Later Life
He lived for many years under constant supervision in the area around Tashkent, South Eastern Russia and made a great contribution to Tashkent by using his personal fortune to help improve the local area. In 1890 he ordered the building of his own palace in Tashkent to house and show his large and very valuable collection of works of art and the collection is now the center of the State museum of arts of Uzbekistan. He was also famous in Tashkent as a competent engineer and irrigator, constructing two large canals, the Bukhar-aryk (which was poorly aligned and soon silted up) and the much more successful Khiva-Aryk, later extended to form the Emperor Nicholas I Canal, irrigating 12,000 desyatinas, 33,000 acres (134 km²) of land in the 'Hungry Steppe' (Голодная степь) between Djizak and Tashkent. Most of this was then settled with Slavic peasant colonisers.
Nikolai had a number of children by different women and one of his grandchildren Natalya Androssov Iskander Romanov died in Moscow in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Grand Duke Nicholas Constantinovich Of Russia
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