Bukhara did not re-emerge from Samarkand's shadow until Abdullah Khan, descended from Genghis Khan's grandson Sheiban, rebuilt most of it in the second half of the 16th century. He also formed the Sheibanid empire by conquering Baikh, Fergana, Tashkent, Khorasan and Khorezm. 

During the 17th century the empire shrank back to its core between the Amu Daiya and Syr Darya rivers and became known as the Khanate of Bukhara. Abdullah Khan's less competent Sheibanid successors wasted their limited energies bickering with other khanates until Nadir Shah invaded from Persia and founded the Astrakhanid dynasty in 1740. In 1784 the merely unimaginative Astrakhanids  were replaced by the positively backward-looking Manghits, who called themselves emirs instead of khans and ruled till 1920. Their founder, Emir Maasum, was, according to Curzon, 'a bigoted devotee, wearing the dress and imitating the life of a dervish'. He was also, by contemporary standards at any rate, a pervert. If the writings of a German doctor who penetrated Bukhara in disguise in 1820 are to be believed, the emir retained, in addition to his harem, 'forty or fifty degraded beings', with whom he indulged in 'all the horrors and abominations of  Sodom and Gomorrah'. 
Maasum's son Nasrullah received in 1832 the audacious, polyglot British officer Alexander Burnes, whose Travels Into Bukhara contains the most colourful and intelligent description available of the city in the early 19th century. Its population of 150,000 was half that of pre-Mongol times, and three quarters of it was of slave extraction, mostly descended from Persian slaves captured and sold at Bukhara's infamous slave market by Turkmen nomads. There were also Russian slaves: 

'A red beard, grey eyes, and fair skin, will now and then arrest the notice of a stranger, and his attention will have been fixed on a poor Russian, who has lost his country and his liberty, and drags out a miserable life of slavery.' 

Not everyone was oppressed. Hindus, Jews and European merchants lived and traded unmolested in return for observing certain ground rules. Only Muslims might ride horses within the city. Whosoever failed to look away as the emir's harem passed risked 'a blow on the head'. Anyone out at night without a lamp would be assumed by the emir's police to be a burglar. And the sabbath (Friday) was strict: 'If a person is caught flying pigeons on a Friday he is sent forth with the dead bird round his neck, seated on a camel.' 

Students were numerous-Burnes reported 366 madrasas each with from 10 to 80 students-and privileged; each had a right to a yearly maintenance grant from their madrasa, and to a share of the state's income. They were not all young: Burnes found 'many of them grave and demure old men, with more hypocrisy, but by no means less vice, than the youths in other quarters of the world.' 

Women blackened their teeth and were absolutely not to be looked at except by their husbands, who were entitled to shoot peeping Toms. 

The city centre, finally, contained 'many ponderous and massy buildings, colleges, mosques and lofty minarets,' while 'the common houses are built of sun-dried bricks on a framework of wood, and are all flat-roofed'-as they are today. 

Age did not mellow Nasrullah. Ten years after Burnes' visit he gained worldwide notoriety by throwing two less diplomatic British officers, Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly, into his bug pit and then beheading them, slighted that Queen Victoria had not pleaded in person for their lives. It was one of the most gruesome and, thanks to an eccentric clergyman, highly publicized episodes in the Central Asian war of nerves between Britain and Russia which Kipling called the Great Game (see Zindan). 

Bukhara had huge symbolic importance for Central Asian Muslims and for British Russo-phobes who thought its annexation by St Petersburg would be a prelude to a Russian invasion of India. So Russia trod carefully. When Bukhara's clergy declared a holy war against her in 1868, General Kaufmann had his pretext for attacking Samarkand to protect Tashkent. He didn't meddle with Bukhara but he did take control of her water supply. The holy war petered out, the frustrated clergy led a revolt against the emir, and the Russians stepped in to crush it for him. Without ever attacking the city they reduced it to vassal status in a treaty of 1873. 
 

Colonial Bukhara 

' Russian, or 'New' Bukhara was even more separate from the old city than were the Russian cantonments at Tashkent and Samarkand. Born when the railway came from Krasnovodsk in 1888, it was centered on the station ten miles south of Bukhara proper at Kagan. The now disused Russian church is still there. 

There followed a delicate 30-year-long, four-cornered power struggle. In the Ark and the gaudy summer palace resided the last emir, Alim Khan, hanging onto the trappings of 'power. Outside the city strutted the Russian garrison and political agent, wanting stability and trade and prepared to support the emir as long as he delivered it. In the mosques and madrasas the mullahs swore death to the infidel and cursed the emir for his dubious loyalty. On street corners and in smoke-filled rooms angry young men whispered a dangerous new jargon about reforms and rights and pan-Turkic brotherhood. 

In 1910 a general massacre of Shi'ite Muslims by Sunnis ended the city's traditional inter-denominational harmony and was blamed on the reformers, who went underground. The Russian premier Stolypin threatened outright annexation of Bukhara. To forestall it the  emir promised financial and educational reform but entrusted it to the clergy, who smoth-à ered it. In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 the once-liberal underground, funded by a merchant millionaire called Mirza Muhitdin Mansur-oghli, grew more frustrated and extreme. But it was not the works of Marx and Lenin they were reading. Mansur-oghli paid for them to go to university in Istanbul and get high on the anti-Russian, pan-Turkic teachings of Mustapha Kemal. 

The Russian Revolution 

When revolutionaries took over St Petersburg and Moscow in 1917, the Emir of Bukhara Was nearly dizzied by the political weathervane. At first, goaded by a murky Russian agent with the un-Russian name of Miller, who had himself switched quickly from the czarists to the communists, he offered his own package of reforms. But when he saw that H Bukhara was not at the top of revolutionary Moscow's agenda he withdrew it. His people seethed. A communist among them, Khodja-oghli (Khojaev), told the Bolsheviks in Tashkent that Bukhara's proletariat was ready to revolt. He was wrong. When the Bolsheviks came the emir had them slaughtered at the station, and Bukhara became unofficial centre of the Central Asian counter-revolution. 

Early in 1920 the emir forbad trade with Russia or Soviet Turkestan. It was a self-imposed blockade. By July three quarters of the khanate's livestock was dead and its people were running out of water. The Istanbul-trained Young Bukharans were at odds with the new and mainly Russian Bukhara Communist Party-but a marriage of convenience looked imminent. 

In August the Red Army bombarded the city and in September, while the emir was away trying to assemble an army, it took possession. Moscow still feared provoking an Islamic uprising, so home-grown revolutionaries were allowed to found the Bukharan People's Republic, nominally independent of the Soviet Union. But the BPR proved awkwardly receptive to overtures from Istanbul, and when the Bolsheviks had a breathing space from their European struggle, they purged Bukhara's communists. On 19 September 1924 the Bukhara Communist Party voted unanimously at its fifth congress to abolish the BPR and found a Soviet Republic in its place. 

Soviet Bukhara 

As a stronghold of Muslim culture, Bukhara presented the evangelically atheistic Bolsheviks with a tricky choice: to raze it and start again, or to let it decay. They chose the latter. In the 20 years following the revolution its population fell by half. Fitzroy Maclean wrote after his visit in 1938: 'With the exception of a highly incongruous Pedagogic Institute which has made a somewhat half-hearted appearance within its walls, the dying city of Bukhara has remained purely Eastern. The only changes are those which have been wrought by neglect, decay and demolition.' 

The purging of anti-Soviet elements had continued steadily, culminating in 1938 with the execution after a show trial of Bukhara's most famous communist son, the same Khojaev who had invited the Bolsheviks to lead an insurrection in 1918 and who subsequently became Soviet Uzbekistan's first president. 

The Soviets did Bukhara the favour of draining and filling in most of its famous pools (there had been 100 when Burnes paid his visit). The diseases they harboured-'Bukhara Boil', 'Sartian Sickness', Guinea worm-disappeared, but so did most of the city's soul. An alternative water supply arrived in 1968 in the form of the 180-km Amu-Bukharski Canal from the river Amu-Darya. Water was suddenly ten times more abundant and President Sharaf Rashidov took the credit while the Aral Sea took the strain. 

Mean while Bukhara was industrialized. Processing plants were built on its outskirts for cotton, silk, wool, meat and milk. The city was honoured with the Soviet Union's biggest Karakul 'factory', in which Karakul lambs are killed before or shortly after birth for their tightly-curled coats which are said to be warmer and softer even than those of Astrakhan lambs. There is also a guano factory staffed by  
pigeons. 

 
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