Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Hedin was fascinated by these legends, and was convinced that behind them must lie some grain of truth. He determined, in the course of his more serious task of mapping and exploring this terra incognita, to find one such city. To him the call of this ocean of sand was irresistible. ‘Over there, on the verge of the horizon, were the noble, rounded forms of sand-dunes which I never grew tired of watching,’ he wrote. ‘Beyond them, amid the grave-like silence, stretched the unknown … the land that I was going to be the first to tread.’

  Hedin’s first venture into the Taklamakan was very nearly his last. He left Kashgar on February 17, 1895, his thirtieth birthday, and proceeded to Merket on the Yarkand-daria, or River Yarkand. Here his caravan leader bought camels and provisions for a month’s travelling in the Taklamakan, and Hedin hired three other men, one of whom claimed to know the region well. They set off on April 10 with eight camels, two guard dogs and a mobile ‘larder’ of three sheep, ten hens and a cock. Their journey, Hedin wrote afterwards, ‘proved to be one of the most difficult I ever undertook in Asia’. His objective was to cross the Taklamakan, mapping its south-western corner between the Yarkand and Khotan rivers, and then push on to Tibet. As the small party left Merket and headed into the desert the villagers shook their heads and prophesied that they would never return.

  Fifteen days later there came a grim warning of trouble. Hedin discovered to his horror that they had only enough drinking water left for another two days. At the last well his men had been told to fill the tanks which the camels were carrying with enough water for ten days, to allow an ample supply until they reached the Khotan-daria. Hedin cursed himself for not personally supervising this. The guide swore they would reach the river in two days, but Hedin was far from convinced. Afterwards, with hindsight, he admitted that he should have turned back. Had he stopped to weigh the risks, he wrote, ‘the caravan would have been saved and no life would have been lost’. Instead, after drastically reducing the party’s water ration, with none at all for the camels, he decided to press on.

  That night they dug in vain for water, working frenziedly for several hours by candle-light but finding nothing. Next day Hedin decided to abandon two ailing camels and all superfluous baggage. Rain clouds gathered briefly, greatly raising their hopes, but then dispersed. A sandstorm next struck the exhausted caravan, forcing them to steer by compass alone. Another camel had to be left behind to die. Then Hedin’s men discovered that Yolchi, the guide, had been stealing their precious water. There was now none left. But for Hedin’s intervention the others would have killed him for his treachery. Hedin now made what he feared would be the last entry in his travel diary. He wrote: ‘All, men as well as camels, are extremely weak. God help us!’ Five full days had now passed since their discovery that they only had enough water left for two.

  On May 1, after being without water for an entire day, in desperation Hedin tried quenching his thirst with the spirit brought for the primus stove. Soon he found himself unable to move. His only hope was for the rest of the party to reach the river and then come back for him, so they pressed grimly on without him. After a while, however, his strength returned and he crawled on, following their trail across the sand and catching them up where they had been forced to halt. No one now had the strength to move. That moment, Hedin wrote afterwards, ‘was the unhappiest I lived through in all my wanderings in Asia’.

  By now one of his four men was unconscious. The others killed the rooster they still had with them and drank its blood. Next came the turn of the sheep, but Hedin found himself unable to swallow its coagulating blood. Two of his men tried drinking camel’s urine, only to be violently sick.

  Tormented by the thought of the grief his disappearance would cause to his family, Hedin made one last resolution to keep going. Discarding even his small medicine chest, but keeping his pocket Bible, he set off at sunset with two men and the five surviving camels in a desperate attempt to reach the river. Behind them they left their two dying companions, including Yolchi the water thief. His last words to Hedin were: ‘Water, sir! Only a drop of water!’ But there was none. During the night another camel died. Then one of Hedin’s two companions – Islam Bai, the caravan leader – announced he could go no further. Again there was no choice, and he was left behind, this time with the remaining camels and equipment. Hedin and Kasim – the last of his men – crawled on at night, digging themselves into the sand during the day.

  On May 4, their fifth day without water, they were amazed to see footprints. At last, they believed, they must be near the Khotan-daria, and life-giving water. But almost immediately they realised that these were simply their own tracks. They had been travelling in a circle. The next morning, Hedin recalled, ‘Kasim looked terrible. His tongue was white and swollen, his lips blue, his cheeks were hollow, and his eyes had a dying, glassy lustre.’ But then, as the sun rose, they saw with incredulity a dark green line on the horizon.

  ‘The forest!’ yelled Hedin. ‘The Khotan-daria! Water!’ By 5.30 a.m. they had reached the shade of the trees, but three hours later had still not come upon the river. Both men collapsed once again from exhaustion and dehydration. By the evening Hedin had recovered a little and was able to crawl on alone through the trees. But when he finally reached the river he found it completely dry. A terrible desire to sleep came over him, but he knew that he would die if he were to lose consciousness, so he forced himself to crawl for another mile along the river bed.

  Suddenly, ahead of him, there was a splash as a water-bird rose. ‘The next moment,’ Hedin writes in Through Asia, ‘I stood on the brink of a little pool filled with fresh, cool water – beautiful water!’ He thanked God for his miraculous deliverance, then began to drink feverishly, scooping up the water in a tin. ‘I drank, drank, drank, time after time.… Every blood-vessel and tissue of my body sucked up the life-giving liquid like a sponge.’ His pulse, which had dropped to only forty-nine, began to beat normally again. ‘My hands, which had been dry, parched, and as hard as wood, swelled out again. My skin, which had been like parchment, turned moist and elastic.…’

  His thoughts then flew to the dying Kasim, lying somewhere back by the dry river bed. Filling his leather boots with water, Hedin staggered back in the moonlight to look for him, occasionally calling out his name. At dawn he came upon him, lying just as he had left him. Kasim whispered: ‘I’m dying.’ Hedin held one of the boots filled with water to his lips. Kasim gulped it down, followed by the contents of the other. Later, after being helped by passing shepherds, they discovered with joy that Islam Bai too had survived and had also been found by shepherds. He threw himself at Hedin’s feet, weeping. ‘He had thought we would never meet again,’ wrote Hedin. One of the camels – the one carrying Hedin’s diaries, maps, money and two rifles – had also survived. Everything else, including the surveying instruments, had been lost. Of the two other men nothing more was ever heard, and eventually their widows were compensated by Hedin. There was now no choice but for the three survivors to return to Kashgar, which they finally reached on June 21. Hedin had failed to find his lost city. He had, moreover, learned a bitter lesson. But it had in no way lessened his determination to unravel the secrets of the Taklamakan. He immediately sent a messenger to the nearest telegraph station on the Russian border to signal for a new set of surveying instruments to be dispatched to him as soon as possible.

  More determined than ever to be the first European to explore one of the lost cities of the Taklamakan, Hedin set out from Kashgar again on December 14, 1895. He took with him the faithful Islam Bai (the other survivor, Kasim, had meanwhile become a watchman at the Russian consulate) and three new men. Skirting the western edge of the desert via the old Silk Road, they covered the three hundred miles to Khotan in twenty-one days. Here, Hedin knew, small antiquities could be obtained from local treasure-hunters. He had learned this from Petrovsky, who used to buy them from merchants arriving in Kashgar from Khotan. Every summer when the snows melted in the mountains, causing flooding in t
he area, artefacts were washed out of the loess (the red soil of the region) and picked up by the natives.

  ‘To the inhabitants these things, unless they are made of gold or silver, are valueless, and they give them to their children to play with,’ Hedin wrote. He was taken to the spot from where they were obtained, an ancient village called Borasan, to the west of Khotan. Being January, however, ‘the season’s harvest of antiquities had been already gathered in …’ Hedin explained, ‘for they never fail to make their annual search for gold and other treasures’. Nonetheless, he managed to turn up a few small objects himself, and to acquire from local treasure-seekers some five hundred assorted antiquities as well as manuscripts and coins. Although not an archaeologist, these modest discoveries were to give him a lifelong interest in such relics and to form the basis of the large collection of Central Asian antiquities now belonging to the Sven Hedin Foundation in Stockholm. The treasures he brought back from Borasan (later identified as Yotkan, the region’s ancient capital) included terracotta images of Buddha, figurines of men, women and camels, and also a number of relics pointing to the presence of early settlers or visitors from the West, most notably a copper cross. Here indeed were the remains of a lost city, albeit only on the fringe of the desert and now obliterated by centuries of flooding and looting.

  Hedin had heard, however, that in the heart of the desert to the north-east lay another mysterious city, almost totally buried in the sand, which the oasis-dwellers called simply ‘Taklamakan’. Accompanied by local guides who said they knew the way, he set out in the direction of the Keriya river. After travelling for ten days in sub-zero temperatures – for it was now mid-winter – they came at last upon the fabled ruins. At first all they could see was the occasional wooden post or section of wall protruding from the sand dunes. Then to his excitement, on one of the walls Hedin spotted several stucco figures clearly depicting Buddha and Buddhist deities. He realised at once that, in this desolate spot, he had stumbled on the remains of the long-lost Buddhist civilisation so vividly described by Fa-hsien and other early Chinese travellers on the Silk Road. Not only did this vindicate them, but also the modern oasis-dwellers with their tales of lost cities far out in the Taklamakan.

  As he scanned the bleak ruins around him – ‘this second Sodom’ he calls it in Through Asia – he realised the enormous importance of what he had found, even if he did not yet know its identity. However, he was only too aware that he had neither the knowledge, the time nor the equipment to conduct a proper scientific excavation, although he stayed there long enough to explore several of the sand-filled buildings. In My Life as an Explorer, written many years afterwards, Hedin explains: ‘The scientific research I willingly left to the specialists. In a few years they too would be sinking their spades into the loose sand. For me it was sufficient to have made the important discovery and to have won in the heart of the desert a new field for archaeology.’

  His own digging revealed not only ancient houses but traces of gardens and avenues of poplars. He also found the remains of plum and apricot trees. In some of the houses his men unearthed strange gypsum figures, eight inches high, and flat at the back indicating that they had served as wall decorations. They also found a life-size human foot, again in gypsum. In one building, which his men said was a temple, they came upon a number of wall-paintings representing female figures ‘somewhat airily clad’ and executed in ‘masterly manner’. Hedin noted: ‘Their hair was twisted in a black knot on the top of the head, and the eyebrows were traced in a continuous line, with a mark above the root of the nose, after the custom among the Hindus of the present day.’

  Considering he was neither art historian nor archaeologist, Hedin’s observations on the iconography of his finds were surprisingly perceptive. He noted, for example, Indian, Greek, Persian and Gandharan influences. Serindian art – a term invented later by Sir Aurel Stein – was at that time still unknown. After removing what he could carry and remarking on the difficulty of digging in the dry sand (‘as fast as you – dig it out, it runs in again and fills up the hole’) Hedin pushed on eastwards towards the Keriya river which he proposed to map and follow northwards into the desert.

  On reaching the river he learned of another sand-buried city nearby called by the natives Karadong, or ‘black hill’. This proved to be smaller than the first. Hedin noted that the architecture was similar, as were the ancient materials used. He also found wall-paintings executed in a similar style to those in the other city. After spending two days there, Hedin continued northwards along the Keriya river to the point where its waters finally vanished beneath the sand. From there he and his men completed a perilous northwards crossing of the Taklamakan before eventually returning to Khotan, having also made numerous important geographical and zoological discoveries. From Khotan, where he spent a month working on his maps and notes, Hedin embarked on another major journey, this time to explore parts of Tibet, the mysterious land he had failed to reach on his ill-fated expedition the previous year. From Tibet he finally returned to Sweden via Peking and the Trans-Siberian railway, to discover that he was already famous.

  It was on his next expedition into the Taklamakan in September 1899 that the indefatigable Swede scored his greatest archaeological triumph, the discovery of the ancient Chinese garrison town of Lou-lan. His subsequent removal of scores of important manuscripts from its ruins, some dating from the third century, is something Chinese scholars find hard to forgive. Had it not been for a lost spade, moreover, he might never have stumbled upon it, and the site – so important to Chinese historians – might have been left intact for their own archaeologists to discover and excavate.

  Financed this time by King Oscar of Sweden and the millionaire Emmanuel Nobel, Hedin left Europe once again for Kashgar where he had a happy reunion with his old friends Petrovsky, Macartney and Father Hendricks. On September 5, together with Islam Bai – now proudly wearing the gold medal of the King of Sweden – he set out for the village of Lailik on the Yarkand river. This was to be the starting point of a remarkable venture – an expedition through the Taklamakan by boat. Hedin’s aim was to survey and map first the Yarkand river and then its continuation, the Tarim. His ultimate destination was Lop-nor, the salt lake in the heart of the desert into which the Tarim emptied, and which appeared to have shifted dramatically over the years. Hedin, primarily a geographer, was determined to solve this riddle (it would take him thirty-five years to do so conclusively).

  First he bought a locally made boat, on which he and his men were to live for the next eighty days. Then they built a smaller craft for exploring narrow or shallow parts of the river and also to serve as the expedition’s larder with its cargo of live chickens and vegetables. Finally, after signing up a crew of five, the expedition set sail.

  Apart from the hazards posed by burans, rapids, shallows and the occasional fallen tree blocking the river, Hedin found it an idyllic way of travelling through the grim landscape. At times, where the river flowed swiftly, the current carried the two boats downstream at breakneck speed, the crew staving them off with long poles when they got too close to the banks. At other times they had to hoist a sail to move at all. Sometimes, by way of relaxation, Hedin would switch on his musical box and the strains of Carmen or the Swedish national anthem echoed out over the desert. Nothing like this had ever been seen – or heard – in the Taklamakan before, and they received astonished looks from the occasional shepherd or passing caravan.

  During the day Hedin worked non-stop on his survey, for there could be no gaps in the chart which would eventually fill one hundred sheets. At night the vessels were tethered to the bank. As winter deepened, Hedin’s one fear was that the river would freeze over, forcing him to abandon his task until spring. Finally, on December 7, it happened, nearly three months after their departure from Lailik and some one hundred and forty miles short of their destination. There was no way of going on, and Hedin decided to occupy himself, until the river unfroze, by undertaking a number of explorator
y overland journeys in the area. He had no tent, although nocturnal temperatures sometimes fell to minus twenty-two degrees and it snowed incessantly. Their drinking water was carried in the form of blocks of ice and at times it was so cold that the ink froze solid in Hedin’s fountain pen, forcing him to abandon it for a pencil.

  After a twenty-day desert crossing they reached the southern Silk Road oasis of Cherchen, then turned north-east and headed towards the Lop desert at the extreme eastern end of the Taklamakan. After travelling for a further twenty-two days they came suddenly on a curious sight – several very ancient wooden houses, each perched on a hillock eight or nine feet high, in the middle of nowhere. These had apparently been stranded there, high and dry, as centuries of erosion had eaten away at the loess around them. A hasty search revealed several ancient Chinese coins, a few iron axes and some wooden carvings depicting men. These were loaded onto two camels and sent back with one of the men to the expedition’s base camp on the Tarim. That might well have been the end of it, had it not been for one man’s forgetfulness. For Hedin was anxious not to linger, intending to complete the final stage of the Tarim survey and then strike southwards into Tibet again, this time with the aim of reaching Lhasa. Moreover, the hot season was not far off and their water was beginning to run low.

  After travelling for some hours they decided to dig for water in a promising looking spot. It was then found that their only spade was missing. One of the men confessed to having left it by mistake beside the ancient houses, and Hedin sent him back on his own horse to find it. When the man returned with the spade he said he had lost his way in a sandstorm but had stumbled on some ruins they had missed before. Sticking out of the sand, he said, were some beautiful wooden carvings. Hedin immediately sent him back again, this time with other men, to collect these. When he saw the carvings Hedin felt ‘dizzy’ with excitement. He wrote: ‘I wanted to go back. But what folly! We had water for only two days.’ He resolved instead to return the following winter and excavate the site more thoroughly.