Colonel Charles Stoddart (23 July 1806 in

Ipswich Ipswich () is a port town and borough in Suffolk, England, of which it is the county town. The town is located in East Anglia about away from the mouth of the River Orwell and the North Sea. Ipswich is both on the Great Eastern Main Line ...

– June 1842 in Bukhara) was a British officer and diplomat. He was a famous British agent in Central Asia during the period of the

Great Game The Great Game is the name for a set of political, diplomatic and military confrontations that occurred through most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century – involving the rivalry of the British Empire and the Russian Empi ...

. Stoddart, the son of Major Stephen Stoddart (1763–1812), was educated at

Norwich School Norwich School (formally King Edward VI Grammar School, Norwich) is a selective English independent day school in the close of Norwich Cathedral, Norwich. Among the oldest schools in the United Kingdom, it has a traceable history to 1096 as a ...

and later commissioned into the

Royal Staff Corps The Royal Staff Corps was a corps of the British Army responsible for military engineering which was founded in and disbanded in . At the time, the Royal Engineers and Corps of Royal Sappers and Miners were administered as part of the Board o ...

from

Royal Military College, Sandhurst The Royal Military College (RMC), founded in 1801 and established in 1802 at Great Marlow and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, England, but moved in October 1812 to Sandhurst, Berkshire, was a British Army military academy for training infant ...

, in 1823. Dispatched on a mission to persuade the

Emir Emir (; ar, أمير ' ), sometimes transliterated amir, amier, or ameer, is a word of Arabic origin that can refer to a male monarch, aristocrat, holder of high-ranking military or political office, or other person possessing actual or cer ...

of Bukhara to free Russian slaves and sign a treaty of friendship with Britain, he was first arrested by the Emir Nasrullah Khan in 1838. In November 1841 Captain

Arthur Conolly Arthur Conolly (2 July 1807, London – 17 June 1842, Bukhara) was a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. He was a captain of the 6th Bengal Light Cavalry in the service of the British East India Company. He participated in many r ...

arrived in Bukhara with part of his remit to attempt to secure Stoddart's release. He was unsuccessful. Both men were executed on charges of spying for the

British Empire The British Empire was composed of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts e ...

on 24 June 1842. In 1845, the Rev

Joseph Wolff Joseph Wolff (1795 – 2 May 1862) was a Jewish Christian missionary born in Weilersbach, near Bamberg, Germany, named Wolff after his paternal grandfather. He travelled widely, and was known as "the missionary to the world". He published sev ...

, who had undertaken an expedition to discover the two officers' fate and who barely escaped with his life, published an extensive account of his travels in Central Asia which made Conolly and Stoddart household names in Britain for years to come. Stoddart is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of Sri Lankan lizard, '' Ceratophora stoddartii''.Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("Stoddart", p. 255).

References

;Notes ;Bibliography *

Peter Hopkirk Peter Stuart Hopkirk (15 December 1930 – 22 August 2014) was a British journalist, author and historian who wrote six books about the British Empire, Russia and Central Asia. Biography Peter Hopkirk was born in Nottingham, the son of Frank St ...

, ''

The Great Game The Great Game is the name for a set of political, diplomatic and military confrontations that occurred through most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century – involving the rivalry of the British Empire and the Russian Empi ...

'', Kodansha International, 1992, , p. 565
The timeline of the Great Game is availabl
online
*Tom Bissell, ''Chasing the Sea'', Vintage, 2004, , pp 247–253 *Stephen M. Bland ''Does it yurt? Travels in Central Asia or How I Came to Love the Stans'', Hertfordshire Press, 2016, *Leonard Arthur Bethell, ''Tales from the Outposts – Vol 1, Frontiers of Empire''. Edinburgh: Blackwood. 1st edition 1932, pp 267–268. *

, ''Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, in the years 1843–1845, to ascertain the fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly''. London: J. W. Parker, 1845. First and second (revised) edition both came out in 1845.
Reprints: **New York: Harper & Bros., 1845 **Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1848 **New York: Arno Press, 1970 **Elibron Classics, 2001, ) **''A mission to Bokhara''. Edited and abridged with an introduction by Guy Wint. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. {{DEFAULTSORT:Stoddart, Charles 1806 births 1842 deaths Royal Staff Corps officers People educated at Norwich School Graduates of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst British diplomats Executed military personnel The Great Game