In the summer of 1907, a group of six scouts from the Poltava region of the Russian empire, in present-day Ukraine, was dispatched by the local authorities to the Central Asian province of Semirech’e, a journey across the empire of some 2500 miles. On the evidence of previous expeditions, Semirech’e, located in the east of Russian Turkestan, had been designated the region of Central Asia most suited to Poltava’s land-hungry peasant inhabitants, blessed as it was with ‘a similar climate and fertile soils, just like Little Russia [Malorossiia]’. The scouts were to see the region’s landscape ‘with their own eyes’, and to assess the feasibility of adapting to life working irrigated and rainfed fields. Upon arrival, the group was quick to note the latent fertility of the local terrain. According to the visitors’ observations, the climate was gentle, the land criss-crossed by irrigation canals, while trees, grains, wild grasses and fruits grew in abundance. In fact, as one scout admitted, ‘anything would grow [here], if there was water’. A fellow companion, one G. F. Khristich, noted that he ‘would live here forever, if they would give me some land’. Further comments reveal that beyond evaluating the quality of the soil, climate and water supply, the visitors also appeared to be appropriating the land by superimposing their own, familiar environmental norms onto Semirech’e’s landscapes. Khristich tellingly noted that on the plots of land prepared for new settlers, ‘there are few plants, but they are growing, and quickly’. The presence — or absence — of trees, flowers, crops and other plants was an important cognitive symbol as to whether the land had potential, and an indication as to its ideal state. The Poltavan visitors were representative of an increasing number of settlers from the Russian empire who migrated to Central Asia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The region had been officially incorporated into the empire with the formation of the Governor-Generalship of Turkestan in 1867, and its military annexation represented one of the final acts in the gradual expansion of Russia’s southern and eastern borders that had been in process since the sixteenth century. The newly formed province ‘presented the empire with a vast, alien, and almost exclusively Muslim territory, which, unlike earlier Asian conquests in Siberia, turned out to be permanently unassimilable to the Russian “core”’. To many metropolitan Russians in the imperial heartland, and a good number of administrators, military men and new settlers in Turkestan itself, Central Asia was indeed an ‘alien’ realm, commonly described in terms of being ‘half-wild’, ‘savage’ and ‘at the edges of the civilized world’, and such temporal and spatial impressions remained deeply rooted in parts of the Russian popular imaginary for the remainder of the tsarist period. Turkestan’s ‘Other-World-liness’ extended in the social imagination to the region’s natural environment, very often entirely conflated with the arid terrain of the Kyzyl Kum and Kara Kum deserts between the Caspian Sea and the Syr-Dar’ia river. As one observer noted:

中文翻译：

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“植物很少，但它们生长得很快”：1854-1914 年俄罗斯中亚的树叶和景观美学

1907 年夏天，俄罗斯帝国波尔塔瓦地区（今乌克兰）的六名侦察员被地方当局派往中亚省塞米雷切省，穿越约 2500 年的帝国。英里。根据先前探险的证据，位于俄罗斯土耳其斯坦东部的塞米雷切被指定为中亚地区最适合波尔塔瓦渴望土地的农民居民，因为它拥有“相似的气候和肥沃的土壤，就像小俄罗斯 [Malorossiia]'。侦察员将“用自己的眼睛”观察该地区的景观，并评估适应灌溉和雨育田地生活的可行性。抵达后，该小组很快注意到当地地形的潜在肥力。据游客观察，气候温和，灌溉渠纵横交错，树木、谷物、野草和水果大量生长。事实上，正如一位侦察员所承认的那样，“如果有水，[这里] 任何东西都会生长”。一位同伴，一位 GF Khristich，指出他“会永远住在这里，如果他们给我一些土地”。进一步的评论表明，除了评估土壤、气候和供水的质量外，游客们似乎还通过将他们自己熟悉的环境规范叠加到 Semirech'e 的景观上来占用土地。Khristich 生动地指出，在为新定居者准备的土地上，“植物很少，但它们正在迅速生长”。树木、花卉、农作物和其他植物的存在或不存在是关于土地是否具有潜力的重要认知标志，以及其理想状态的指示。波尔塔文的游客代表了从 19 世纪中叶开始迁移到中亚的越来越多的俄罗斯帝国定居者。随着 1867 年土耳其斯坦总督的成立，该地区已正式并入帝国，其军事吞并是自 16 世纪以来俄罗斯南部和东部边界逐渐扩张的最后行动之一。世纪。新成立的省份“为帝国提供了广阔的、陌生的、几乎完全是穆斯林的领土，与早期亚洲在西伯利亚的征服不同，它被证明永远无法与俄罗斯的“核心”同化。对于帝国中心地带的许多大都市俄罗斯人以及许多行政人员来说，对于土耳其斯坦本身的军人和新定居者而言，中亚确实是一个“外星”王国，通常被描述为“半野”、“野蛮”和“处于文明世界的边缘”，以及这样的时间和空间在沙皇时期的剩余时间里，这些印象仍然深深植根于俄罗斯流行想象的某些部分。土耳其斯坦的“其他世界线”在社会想象中扩展到该地区的自然环境，通常完全与里海和锡尔达里亚河之间的克孜勒库姆沙漠和喀拉库姆沙漠的干旱地形混为一谈。正如一位观察者所指出的：在沙皇时期的剩余时间里，这种时间和空间印象仍然深深植根于俄罗斯大众想象的某些部分。土耳其斯坦的“其他世界线”在社会想象中扩展到该地区的自然环境，通常完全与里海和锡尔达里亚河之间的克孜勒库姆沙漠和喀拉库姆沙漠的干旱地形混为一谈。正如一位观察者所指出的：在沙皇时期的剩余时间里，这种时空印象仍然深深植根于俄罗斯大众想象的某些部分。土耳其斯坦的“其他世界线”在社会想象中扩展到该地区的自然环境，通常完全与里海和锡尔达里亚河之间的克孜勒库姆沙漠和喀拉库姆沙漠的干旱地形混为一谈。正如一位观察者所指出的：