In September 2026, Princeton University returned to life after the summer recess, with students back on its Collegiate Gothic campus and the Princeton Triangle Club holding auditions for its latest annual musical. Exactly a century earlier, the same student troupe opened Samarkand, a lavish romantic comic opera named after the Central Asian city, before a paying audience in nearby Trenton, New Jersey.

No footage of the production is known to survive, and its undergraduate performers have long since passed from living memory. But the centenary of this forgotten play offers a revealing glimpse into the American collegiate imagination of Central Asia in the 1920s, when Samarkand could serve as shorthand for a sumptuous, composite Islamicate Orient rather than for anything particularly specific to the city or the region.

Princeton’s Samarkand

Princeton’s century-old student-run Triangle Club provided the institutional setting where an Orientalist imagination of Central Asia could become the subject of a polished Ivy League theatrical production. Founded in 1891, the Club is the oldest touring collegiate musical-comedy troupe in the United States, having built its reputation by staging an original show each academic year and taking it beyond Princeton. Undergraduate students write and perform each production, while professional directors and choreographers prepare it for public performance. Samarkand, billed for the 1926-27 academic year, was the Club’s 38th annual comic opera production and was staged four years before the opening of McCarter Theatre, where the annual tradition has since been anchored.

    True to the Club’s traditions, Samarkand was a product of undergraduate authorship and performance combined with professional theatrical supervision, and its premiere brought Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy before a paying public in the Garden State’s capital. On December 15, 1926, the production opened at the Trent Theatre in Trenton, a public commercial venue twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) from Princeton. In operation from 1903 to 1972, the Trent Theatre predated McCarter and served as a temporary stage after the destruction of the on-campus Casino Theatre briefly left Princeton University without a suitable theatrical venue.

Undergraduates wrote the libretto, lyrics, music, and dialogue and filled every credited role in the cast and chorus. Because Princeton admitted only men until the 1969-1970 academic year, male students also performed the female characters. Donald Clive Stuart, a professor of dramatic literature at Princeton, directed the show, while other theatrical professionals staged its dances and arranged and orchestrated its score (no playwright or script adviser was credited).

    Samarkand presents a rather conventional comic-operatic mixture of prophecy, romance, court intrigue, and sudden acquisition of power. Act I opens in the throne room of Haroun-El-Emenope, Caliph of Ashkabad, whose court includes his daughter Shelmardeen, the magician Attar-Bey-Bey, and the ambitious wazir Raschid. A voice from a feared magic urn foretells Haroun’s death and Shelmardeen’s marriage to a vagabond. Zahirudin, a mysterious adventurer from Samarkand whose name is said to mean “Fate,” arrives in search of the renowned princess, courts her with songs about the Golden Road to his native city, and eventually departs with her.

Raschid plots the Caliph’s death, seeks Shelmardeen for himself, and directs jealousy and suspicion against Zahirudin. A dancing girl named Yasmini, two rival suitors, four conspirators, and the Djinn of the urn complete the principal cast. Act II takes place in an enchanted garden, where the prophecy is fulfilled through a convenient reversal: death claims the cruel Caliph of Samarkand instead of Haroun, after which Zahirudin is proclaimed Caliph and marries Shelmardeen.

An Orientalist Fantasy of Central Asia

    The surviving visual materials for Samarkand presented Central Asia through generalized Orientalist imagery of luxury, mystery, and theatrical exoticism. The play’s black-and-gold playbill cover features an enthroned, elaborately dressed figure before an immense peacock tail, with dense ornament covering nearly every part of the design. The play’s orange-and-black sheet-music cover presents a turbaned man and a richly costumed woman beneath a drooping tree as the man points toward a distant city of domes and minarets under a crescent moon. The program’s costume drawing of Attar-Bey-Bey depicts the court magician in a long robe, broad sash, extravagant jewelry, and elaborate headdress against a dark flame-shaped backdrop. None of these elements is distinctly Central Asian.

The most candid commentary on this imagery appears in a garment advertisement beneath the program’s setting descriptions. A cartoon turbaned figure dreams of a modern outfit while the caption declares, “All this Oriental splendor stuff reminds us we’ve some pretty splendid male wardrobings for Americans. At least Princeton undergrads and alumni tell us so.” The joke makes explicit what the covers and costume imply: the play’s Samarkand was a marketable image of “Oriental splendor,” and the advertisement addressed its theatergoers directly as American consumers, particularly Princeton students and alumni.

Samarkand on Tour

    Samarkand took Princeton’s Orientalist fantasy on a national tour that eventually encompassed twenty-four performances, and reviewers across its itinerary consistently valued the production’s humor, spectacle, and theatrical polish. After three performances in Trenton on December 15-17, 1926, the Club appeared in Washington (December 18), Baltimore (December 20), New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (December 21), Pittsburgh (December 22), Cincinnati (December 23), Nashville (December 24), and Birmingham (December 25). After a one-day interval on the day after Christmas, the tour resumed in Memphis (December 27), followed by Little Rock (December 28), St. Louis (December 29), Chicago (December 30), Indianapolis (December 31), Cleveland (January 1, 1927), Syracuse (January 3), and New York again (January 4). The Club later performed in Orange, New Jersey (February 18), Newark (February 21), and Philadelphia (February 25-26). On June 17-18, shortly after the end of the spring semester, the play was staged one last time at Princeton’s University Gymnasium (destroyed in a fire in 1944).

All twenty-four known performances occurred during the 1926-27 academic year, and no evidence has emerged of a later revival. After opening night, The Daily Princetonian declared that Samarkand “took its place among the best of recent Triangle Club plays,” although it observed some roughness in the most demanding dances. The New York Times called the Metropolitan Opera House performance “a hit” and praised its songs, jokes, dancing, costumes, and settings. Newspapers in Nashville, Birmingham, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Syracuse, and other stops repeatedly commended the catchy music, clever lines, scenic effects, colorful costumes, disciplined chorus, and professional finish. The surviving notices offered little discussion of the play’s geographic or cultural accuracy.

A City Reduced to a Dream

    In Samarkand, the city honored in its title serves primarily as a geographically and culturally distant realm whose name promises romance, wealth, happiness, and power. The program identifies the setting of Act II only as “an enchanted garden in Samarkand,” and the city receives none of the social or physical detail of an actual urban setting. In a musical sequence titled “The Pilgrimage,” the Spirit of the Urn commands the characters to travel eastward over the sand, past swaying caravans and through low shadows, along a golden road where their “fondest dreams ever come true.”

Zahirudin similarly describes the place as a “dim-mooned city of delight,” and the ballet libretto calls the Golden Road to Samarkand “the pathway that leads to the land where dreams come true.” Samarkand offers rewards at every level of the plot: the journey promises riches, joy, and power; it secures the lovers’ union; and it raises the vagabond Zahirudin to the caliphate. No streets, monuments, institutions, or ordinary inhabitants appear, as the city is reduced to sand, caravans, bells, magic, an enchanted garden, and a distant promise of fulfillment.

A Composite Orient

    The cultural setting of Samarkand is a composite Orientalist fantasy that blends Arabic, Persianate, Turkic, Central Asian, and South Asian references while offering almost nothing specific to Samarkand or Central Asian history and culture. Its Arabic materials include a caliph and wazir, a Djinn from a magic urn, and the song “We Know All About the Arabian Nights (But What About the Days?).” The cast bears Arabic- and Persianate-adjacent names, while “Come to Our Altar Fires” and the “Hymn of the Fire-Worshippers” connect it to Zoroastrianism. Samarkand and “Ashkabad” are the principal regional markers, accompanied by generic palaces, deserts, and caravans; historically or geographically specific Central Asian features are virtually absent.

The suitor Haidan Sikh even introduces a South Asian religious identity into the mixture, primarily to facilitate an English pun. The religious setting is equally unstable: subjects of a caliph chant to idols, burn incense, seek prophecy from an urn, and sing to altar fires. Even the name Ashkabad presents a chronological puzzle. The city now known as Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, officially bore the name Poltoratsk from 1919 to 1927. The coincidence was presumably inadvertent.

Inventing the East in English

    The pseudo-Islamicate names in Samarkand reveal a genuinely amusing side of the production’s Orientalism, as their foreign-sounding forms seem designed to deliver jokes in English. The rival suitors Peke Abou and Haidan Sikh are phonetic disguises for “peekaboo” and “hide-and-seek.” Haroun-El-Emenope can be heard as “around L-M-N-O-P” (an alphabetical sequence), while Attar-Bey-Bey appears to echo “attababy.” The adventurer Zahirudin seems to suggest “They hear you, Dean,” echoing the name of his eventual bride, Shelmardeen – “She’ll marry Dean.” Four conspirators named Iambad, Heezbad, Urbad, and Wirbad identify themselves as “I am bad,” “He’s bad,” “You’re bad,” and “We’re bad.” Although these puns demonstrate undergraduate ingenuity, their mechanism treats Islamicate names as decorative sounds detached from cultural context.

Before Princeton: Imagining Central Asia in the West

    The composite setting of Samarkand may be seen as part of a longer Western tradition that located Central Asia within a loosely bounded Persianate and Islamicate Orient. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721) used the wealthy Isfahani nobleman Usbek, his seraglio, and a passing allusion to the khan of Tartary as materials for a French satire of European society. Goethe’s engagement with Hafez, Ferdowsi, and Zoroastrian texts informed his own experiments in Persianate poetry and contributed to his later conception of world literature (Weltliteratur). Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) subsequently made a stylized Persian past extraordinarily popular among the English-speaking public.

More geographically explicit representations followed the routes of Arminius Vámbéry, Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shanskiy, Nikolay Przhevalskiy, Sven Hedin, and Mannerheim, whose journeys across Central Asia generated travel narratives, maps, ethnographic collections, and photographs under scientific, imperial, and military auspices. Stephen Graham’s illustrated Through Russian Central Asia (1916) carried this tradition into English travel writing only a decade before Samarkand. The Russian painter Vasiliy Vereshchagin’s Turkestan Series juxtaposed bazaars, monuments, and local figures with conquest and death, while the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky’s early color photography presented Central Asian cities, architecture, rulers, and inhabitants with striking immediacy. Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which premiered in Milan less than eight months before Samarkand, offered a contemporaneous example of cultural conflation: its Persian-derived title means “daughter of Turan,” although its title character is a Chinese princess and the opera is set in imperial China and incorporates Chinese folk melodies.

Tamerlane and the Western Imagination

    Western fascination with Tamerlane (Timur) had endowed Samarkand with much of its dramatic reputation long before 1926, although the Princeton play omitted the conqueror who had made the city his imperial capital. Christopher Marlowe’s two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587-1588) presented Timur as a Scythian shepherd whose military genius and boundless ambition carried him to dominion over vast territories. Around 1700, Andrea Celesti’s monumental Tamerlane and Bajazet portrayed the victorious ruler receiving the captive Ottoman sultan amid an invented display of Oriental magnificence. Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane (1701) offered a contrasting image of a restrained and virtuous monarch, commonly interpreted as an analog for William III, while Bajazet represented Louis XIV.

The defeat and captivity of Bayezid subsequently provided the shared historical premise for George Frideric Handel’s Tamerlano (1724), Antonio Vivaldi’s Bajazet (1735), and Josef Mysliveček’s Il gran Tamerlano (1771), all of which combined imperial conflict with captivity, dynastic romance, and suicide. Across the Atlantic Ocean, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” (1827) imagined the dying conqueror lamenting that his pursuit of power had cost him his youthful love. These works assigned Tamerlane radically different roles – insatiable conqueror, enlightened sovereign, sadistic tyrant, or tragic lover – and repeatedly used him to examine ambition, kingship, political rivalry, and unfulfilled love. By 1926, the name Samarkand therefore carried centuries of associations with imperial power, danger, magnificence, and romance, even though Samarkand detached those associations from Timur and his empire.

From Bukhara Carpets to the Golden Road

    The city of Bukhara appeared frequently in Western commercial accounts, as the city’s name became shorthand for Oriental luxury in the carpet trade. By the turn of the twentieth century, so-called “Bokhara rugs” had become fashionable furnishings in Paris, London, and other European and North American markets. Travel narratives reinforced the city’s reputation as a remote seat of Islamic tradition and monarchical wealth, and Prokudin-Gorsky’s 1911 color portrait of Emir Alim Khan, the last emir of the Emirate of Bukhara, preserved an especially vivid image of its royal splendor. The use of “Bokhara” in Western commerce closely parallels Princeton’s theatrical use of Samarkand: both place-names promised magnificence while conveying little about the cities and peoples they denoted.

    By 1926, Samarkand had become a familiar Western literary emblem of sensual abundance, imperial grandeur, distant suffering, and alluring travel. John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes (1820) invokes “silken Samarcand” amid a feast of candied fruits, spiced delicacies, gold, silver, and perfume whose imagined geography extends from Fez to Lebanon (with Samarkand nearly 2,000 miles beyond this spectrum). Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane” invites the reader to behold Samarkand as the “queen of Earth,” the supreme monument to Timur’s pride and power.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Young King” (1891) treats the city as one point in a remote Oriental panorama of splendor and catastrophe. James Elroy Flecker’s The Golden Journey to Samarkand (1913) was the Princeton production’s most immediate literary precedent, and the published score confirms the inspiration by printing two stanzas from Flecker above the cast list. The musical echoes Flecker’s pilgrims and caravans, desert shadows, ringing bells, “dim-moon city of delight,” and “Golden Road to Samarkand,” but turns his restless pursuit of adventure and forbidden knowledge into a promise of romance, riches, joy, and political power.

Orientalism for the Jazz Age

    The Orientalism of Samarkand bore the unmistakable imprint of the expanding consumer culture of the United States in the 1920s, most conspicuously in the material rewards promised by its songs at every stage of the journey eastward. Contemporary American life repeatedly intrudes upon the supposedly ancient court, where characters joke about “airplane rugs,” call old-fashioned dancing “déclassé,” invoke the blues and the Black Bottom, and warn that a Morris chair is no place for the decade’s newest steps. For Princeton students and audiences across the country, Samarkand became an imagined treasure trove of worldly pleasures that magnified familiar ambitions for wealth, leisure, fashion, romance, and social advancement, while the playbill’s myriad advertisements for clothing and hats marketed purchasable tokens of its splendor after the curtain fell.

A Century Later

    Princeton University’s relationship with Central Asia has changed profoundly since Samarkand, and the play’s centenary invites recognition of both the distance between the theatrical imagination of the region it invoked and the scholarship that has since emerged. The play’s cultural imprecision partly reflects the institutional setting of 1926, when Princeton had not yet established the department that would become Near Eastern Studies, sustained academic interest in Central Asia was inconspicuous, and Central Asians had little visible presence in the Ivy League. Leon B. Poullada, a former diplomat and political scientist who earned his doctorate at Princeton and became a prominent scholar of Afghanistan, helped lay the groundwork for this change: the memorial lecture series established in his honor in 1995 has repeatedly addressed Central Asian history and Islam.

His son, Peter Poullada, a 1975 Princeton graduate in Near Eastern Studies, later published a notable study of Turkmen history, while the department now hosts the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associateship in Central Asian Studies. As a relatively small university, Princeton still lacks a regional program devoted exclusively to Central Asia, but the region receives sustained attention through the Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies within the Department of Near Eastern Studies, as well as research conducted by faculty and doctoral students in the History, Near Eastern Studies, and East Asian Studies departments.

Princeton-trained historians such as James Pickett have become leading scholars of Central Asia; the Department of History has hosted Sarah Cameron as a visiting scholar; and recent conferences and colloquia held at Princeton have featured lectures delivered by Artemy Kalinovsky and Scott Levi. Princeton Near Eastern Studies professor Michael Reynolds’s forthcoming biography, A Life Lived like a Storm, follows Enver Pasha through a final, dramatic chapter of the former Ottoman war minister’s career in Central Asia. In March 2024, Princeton’s Central Asian Student Association received formal recognition as an undergraduate organization. A century after Samarkand staged Central Asia as a playground for American fantasy, Princeton is now a leading institution in the study of the region.

By Diego Benning Wang.

Diego Benning Wang is a historian of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Having received a PhD in history from Princeton University, an MA in Russian studies from Columbia University, and a BA in Russian studies from New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University.