ocean was a source of fascination to 19th-century geographers, and the question of its origin, for which there are six candidates, was only finally settled in 1892 by Lord Curzon himself.

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