Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Aware of Petrovsky’s successful antiquarian activities, pursued entirely through native dealers, Hoernle pressed the Government of India to give active support to the purchase of antiquities by its own representatives in Central Asia. As a result, the political agents in Srinagar, Gilgit, Chitral, Leh, Khorassan and Meshed – not forgetting Macartney in Kashgar – were alerted in August 1893 to look out for and acquire suitable items which were to be forwarded to Hoernle in Calcutta. Before long Hoernle was able to report : ‘In response to these instructions a large number of Central Asian antiquities have already been secured, forming a very respectable British Collection, to which additions are still being made.’ He could not restrain himself from adding: ‘To me personally it is a source of much satisfaction to have thus been the means of initiating the movement.’ It was a satisfaction which was to prove short-lived.

  But competition for the manuscripts and antiquities of Central Asia was not limited to the British and Russians. In 1890, the year that the Bower manuscript reached Hoernle, two Frenchmen – a cartographer named Dutreuil de Rhins, and an orientalist called Fernand Grenard – set out on a French Government mission to Chinese Turkestan and Tibet. It was destined to last three years, involve them in appalling hardship, and to end in tragedy for Dutreuil de Rhins. While mainly concerned with map-making and other scientific work, the two explorers managed also to acquire a collection of antiquities. These included the terracotta figures of a Bactrian camel and a man’s moustached head – and at least one important manuscript. This, written in ancient Indian characters on birch-bark, was only slightly later in date than the Bower manuscript, although Grenard claimed it to be much earlier. It was identified by scholars in Paris as part of the Dhammapada, a Buddhist sacred text.

  This manuscript, together with all their other finds, had nearly been lost when, in June 1893, the party was ambushed in Tibet by hostile tribesmen. In the ensuing gun battle Dutreuil de Rhins was mortally wounded in the stomach. While Grenard was trying to improvise a litter for his wounded leader, their attackers carried off the dying man and threw him into a river some seven miles away. They also plundered the expedition’s baggage, dividing the loot and throwing away all field notes, films, instruments and antiquities. Grenard, who later had to face accusations that the tragedy was the result of their antagonising the local inhabitants, managed to escape with his life and eventually recovered some of their possessions, including the manuscript. On being examined in Paris, this was found to be incomplete. Soon after, however, other fragments of the same manuscript turned up in St Petersburg. These had been obtained by Petrovsky, though exactly how and from whom is not clear.

  By the year 1899, the British Collection in Calcutta had reached sufficient size for Dr Hoernle to feel justified in issuing a report on its progress. The first part of the report entitled ‘A Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia’, was published as an extra number of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In it Hoernle listed with meticulous care, and in order of their acquisition, each consignment of manuscripts and other antiquities to reach him following the arrival of the Bower Manuscript nine years earlier.

  Some of the manuscripts and block-printed books in Hoernle’s possession were written in previously unknown languages but in known scripts. These were gradually deciphered by Hoernle and other philologists, and added to the canon of extinct languages. Others, however, were a puzzle to scholars as even the scripts in which they were written were unknown. Much time was spent by Hoernle and other orientalists in trying to analyse these, but without success.

  Meanwhile, from Kashgar, Leh, Srinagar and elsewhere Hoernle’s men were enthusiastically dispatching to him their latest purchases as the dealers and treasure-hunters kept them supplied. A typical entry from the list of acquisitions in the Hoernle report reads : ‘From Mr. G. Macartney, a collection of miscellaneous antiquities procured from Khotan and the Taklamakan consisting of (a) thirteen books, (b) pottery, (c) coins, (d) sundry objects. Seven books and the antiques were purchased by Mr. Macartney in Khotan for Rs. 95; the remaining six books were purchased by him from Badrudin [a native dealer]. The total cost was Rs. 150. The collection was received by me early in November 1897.’ He singles out Macartney in Kashgar for particular praise among his suppliers, explaining that due to his close proximity to the Silk Road sites he had proved ‘the most successful in his contributions to the collection’. Hoernle adds, with a pride understandable in a government employee, that the objects in the collection had been obtained for ‘often trifling amounts of money’.

  Most of the finds, Hoernle reported, came from sand-buried sites around Khotan. Fifteen such sites, he said, were believed to exist at various distances from Khotan, ranging from five to one hundred and fifty miles, although the existence of only two had been verified by European visitors. ‘For the remainder,’ Hoernle added, ‘we have only the information given by native treasure-seekers.’ Principal among these, he noted, was a certain Islam Akhun of Khotan. It was a name that Hoernle would have good cause to remember.

  Islam Akhun’s often highly coloured accounts of his forays into the Taklamakan in search of antiquities were faithfully taken down from him by Macartney and passed to Hoernle together with the finds. This enterprising native treasure-hunter had other customers as well, and numbers of his discoveries found their way between 1895 and 1898 into the great public collections in London, Paris and St Petersburg, where scholars scratched their heads over those in ‘unknown characters’.

  A typical account of one of Islam Akhun’s finds published by Hoernle relates how the treasure-seeker came upon an old house half buried in the sand. ‘As the door was not visible,’ Hoernle tells us, ‘a hole was made in one of the exposed sides. This done, Takhdash, one of Islam Akhun’s companions, crept in and found himself in a small room of about three yards square. This room was considerably filled with sand, so much so that it was impossible for a person to stand up in it without his head touching the ceiling. Takhdash found the books while digging in the sand. There were many other books, but these were in such a dilapidated condition that they crumbled to pieces on being handled.’ Perhaps in answer to a question from Macartney which he found too searching for comfort, Islam Akhun explained that he had been ‘too frightened to inspect the interior of the house himself’.

  To this Hoernle appended a warning which he would have done well to heed himself. ‘This account, of course, must be taken quantum valeat,’ he wrote, adding : ‘But there is nothing intrinsically improbable in the local descriptions, and the distances fairly agree with those given of the same places at other times.’ Hoernle explained away one discrepancy involving distances which he had spotted by observing that : ‘Natives of Turkestan, as Mr. Backlund [a Swedish missionary in Kashgar] informs me, are very untrustworthy in their estimates of distances.’

  Other sites which Akhun told Macartney he had found in the Taklamakan, and from which he had acquired manuscripts and block-printed books, included Quarā Qöl Mazār where he stumbled on ‘an immense graveyard in ruins, about 10 miles long’ which Hoernle helpfully suggested might well be Buddhist. Then there was Yābū Qūm, where he had found manuscripts among the bones in an old coffin, and whose name (it means ‘load-ponies sands’) Backlund speculated to Hoernle might mark the place where a caravan had once perished. A third site reported by Akhun was at a place he called Qarā Yāntāq where he said he had found a human skull using a bag containing a manuscript as a ‘pillow’.

  While pointing out that these sites might not be the real sources of Islam Akhun’s finds (Hoernle suspected that somewhere the treasure-hunters had stumbled on an ancient library they wished to keep secret), he was nonetheless ready to believe in their great age. Observing that the dry Taklamakan sand was a natural preservative, he added: ‘There is, therefore, nothing intrinsically improbable in the claim of the manuscripts and xylographs contained in the British Collection to be of very great antiquity.’

  Hoernle, it must be said in
fairness, did not duck the possibility of there being forgeries among the manuscripts and block-printed books in the British Collection. In fact, he recounted in his report an amazingly cautionary tale, but then doggedly rejected it. In a section of the report headed ‘The Question of Genuineness’, Hoernle observed: ‘Considering the abundance of the block-prints and the mystery of their scripts, it is not surprising that the suspicion of forgery should suggest itself. It suggested itself to me at an early stage of my acquaintance with the Khotanese books, and I am informed that it has also suggested itself to some of the British Museum authorities and others.’ He went on to quote a letter he had received from the Swedish missionary Backlund shortly before writing his report.

  Backlund related how after purchasing three old books from Islam Akhun, who said he had dug them up from beneath a hollow tree, one of his own servants had approached him. ‘Sahib,’ the native had begun, ‘I want to tell you that these books are not so old as they are pretended to be. As I know how they are prepared, I wish to inform you of it. When I lived in Khotan I wished very much to enter into the business, but was always shut out and could even get no information about the books. At last I consulted my mother about it and she advised me to try to find out from a boy with whom I was on very intimate terms, and who was the son of the headman of the business. So one day I asked him how they got these books, and he plainly told me that his father had the blocks prepared by a cotton printer.’

  As though anticipating Hoernle’s thought, Backlund added: ‘Now it is evident that the servant might have said all this from jealousy only, but I am determined to examine the books with more critical eyes than before.’ He then drew attention to several points which struck him as suspicious. He noticed, for example, that the books he had just bought from Akhun had a certain crispness or freshness and bore none of the signs of wear and tear normally associated with everyday use. He also noticed that the paper on which they were printed was ‘exactly of the same kind as prepared in Khotan in the present day’, and ‘though very ill-treated (burnt and smoky) is still strong, almost as if it were new’. He further pointed out that the corners of the books ‘are quite square (not round as they usually are in old books) and the edges recently cut, though in such a manner as to make them look old’.

  But Hoernle painstakingly refuted all Backlund’s points – to his own satisfaction at least – after weighing up the evidence on both sides. Reading his report today, it is hard to escape the conclusion that his wish to believe in the authenticity of these particular books and manuscripts had overriden his critical judgement. Again and again he comes down firmly on the wrong side of the fence. The worst that he seems willing to believe is that a supply of genuine old wood-blocks had been discovered by the treasure-hunters and that these were occasionally used to produce ‘reprints’ of old books.

  His verdict was quite categoric: ‘To sum up,’ he wrote, ‘the conclusion to which with the present information I have come to is that the scripts are genuine, and that most, if not all, of the block-prints in the Collection also are genuine antiquities; and that if any are forgeries they can only be duplicates of others which are genuine.…’

  Meanwhile, other important discoveries (about which there could be no such doubts) were beginning to come to light in the Gobi–Taklamakan region. Among the most significant were those of a Russian scholar, Dmitri Klementz. In 1898 he was sent by the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg with the specific aim of investigating some ancient and mysterious ruins which Russian travellers had reported seeing around the oasis of Turfan, on the edge of the Gobi. It was the first ever purely archaeological expedition to visit Chinese Central Asia. In addition to confirming the existence of the ruins, some of which he photographed, Klementz brought back manuscripts and also fragments of Buddhist wall-paintings. His discoveries, as we shall see, were within a few years to lead to a flurry of archaeological activity in this region and, inadvertently, to one of the great tragedies of art history.

  But, important as his finds were to prove, Klementz was not destined to be the first to uncover the long-lost secrets of the Silk Road. For, travelling eastwards across the Pamir, a new and remarkable figure had already entered the Central Asian arena, determined to discover the truth about the cities filled with treasure said to lie far out in the Taklamakan.

  4. Sven Hedin – the Pathfinder

  * * *

  This brilliant figure, who was to shoot like a meteorite across the Central Asian scene, was a young and virtually unknown Swede called Sven Hedin. Bookish, bespectacled (at times he was threatened with almost total blindness) and small in stature, he was nonetheless destined to become one of the world’s great explorers. His mild appearance concealed a man of extraordinary determination, physical strength and ambition, not to say occasional recklessness. A ruthless leader, he drove both himself and his men – a number to their death – without mercy. Yet he had a horror of killing animals, ‘of extinguishing a flame I could not light again’, as he put it. For his achievements during half a century of Central Asiatic travel he was festooned with honours by many governments, received by kings and dictators, and lionised by the great. In Britain he was awarded a knighthood, honorary doctorates by both Oxford and Cambridge, and two of the Royal Geographical Society’s coveted gold medals. His published works – some popular, others scholarly – ran to nearly fifty volumes and were translated into thirty languages. His personal friends included the Tsar, the Kaiser, the King of Sweden, Hindenburg, Kitchener and Lord Curzon. Schoolboys, as well as readers of The Times, thrilled to his adventures. Other travellers were awed by his feats of endurance, and geographers by his professional achievements. And yet, when he died at the age of eighty-seven in 1952, he was a forgotten man. The meteorite, after a long trail of glory, had disappeared virtually without trace. He died, moreover, reviled by many of those who once had honoured him.

  Few people today can probably recall what caused this abrupt reversal in Hedin’s fortunes. Briefly, he made the fatal mistake – at least in the eyes of many of his former friends – of twice becoming involved in power politics, each time moreover on the losing side. A man of passionate beliefs, Hedin was prepared to sacrifice universal esteem during World War I, and again in World War II, by taking an uncompromising pro-German stand, a puzzling decision in view of his part-Jewish ancestry. Entire books were written aimed at denigrating him. One, published in 1916, was a satire purportedly by ‘Hun Swedin’. Another, which appeared in Britain the next year, ended: ‘You have denied humanity, Sven Hedin, and in return you are denied today by the Swedish people. We do not know you. What do your discoveries mean to us? What does it interest us whether you have discovered both Tibet and China?’

  However, Hedin’s accomplishments as an explorer are beyond question. Judged merely by his maps he was brilliant, as today’s satellite surveys of Central Asia have shown. Sir Francis Younghusband, who met him at Kashgar in 1890 when he was still unknown, was much struck by him. ‘He impressed me as being of the true stamp for exploration – physically robust, genial, even tempered, cool and persevering … I envied him his linguistic ability [Hedin was fluent in seven languages], his knowledge of scientific subjects, and his artistic accomplishments. He seemed to possess every qualification of a scientific traveller, added to the quiet, self-reliant character of his northern ancestors.’ On this first visit to Kashgar, Hedin also made valuable friendships with Petrovsky and Macartney, and met Father Hendricks, a remarkable Dutch priest much beloved by all travellers in the region.

  The visit was merely a reconnaissance, and four years later, aged twenty-nine, he was back there again to begin a series of historic and often perilous journeys across Central Asia and Tibet which would span some forty years. This time he reached Kashgar by crossing the Pamir. He had ignored warnings of the dangers of attempting a winter crossing of the highest pass on earth, the Taghdumbash. The conditions had been appalling, with the mercury freezing in his thermometer and the temperature falling one nigh
t to minus thirty-seven degrees. Not only did he suffer from mountain sickness but due to the extreme cold, temporarily lost his sight, and had to be led blindfolded on the descent to Kashgar.

  Hedin, as Younghusband had pointed out, was highly qualified for his role as a scientific explorer. When only twenty-one, after youthful journeys through Persia and Russian Central Asia, he had returned to Sweden determined to acquire the skills he felt he needed for what he saw as his life’s work. He enrolled at the University of Stockholm where for two years he studied geology, physics and zoology. After graduating he enrolled at Berlin University, studying physical geography under the great Baron von Richthofen – himself a celebrated Asiatic explorer – as well as historical geography and palaeontology under other leading professors. He broke off his studies in 1890 to make his first journey to Kashgar, where he met Younghusband, returning for a further year’s tuition under von Richthofen.

  Then followed his nightmarish crossing of the Pamir and three expeditions across Chinese Central Asia. The first, in February 1895, was to prove to those who followed him – notably Sir Aurel Stein – that travel into the interior of the Taklamakan desert, and not merely around it, was possible, albeit extremely dangerous. His subsequent two Taklamakan expeditions, in December 1895 and September 1899, were to yield discoveries of enormous archaeological importance.

  Like all visitors to the region, Hedin had listened to endless tales of lost cities, strewn with ancient treasures, lying deep in the Taklamakan. Many men, it was said, had ventured in search of them, hoping to make their fortunes. The few who had returned to tell the story spoke fearfully of how the guarding spirits had foiled them in their attempts to remove the treasure. One man from Khotan, Hedin was told, was luckier. He had fallen into debt and went into the desert hoping to die. Instead he had stumbled on a hoard of gold and silver and was now a rich man.