Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  When the river survey was completed the party struck south once more across the desert, making their way through the grim mountain passes into Tibet and again briefly out of this narrative. After losing one of his men, ten horses and three camels (another man lost both his feet through frostbite), Hedin decided to leave Tibet and return to the mysterious ruins in the Lop desert. On arrival, he drew a careful plan of the site and then began to excavate, offering a reward to the first of his men to find ‘human writing in any form’. Before long one of them came forward with a piece of wood bearing an Indian inscription. Excavation of each house continued, and soon one of the men found a piece of paper with Chinese characters on it. After this more and more scraps of ancient paper bearing Chinese writing were discovered – thirty-six in all. In addition, one hundred and twenty wooden documents were found, together with a fragment of an ancient rug, its colours still quite bright, and bearing a swastika design. These manuscripts, one of which identified the site as that of Lou-lan, were to provide scholars with an amazingly intimate and rounded picture of life in this Chinese garrison town. Originally founded to safeguard China’s western frontier and the vital traffic along the Silk Road, it had finally fallen to the barbarians at the beginning of the fourth century. Once a large and flourishing community, with civil service, post office, hospital and schools, it had already lain beneath the sands of Marco Polo’s ghoul-infested Desert of Lop for close on a thousand years when he passed that way in 1224.

  From the mass of wooden slips and scraps of (the then newly invented) paper unearthed by Hedin, the minutiae of its citizens’ day-to-day lives have been pieced together to reveal a people very like ourselves. The discoveries include everything from records of punishments meted out to tax-evaders to the scribblings of children faced by such familiar problems as to what nine-times-nine makes. One of the houses they emptied of sand was found with its door wide open – ‘just as it must have been left by the last inhabitant of this ancient city more than 1,500 years ago’, Hedin observed. Together with his earlier discovery of mysterious ‘Taklamakan’, the finding of Lou-lan made a remarkable double for the indefatigable Swede. In all, he spent seven days excavating there before heading south once more in another attempt to reach Lhasa, this time disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim.

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the Taklamakan another European traveller, Marc Aurel Stein, had already started on the first of three great archaeological raids on the Silk Road. A man every bit as determined as Hedin, his expeditions – spread over sixteen years – were to result in the removal of enough works of art and manuscripts from Chinese Central Asia to fill a museum. They were also to earn him the bitter opprobrium of the Chinese who, to this day, regard him as foremost among those foreigners who robbed them of the bones of their history.

  5. Aurel Stein – Treasure-Seeker Extraordinary

  * * *

  Sir Aurel Stein’s expeditions, which were to carry him some twenty-five thousand miles through Chinese Turkestan, have been described by another famous excavator, Sir Leonard Woolley, as ‘the most daring and adventurous raid upon the ancient world that any archaeologist has attempted’. Professor Owen Lattimore, himself an eminent Central Asian traveller and historian, has called Stein ‘the most prodigious combination of scholar, explorer, archaeologist and geographer of his generation’.

  Such appraisals by fellow professionals can be substantiated by the facts, but superlatives must be used carefully. One writer, for instance, has described Stein as ‘the greatest explorer of Asia since Marco Polo’. This is to detract from the achievements of Sven Hedin, only some of whose travels – those concerned with archaeology – were chronicled in the previous chapter. Indeed, taking into account his Tibetan expeditions, Hedin was arguably the greater explorer, geographically speaking. Besides considerable mutual respect, mixed with a disdain for those who operated only on the fringes of the Taklamakan, the two men had much in common. Like Hedin, Stein was knighted by the British Government for his contribution to Central Asian studies, received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, and won the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society, to name just a few of a lifetime’s honours. Both men were small and compact (Stein was a mere five feet four inches in height), both were bachelors, both wrote voluminously of their travels, and both lived into their eighties. They were born, moreover, within three years of one another, Stein being the elder.

  There was, however, one fundamental difference between them. Stein was a brilliant orientalist who turned to exploration to confirm certain theories he had about what lay buried in China’s back of beyond. He was, in his own words, ‘an archaeological explorer’. Hedin, a highly trained geographer and cartographer, was an explorer pure and simple and in that respect had more in common with the great Russian Asiatic traveller Prejevalsky. Nonetheless, as an explorer of history, Stein’s discoveries put him head and shoulders above his rivals. He is, indeed, the giant of Central Asian archaeology.

  Born of Jewish parents in Budapest in 1862, he was baptised a Christian because they believed that, in the climate of those times, he would fare better. To quote Jeannette Mirsky, his biographer: ‘Baptism, as the elder Steins saw it, was the key that unlocked the ghetto and proffered … access to the riches of the world outside.’ Nor was he to disappoint them, although they did not live to see his unique contribution to those riches. His adopted faith was to remain with him all his life. When in 1943 he was dying in Afghanistan (from where, at the age of eighty-one, he was planning one last great Central Asian journey) he asked on his death-bed for a Church of England burial service.

  From his schooldays to his grave Stein was fascinated by the campaigns and travels of Alexander the Great. He was to spend much of his life trying to retrace the routes and pinpoint the battlefields which carried the Greeks, together with their art and learning, into Central Asia. Their art he was to pursue further, across the passes of the Karakoram and eastwards along the ancient Silk Road. Perhaps too, like the Hungarian orientalists Csoma de Koros and Arminius Vambery before him, he was attracted subconsciously to Central Asia by the ancient belief that the Hungarians are descended from the Huns. Certainly he was influenced and inspired by these two great travellers.

  After studying oriental languages at the universities of Vienna and Leipzig, and receiving his Ph.D. from Tübingen at the age of twenty-one, he came to Britain, which was eventually to become his adopted country. He spent three years at Oxford and at the British Museum studying classical and oriental archaeology and languages, but omitted Chinese – a gap in his linguistic armoury which was to cost him dear some twenty years later at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas near Tun-huang. His studies in Britain were interrupted, most fortuitously as it happened, by a year’s conscript service in the Hungarian army where he was trained in field surveying, a skill which would prove invaluable in the unmapped regions of Central Asia where he was to make his name.

  When his parents died (his mother was already forty-five when he was born) he turned his back on Hungary for good, moving to India where in 1888 at the age of twenty-six he joined the education service at Lahore. There he became a friend of Rudyard Kipling’s father who was curator of the ‘wonder house’, the museum of Gandhara and other Indian art immortalised in the novel Kim. From him Stein learned much about the iconography of India as well as all that was known at that time of the art of Buddhist Central Asia. From Lahore he made the first of his many forays into areas where no European had set foot before – a rapid archaeological survey of mysterious Buner while accompanying a punitive expedition to the north-west frontier region of India.

  Despite the solitary life he was to lead, sometimes not seeing another European for a year or more at a time, Stein enjoyed warm friendships. These, of necessity, had to be maintained over enormous distances by correspondence usually written at night in his tent by candlelight and conveyed across desert and mountain range by native mail carrier. Nonetheless his work always came first, whether he was wri
ting up his field notes at the end of a long day’s work in the desert, or later preparing the monumental accounts of his expeditions at his isolated tented home in Kashmir.

  However, it was not until May 1900, at the age of thirty-seven, that he set out on the first of his great expeditions across the Karakoram mountains into the Taklamakan desert. On this initial journey, which was to last almost a year, Stein was officially stateless, for although he had surrendered his Hungarian nationality he had not yet obtained his British passport. (His new citizenship finally came through in 1904.) He would have liked to have set out earlier, having heard rumours that Russian and German expeditions were being planned and that Hedin was about to return to the region, but he first had to obtain permission from the Indian Government to cross into this politically sensitive area. The Chinese, moreover, had to be persuaded to agree to the expedition. Finally he had to obtain leave of absence from his job and raise the money to finance the venture.

  In a carefully argued application to the Government of India he presented his case. ‘It is well known from historical records,’ he wrote, ‘that the territory of the present Khotan has been an ancient centre of Buddhist culture … distinctly Indian in origin and character.’ He listed some of the manuscripts and other antiquities that had emerged from the Taklamakan desert, pointing out that if ‘the casual search of native treasure-seekers’ had yielded these, then systematic exploration of the Silk Road sites by a European archaeologist might be expected to produce finds of the greatest importance.

  Stein’s expedition had the enthusiastic support of Dr Rudolf Hoernle, a powerful ally in Calcutta’s corridors of power. In a letter supporting the venture he argued strongly that the southern part of Chinese Turkestan belonged by rights to the British sphere of influence, adding that ‘we should not allow others to secure the credit which ought to belong to ourselves’. Had he foreseen one result that the journey would yield he might have felt less jingoistic.

  In addition to Hoernle’s backing, Stein had the unexpected good fortune of gaining as an ally the most powerful man in India, the new Viceroy. In April 1899, when Lord Curzon was visiting the Punjab, Stein was asked to conduct him around the Lahore Museum. In the course of their tour Stein explained to him the significance of Gandhara art, simultaneously seizing the opportunity to tell him of his plan to solve the mysteries of what lay beyond the Karakoram. Curzon, still only forty, had himself written a book on Central Asia, albeit on Russian ambitions there, and was keenly interested in what Stein had to say. He instructed the British Minister in Peking to seek from the Chinese authorities a passport allowing Stein to enter Chinese Turkestan via the Karakoram route. In due course this arrived, together with authorisation from the Indian Government for the expedition to proceed. The Chinese document ordered the local ambans, or chief magistrates, to protect Stein and, perhaps more important, in no way to hinder him.

  Meanwhile, Stein had been making careful preparations for his journey. He had obtained much valuable knowledge about the peculiar problems facing travellers in the Taklamakan from Through Asia, Sven Hedin’s two-volume account of his discoveries there, which had just been published. He had learned from Hedin’s near fatal encounter with the Taklamakan that the only possible time to explore and excavate the sites far out in the desert would be during the winter months. It would thus be arctic conditions and not the appalling heat of summer that he would have to prepare himself for. First he purchased a Stormont-Murphy arctic explorer’s stove with which to heat his tiny tent. The latter, furthermore, he had fitted with an additional lining of thick serge. (Despite this, the ink was at times to freeze in his pen, as Hedin’s had.) He also took thick furs for travelling and sleeping in. But water was his biggest problem in a desert where it rained on average only once in ten years. He ordered some specially made galvanised iron water tanks, each designed to take seventeen gallons, the maximum a Bactrian camel could carry in the desert. This would be supplemented with blocks of ice once the temperatures fell below zero.

  Stein next travelled up to Srinagar, in Kashmir, where he set up camp on Mohand Marg, a grassy meadow ten thousand feet above sea level, which was to be his home on and off for many years, and the launching point of all his expeditions. He was joined there by the four men who were to accompany him. They were Ram Singh, a Gurkha surveyor seconded by the Survey of India to help him with the important mapping programme; Mirza Alim and Sadak Akhun, Stein’s servant and cook; and Jasvant Singh who was to perform similar duties for Ram Singh. The final member of the expedition was a small terrier called Dash, the first of a succession bearing that name which he took with him on his four Central Asian journeys.

  A month later, on May 31, 1900, the party left Srinagar at the start of a rugged but uneventful eight-week trek across the Karakoram to Kashgar. There Stein spent the remainder of the summer at Chini-Bagh, the comfortable official residence of George Macartney and his wife. Macartney was a man of unusual background, being the son of a Scottish father, Sir Halliday Macartney, and a Chinese mother (of whom he never spoke, even to his own children, and to whom there was no reference in his obituary in The Times when he died in 1945). He was to serve for twenty-eight years as Britain’s representative in this remote Central Asian listening post, claimed by geographers to be further from the sea than any town on earth. He and Stein, who shared many common interests, struck up a close friendship and Stein was to stay with the Macartneys on further expeditions. Their hospitality was legendary. ‘Every traveller in Central Asia knows (and blesses) the British Consulate-General at Kashgar, for it is a haven of comfort and a centre of hospitality to the European who elects to try his luck in Chinese Turkestan.’ So wrote Colonel Reginald Schomberg in 1933 of the tradition established by the Macartneys at Chini-Bagh and continued by their successors until that small corner of Britain in remotest Asia was finally handed back to the Chinese Government in the late 1940s.

  Despite the Chinese passport obtained for him by Lord Curzon, Stein’s presence in this politically sensitive area where three empires met was not made any easier by the activities of Petrovsky, the Russian consul-general and Macartney’s arch rival (for antiquities as well as political intelligence). Petrovsky did his best to persuade the local Chinese authorities, who were in considerable awe of him, that Stein was really a British spy travelling in the guise of an archaeologist. Despite this, once the heat of the Taklamakan summer began to wane Stein and his party left Kashgar for Khotan, the first of the old Silk Road oases he intended to investigate. For Khotan was the town from where Islam Akhun, chief supplier of ‘old books’ to the British Collection (and simultaneously, as it turned out, to St Petersburg), claimed to have made his forays into the surrounding desert. Despite the conviction of his friend Hoernle that these were genuine, Stein had serious doubts. One of his main purposes in visiting Chinese Turkestan was to check the treasure-hunter’s story by sending out local scouts to try to find further examples of Akhun’s unknown scripts and also by examining personally some of the sites described by Akhun to Macartney and subsequently incorporated in Hoernle’s report.

  He also aimed to visit ‘Taklamakan’ that mysterious city of Hedin’s north-east of Khotan, and conduct more thorough excavations there. He hoped, moreover, that by making enquiries in the oasis towns, he would discover new sites for himself. In addition, he and Ram Singh, with plane-table and theodolite, hoped to fill in many of the blank spaces on the map. Finally, by following in the footsteps of the seventh-century pilgrim Hsuan-tsang (spelled Hiuen-Tsiang by Stein), who returned home from India along the southern arm of the Silk Road, he hoped to identify some of the sacred Buddhist sites described by the traveller, who had been another of his heroes since undergraduate days.

  Shortly after setting out from Kashgar, Stein gained his first brief taste of the Taklamakan. After villagers had reported to him the existence of a kone-shahr, or ruined town, in the desert to the east he turned hopefully off the main caravan trail, sending the rest of the party ahead. But
failing to find the site, whose location his informants had been extremely vague about, Stein abandoned the search and set off in pursuit of the others.

  In Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, his account of this expedition, he describes this first brief encounter with the great Chinese desert with which he was to become so familiar over the next thirty years. ‘Far away to the south stretched a sea of sand curiously resembling the ocean with its wave-like dunes.… The sand-dunes to be crossed steadily increased in height, and the going became more difficult.… The ponies’ feet sank deeply into the loose sand, and each ascent of thirty to forty feet was thus a tiring performance.’ After five miles of struggling across the dunes they met up with the main party at a well which someone had protected from the advancing sandhills by erecting a crude wooden shed over it. The water, lying six feet below the desert surface, was so brackish, however, as to be undrinkable.

  On reaching Yarkand, where the caravan trails to India and Afghanistan once branched away from the main Silk Road, Stein discovered to his annoyance that two of his camels and two ponies had developed sores. Also money which should have been awaiting him there had failed to materialise. This meant sending a messenger all the way back to Kashgar to collect the money, a journey totalling some two hundred and forty miles. It also meant halting a week in Yarkand while the animals’ sores healed. Stein was particularly annoyed because he suspected that their condition had been carefully kept from him, with the result that their sores had become steadily worse. ‘The experience was not thrown away on me,’ he wrote drily. ‘Thereafter inspections of the animals were held almost daily, and those responsible for their loading learned to understand that the hire of transport in place of animals rendered temporarily unfit would be recovered from their own pay.’