Sven Hedin - Overview

Overview

At 15 years of age, Hedin witnessed the triumphal return of the Arctic explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld after his first navigation of the Northern Sea Route. From that moment on, young Sven aspired to become an explorer. His studies under the German geographer and China expert Ferdinand Freiherr von Richthofen awakened a love of Germany in Sven and strengthened his resolve to undertake expeditions to Central Asia in order to explore the last uncharted areas of Asia. After obtaining a doctorate, learning several languages and dialects, and undertaking two trips through Persia, he ignored the advice of Ferdinand von Richthofen to continue his geographic studies in order to acquaint himself with geographical research methodology; the result was that Hedin had to leave the evaluation of his expedition results later to other scientists.

Between 1894 and 1908, in three daring expeditions through the mountains and deserts of Central Asia, he mapped and researched parts of Chinese Turkestan (officially Xinjiang) and Tibet which had been unexplored until then. Upon his return to Stockholm in 1909 he was received as triumphantly as Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. In 1902 he became the last Swede (to date) to be raised to the untitled nobility and was considered one of Sweden’s most important personalities. As a member of two scientific academies, he had a voice in the selection of Nobel Prize winners for both science and literature. Hedin never married and had no children, rendering his family line now extinct.

Hedin's expedition notes laid the foundations for a precise mapping of Central Asia. He was one of the first European scientific explorers to use native-born scientists and research assistants on his expeditions. Although primarily an explorer, he was also the first to unearth the ruins of ancient Buddhist cities in Chinese Central Asia. However, as his main interest in archaeology was finding ancient cities, he had little interest in performing thorough excavations. Of small stature, with a bookish, bespectacled appearance, Hedin nevertheless proved himself a determined explorer, surviving several close brushes with death from hostile forces and the elements over his long career. His scientific documentation and popular travelogues, illustrated with his own photographs, watercolor paintings and drawings, his adventure stories for young readers and his lecture tours abroad made him world famous.

As a proven expert on Turkestan and Tibet, he was able to obtain unrestricted access to European and Asian monarchs and politicians as well as to their geographical societies and scholarly associations. They all sought to purchase his exclusive knowledge about the power vacuum in Central Asia with medals, diamond-encrusted grand crosses, gold medals, honorary doctorates and splendid receptions, as well as with logistic and financial support for his expeditions. Hedin, in addition to Nikolai Przhevalsky and Sir Francis Younghusband, Sir Aurel Stein, were active players in the British-Russian struggle for influence in Central Asia, the Great Game. Their travels were supported because they filled in the "white spaces" in contemporary maps, providing valuable information.

Hedin was honored in ceremonies in:

• 1890 by King Oscar II of Sweden
• 1890 by Shah Nāser ad-Dīn Schah
• 1896, 1909 by Czar Nicholas II of Russia
• from 1898 frequently by Kaiser Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary
• 1902 by the Viceroy of India Lord Curzon
• 1903, 1914, 1917, 1926, 1936 by Kaiser Wilhelm II
• 1906 by the Viceroy of India Lord Minto
• 1907, 1926, 1933 by the 9th Panchen Lama Thubten Choekyi Nyima
• 1908 by Emperor Mutsuhito
• 1910 by Pope Pius X
• 1910 by Theodore Roosevelt
• 1915 and subsequently by Hindenburg
• 1929 and 1935 by Chiang Kai-shek
• 1935, 1939, 1940 (2x) by Adolf Hitler.

Hedin was and remained a figure of the 19th century who clung to its visions and methods also in the 20th century. This prevented him from discerning the fundamental social and political upheavals of the 20th century and aligning his thinking and actions accordingly.

Concerned about the security of Scandinavia he favored the construction of the battleship Sverige. In World War I he specifically allied himself in his publications with the German monarchy and its conduct of the war. Because of this political involvement he lost his scientific reputation with Germany’s wartime enemies, his membership in their geographical societies and learned associations, as well as any support for his planned expeditions.

After a not very successful lecture tour in 1923 through North America and Japan, he traveled on to Peking to carry out an expedition to Chinese Turkestan, but the unstable political situation thwarted this intention. He instead traveled through Mongolia by car and through Siberia with the Trans-Siberian Railway.

With financial support from the governments of Sweden and Germany he led, between 1927 and 1935, an international and interdisciplinary Sino-Swedish Expedition to carry out scientific investigations in Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan, with participation of 37 scientists from six countries. Despite Chinese counterdemonstrations and after months of negotiations in China, was he able to make the expedition also a Chinese one by obtaining Chinese research commissions and the participation of Chinese scientists. He also concluded a contract which guaranteed freedom of travel for this expedition, which because of its arms, 300 camels, and activities in a war theater resembled an invading army. However, the financing remained Hedin's private responsibility.

Because of failing health, the civil war in Chinese Turkestan, and a long period of captivity, Hedin, by then 70 years of age, had a difficult time after the currency depreciation of the Great Depression raising the money required for the expedition, the logistics for assuring the supplying of the expedition in a war arena, and obtaining access for the expedition’s participants to a research area intensely contested by warlords. Nevertheless, the expedition was a scientific success. The archaeological artifacts which had been sent to Sweden were scientifically assessed for three years, after which they were returned to China under the terms of the contract.

Starting in 1937, the scientific material assembled during the expedition was published in over 50 volumes by Hedin and other expedition participants, thereby making it available for worldwide research on eastern Asia. When he ran out of money to pay printing costs, he pawned his extensive and valuable library, which filled several rooms, making possible the publication of additional volumes.

In 1935 Hedin made his exclusive knowledge about central Asia available, not only to the Swedish government, but also to foreign governments such as China and Germany, in lectures and personal discussions with political representatives of Chiang Kai-shek and Adolf Hitler.

Although he was not a National Socialist, Hedin’s incredible naivety and gullibility as well as his illusive hope that Nazi Germany would protect Scandinavia from invasion by the Soviet Union brought him in dangerous proximity to representatives of National Socialism, who exploited him as an author. This destroyed his reputation and put him into social and scientific isolation. However, in correspondence and personal conversations with leading Nazis his successful intercessions achieved the pardoning of ten people condemned to death and for the release or survival of Jews who had been deported to German concentration camps.

At the end of the war U.S. troops deliberately confiscated the documents relating to Hedin’s planned Central Asia atlas. The U.S. Army Map Service later solicited Hedin’s assistance and financed the printing and publication of his life’s work, the Central Asia atlas. Whoever compares this atlas with Adolf Stielers Hand Atlas of 1891 can appreciate what Hedin accomplished between 1893 and 1935. The maps were used by the U.S. Army to interpret satellite images and by U.S. Air Force pilots during the war in Afghanistan.

Although Hedin's research was taboo in Germany and Sweden because of his conduct relating to Nazi Germany, and stagnated for decades in Germany, the scientific documentation of his expeditions was translated into Chinese by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and incorporated into Chinese research. Following the recommendations made by Hedin to the Chinese government in 1935, the routes he selected were used to construct streets and train tracks, as well as dams and canals to irrigate new farms being established in the Tarim and Yanji basins and the deposits of iron, manganese, oil, coal and gold discovered during the Sino-Swedish Expedition were opened up for mining. Among the discoveries of this expedition should also be counted the many Asian plants and animals unheard of until that date, as well as fossil remains of dinosaurs and extinct horned animals. All of them were named after Hedin, the scientific classification suffix being hedini. But one discovery remained unknown to Chinese researchers until the turn of the millennium: in the Lop Nur desert, Hedin discovered in 1933 and 1934 ruins of signal towers which prove that the Great Wall of China once extended to Xinjiang.

From 1931 until his death in 1952 Hedin lived in Stockholm in a modern high-rise in a preferred location, the address being Norr Mälarstrand 66. He lived with his siblings in the upper three stories and from the balcony he had a wide view over Riddarfjärden Bay and Lake Mälaren to the island of Långholmen. In the entryway to the stairwell is to be found a decorative stucco relief map of Hedin’s research area in Central Asia and a relief of the Lama temple, a copy of which he had brought to Chicago to the 1933 World's Fair.

On October 29, 1952, Hedin's will granted the rights to his books and his extensive personal effects to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; the Sven Hedin Foundation established soon thereafter holds all the rights of ownership.

Hedin died at Stockholm in 1952. The memorial service was attended by representatives of the Swedish royal household, the Swedish government, the Swedish Academy and the diplomatic service. He was buried in the cemetery of Adolf Fredrik church in Stockholm.