Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Manichaeism, born in Persia in the third century, was based on the opposing ‘Two Principles’ – Light (the spirit) and Darkness (the flesh). The disciples of Manes were ruthlessly persecuted by the Christians in the West at the end of the fifth century. Fleeing eastwards they eventually reached Chinese Central Asia and China proper where they became firmly established under the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties. Until the Germans began to unearth whole Manichaean libraries in the Turfan region, this creed appeared to have no literature, and was known chiefly by the violently hostile writings of its opponents, notably St Augustine.

  The Uighur Turks encountered Manichaeism around the year 762 when they pillaged Ch’ang-an, the T’ang capital, and became converts to it soon after. This outlandish creed, which borrowed from the conflicting beliefs of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, enjoyed its heyday in the tenth century. Thereafter it suffered a decline, eventually disappearing from China. In the western oases of the Silk Road it was violently extinguished and supplanted by the tidal wave of Islam, while further east it was replaced by Buddhism. Proof of the latter can be seen at Karakhoja, at the north-eastern end of the Taklamakan, where beautiful Manichaean wall-paintings were discovered by von Le Coq concealed behind later Buddhist ones. However, it was the art of Buddhism which left the most powerful and enduring monuments along the Silk Road, although both Nestorian and Manichaean artists and scribes also left behind them ample evidence of their own remarkable achievements.

  The art and civilisation of the Silk Road, in common with that of the rest of China, achieved its greatest glory during the T’ang Dynasty (618–907), which is generally regarded as China’s ‘golden age’. During the long periods of peace and stability which characterise this brilliant era, prosperity reigned throughout the empire. Its capital Ch’ang-an, the Rome of Asia and point of departure for travellers using the Silk Road, was one of the most splendid and cosmopolitan cities on earth. In the year 742 its population was close on two million (according to the census of 754, China had a total population of fifty-two million, and contained some twenty-five cities with over half a million inhabitants). Ch’ang-an, which had served as the capital of the Chou, Ch’in and Han dynasties, had grown into a metropolis measuring six miles by five, surrounded by a defensive wall. The gates were closed every night at sunset. Foreigners were welcome, and some five thousand of them lived there. Nestorians, Manichaeans, Zoroastrians, Hindus and Jews were freely permitted to build and worship in their own churches, temples and synagogues. An endless procession of travellers passed through the city’s gates, including Turks, Iranians, Arabs, Sogdians, Mongolians, Armenians, Indians, Koreans, Malays and Japanese. Every known occupation was represented: merchants, missionaries, pilgrims, envoys, dancers, musicians, scribes, gem dealers, wine sellers, courtiers and courtesans. Dwarfs, gathered from all over Asia, were particularly popular among the Chinese as jugglers, dancers, actors and entertainers. Entire orchestras were brought from distant towns along the Silk Road and from elsewhere in Asia to entertain the imperial court.

  A remarkably accurate record of the origins and occupations of these foreigners is found in the terracotta tomb figures discovered around Ch’ang-an (today called Sian) in graves dating from that era. Many of these ming-chi, or tomb furnishings, clearly depict foreigners whose race or country of origin scholars have been able to determine from their physiognomy or dress. In addition to the continuous procession of travellers, a cornucopia of luxuries and everyday goods emptied itself daily into the capital’s many bazaars. Among the more exotic commodities, many of which arrived via the Silk Road, were cosmetics, rare plants (including the saffron crocus), medicines, aromatics, wines, spices, fragrant woods, books and finely woven rugs. In addition to the ‘heavenly horses’ from Ferghana, some of which were trained to dance to music, there were peacocks, parrots, falcons, gazelles, hunting dogs, the occasional lion or leopard, and that two-legged marvel (to the Chinese) the ostrich. These latter creatures, two of which reached China in the seventh century, were first known to the Chinese as ‘great sparrows’ and later as ‘camel birds’, a description borrowed from the Persians. One of these was reputed to be able to run three hundred Chinese miles in a day, and to digest copper and iron.

  Despite their insatiable appetite for these exotic imports, the Chinese nevertheless regarded the foreigners who brought them as Hu, or barbarians. Indeed, such was their deeply rooted sense of superiority that they regarded all foreigners with contempt. Gifts from foreign rulers were accepted by the imperial court as tribute and visiting princes and envoys received as vassals.

  Under the T’ang Dynasty the Silk Road may have enjoyed a golden age, but the fortunes of both the dynasty and its principal trade route were firmly bound together. When the dynasty began to decline, so too did the civilisation of the Silk Road. It was a process which was to end in the ultimate disappearance, together with their monasteries, temples and works of art, of many flourishing towns. Indeed, so completely did all traces of this once-glorious era vanish that it was not until the nineteenth century that it was rediscovered. The reasons for its disappearance are complex, and the process was spread over several centuries. But there were two principal causes. One was the gradual drying up of the glacier-fed streams which supplied the oasis towns. The other was the sudden arrival, sword in hand, of the proselytising warriors of Islam from far-off Arabia.

  Ever since man first moved into the oases of the Taklamakan, back in the mists of Central Asian pre-history, it had been a struggle for survival. Not only against marauding Huns, Tibetans and others, but against death by thirst or starvation. Indeed, survival would have been impossible in this barren landscape but for the streams cascading down from the mountains and spilling into the desert. By skilful use of this water through elaborate irrigation systems the people of the oases had made themselves agriculturally self-sufficient. If, for whatever reason, this irrigation was neglected or interrupted for any length of time then the desert, ever waiting its chance, would take over. The oasis would be abandoned and before long all signs of human habitation would vanish beneath the sands. The town of Niya ‘died’ in this way at the end of the third century AD, when the Chinese temporarily lost control of the Silk Road. It was soon swallowed up by the Taklamakan.

  But however wisely the inhabitants conserved and controlled their water supplies, the processes of geography were working remorselessly against them. High above them in the mountains, the glaciers which fed the streams bringing them life were shrinking. This process, which had begun at the end of the Ice Age, resulted in a steadily diminishing flow of water throughout the Tarim basin. Lou-lan, near Lop-nor, was once the terminal oasis of the Konche river, which was still flowing at the beginning of the fourth century. By the end of the third century, however, the oasis ceased to be occupied as the river gradually receded. Rivers also sometimes changed course or silted up, and sites had to be abandoned. One such oasis was Yotkan, the original site of ancient Khotan, which today lies buried under alluvium.

  But the ultimate reasons for the disappearance of the Buddhist civilisation from the Silk Road were the decline and eventual collapse of the T’ang Dynasty, the victories of the Arabs to the west and the final conversion of the whole Taklamakan region to Islam. The advance of this new religion along the Silk Road spelled the death of figurative art – the portrayal of the human form – for this was anathema to Moslems. Many statues and wall-paintings were damaged or destroyed by these iconoclasts, while temples and stupas were left to crumble and vanish beneath the sand. By the fifteenth century, Islam had become the religion of the entire Taklamakan region. Under the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) the Silk Road was finally abandoned when China shut herself off from all contact with the West, and this led to the further isolation and decline of the area.

  In face of all this, only the strongest and best-watered of the oases survived, and they with a new religion possessing its own art and architecture. The others, with their rich and forgotten sec
rets, lay buried beneath the sands of the Taklamakan, where they were to remain undisturbed for so many centuries.

  2. Lost Cities of the Taklamakan

  * * *

  Among the oasis dwellers of the Taklamakan, strange legends of ancient towns lying buried beneath the sands had been passed down from grandfather to grandson for as long as anyone could remember. Hoards of gold, silver and other treasures, it was said, lay among the dunes ready for the taking by anyone with nerve enough to face the natural and supernatural terrors of the desert. In 1875, a Kirghiz tribesman who had once been a shepherd near the salt marshes around Lop-nor left a vivid account of one such lost city which he claimed to have seen from a distance.

  The walls are seen rising above the reeds in which the city is concealed [he recounted]. I have not been inside the city but I have seen its walls distinctly from the sandy ridges in the vicinity. I was afraid to go amongst the ruins because of the bogs around and the venomous insects and snakes in the reeds.… Besides, it is a notorious fact that people who do go among the ruins almost always die, because they cannot resist the temptation to steal the gold and precious things stored there.… You may doubt it, but everybody here knows what I say is true, and there are hundreds of Kalmaks who have gone to the temple in the midst of these ruins to worship the god there.… Ranged on shelves all around the figure are precious stones and pearls of great size and brilliancy, and innumerable yambs, or ingots of gold and silver. Nobody has the power to take away anything from here. This is all well known to the people of Lop.

  His account, published in an official Indian Government report, goes on to recount what befell one Kalmak tribesman who visited the city to worship but succumbed to temptation, secreting two gold ingots in his clothing. He had not gone far when he was suddenly overcome by great weariness and fell asleep. When he awoke the treasures were missing. Returning to the temple for more, he found to his amazement that the ingots he had taken were back in their place. He was so frightened, the tale goes, that he prostrated himself before the god and begged forgiveness. To his relief the figure smiled, but warned him against such sacrilege in future.

  Other legends tell how these cities came to perish in the first place, usually as a punishment for the sins of their inhabitants. The sixteenth-century Moslem historian Mirza Haidar relates how such a fate befell the town of Katak, near Lop-nor, when only the mullah and muezzin were allowed, thanks to their piety, to escape the engulfing sands. While the muezzin was calling prayers for the last time it started to rain sand, and before long the entire town, except for the mosque, slowly vanished from sight. The terrified muezzin, looking down from the top of his minaret, noticed that the ground around was rapidly rising towards him. Hurriedly completing his prayers, he leapt the few remaining feet onto the sand. Then he and the mullah took to their heels, agreeing that it was wise ‘to keep at a distance from the wrath of God’. The city of Katak ‘is to this day buried in sand’, Mirza Haidar adds.

  Some of these Sodom and Gomorrah stories date from much earlier times, when Buddhism was still flourishing along the Silk Road. In the seventh century the great Buddhist pilgrim-explorer Hsuan-tsang, later to be adopted by Sir Aurel Stein as his patron saint, told of another town which several centuries before had been buried in a sandstorm because its inhabitants had apparently neglected their religious duties. Hsuan-tsang relates that a great wind arose. ‘Then on the seventh day in the evening, just after the division of the night, it rained sand and earth.’ Before long the entire town, which he called Ho-lo-lo Kia, lay beneath a huge mound of sand. Hsuan-tsang goes on: ‘The kings of neighbouring countries, and persons in power from distant spots, have many times wished to excavate the mound and take away the precious things buried there. But as soon as they have arrived at the borders of the place, a furious wind has sprung up, dark clouds have gathered together from the four quarters of heaven, and they have become lost.’ Altogether, it was said, some three hundred towns lay buried beneath the barren sands of the Taklamakan.

  But one neighbouring king was not to be deterred by Hsuan-tsang’s ‘furious wind’, or any other of the desert’s terrors, in his determination to get at the treasures of these lost cities. Ney Elias, the great Asiatic scholar and traveller, writing in 1895, refers to what he describes as ‘perhaps the only systematic exploitation of the ancient sites ever undertaken’. This was carried out with slave labour by the Amir of Kashgar, the tyrannical Mirza Aba Bakr (who did in fact come to a bad end – he was beheaded in his sleep). A vivid account of the Amir’s treasure-hunting in the Khotan region is given us by Mirza Haidar, who lived about the same time. Elias, in his introduction to a translation of this work, concludes: ‘We may infer that nearly everything of intrinsic value was brought to light, while much that was of antiquarian interest was destroyed, so that when, at some future time, civilised explorers come to investigate the ruins and find little to reward their labours, they may feel indebted to the cupidity of Mirza Aba Bakr for their disappointment.’

  That was written only five years before Stein set out across the snowy Karakoram on the first of his three great raids into the Taklamakan – expeditions destined to disprove dramatically that prediction. Elias was never to know this, for he died in 1897 while Stein was still planning his first journey.

  Although in Ney Elias’s day no European traveller had yet excavated any of these lost cities, for some years scholars in the West had been aware of their probable existence. The first real evidence, as opposed to mere legend, had been produced in 1865 by a native traveller. He was a ‘moonshee’, or Indian clerk, named Mohamed-i-Hameed, who had been sent by the British on a secret mission across the Karakoram to explore the oases of the Taklamakan, a region then virtually unknown. For the powers-that-be in Calcutta and London considered it too hazardous, both politically and personally, to dispatch British officers, even in disguise, into this unpoliced Chinese backwater between the frontiers of Russia and India. On the other hand, ever concerned about the threat posed to India by Tsarist Russia, they were anxious to possess accurate surveys of the routes likely to be taken across this no-man’s-land by an invading army.

  In the 1860s, Captain T. G. Montgomerie of the Survey of India, the body responsible for mapping the whole of British India and beyond, had hit upon a brilliant solution – the use of ‘moonshees’. He explained the idea in a paper read to the Royal Geographical Society in London on May 14, 1866. ‘While I was in Ladakh,’ he told his audience, ‘I noticed that natives of India passed freely backwards and forwards between Ladakh and Yarkand, and it consequently occurred to me that it might be possible to make the exploration by their means. If a sharp enough man could be found he would have no difficulty in carrying a few small instruments amongst his merchandise and with their aid I thought good service might be rendered to geography.’

  The Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab agreed to finance a one-man, native expedition into Chinese Central Asia, and Mohamed-i-Hameed, who already had some experience of route surveying, was chosen. He was given further training, issued with clandestine surveying instruments specially designed for the purpose, and dispatched to Yarkand. In place of the usual stand for his prismatic compass he was provided with an ordinary spiked staff like those often carried by Himalayan travellers. The head, however, was made rather larger than usual and cut off flat so that his compass could be placed on top of it. ‘By this means,’ Montgomerie explained, ‘a steady observation could be readily secured without much trouble and in a way little likely to excite suspicion.’ The moonshee’s other instruments, which included a small tin lantern for reading the sextant at night and a copper jug and oil lamp for boiling a thermometer (to calculate altitudes), were all of the smallest size procurable. Detection, as both the moonshee and his spy-masters knew only too well, would mean almost certain death at the hands of what Montgomerie called ‘the Khirgiz hordes who infest that road’. By ‘that road’ he meant the grim, skeleton-strewn trail from Ladakh, across the Karakoram to Yarkand in Chi
nese Turkestan.

  Mohamed-i-Hameed left Kashmir for Ladakh, the last outpost of British influence, on June 12, 1863, proceeding thence by caravan across what Montgomerie described as ‘the most elevated country in the world’ to Yarkand, which he reached some three and a half months later. He lived there for six months, all the time making secret observations with his instruments for Montgomerie and noting down everything he saw and heard. Then, towards the end of March 1864, he was warned by a Moslem friend that Chinese officials had become suspicious of his activities and were making enquiries about him. Sending his incriminating equipment on ahead of him, the moonshee then slipped away from Yarkand without detection and headed back through the Karakoram passes to Ladakh.

  Perhaps as a result of hardships suffered on this journey, the moonshee fell ill, together with a travelling companion. Both men died, almost within sight of home. It was thought at first that they had been murdered, possibly by Chinese agents, but investigations by one of Montgomerie’s colleagues, Civil-Assistant William Johnson, who happened to be surveying in this region at the time, finally ruled this suspicion out. Although some of the moonshee’s more saleable possessions were found to have disappeared, the precious notes he had kept so carefully and conscientiously throughout his secret mission were recovered by Johnson and passed to Montgomerie.