Describing the trove of Asian weapons housed at the Tsarskoye Selo Arsenal in 1860, the collection’s keeper Florent Antoine de Gille commented that “L’esprit des Orientaux offre dans leurs armes…les oppositions très-étranges des idées les plus différentes.” De Gille’s comment reflects a commonplace idea of the time, that weapons and objects could somehow capture the essence of the Asian peoples who made them. Beginning in the 1840s, the Tsarskoye Selo Arsenal began to proactively collect weapons from South Asia. On the one hand, this reflects the Russian Imperial Family’s participation in the European vogue for collecting Medieval weaponry from the West alongside contemporary Asian arms and armor. But studying the development of this collection, its display, and presentation in lushly illustrated catalogs, reveals how the court perceived different parts of Asia and how they attempted to frame their relationship with Asia to the public. This paper examines the history of the Indian arms and armor collection at Tsarskoye Selo and uses the presentation of this collection to explore the Anglo-Russian rivalry from the time of the first Anglo-Afghan War until the establishment of the Durand Line in Afghanistan in 1893. I argue that the various catalogs and re-stagings of the collection reveal how the Russian court responded to the popular idea of the Great Game—the largely fictitious idea that Russia had designs on British India. In doing so, this paper shows us how Russian views of both Asian people and Western Europe developed during this period, evolving from vague Romantic tropes to increasingly precise, political information.
