The Chinese amban, or chief magistrate of Yarkand, received Stein warmly and they soon discovered that they had a shared interest in Hsuan-tsang. The amban threw a banquet for his new friend consisting of sixteen courses and lasting three hours. Not being used to ‘eating sticks’, Stein was provided with a rather grubby fork. In the course of the meal he was asked for news of the Boxer uprising which had broken out some two thousand miles away in Peking. He told the amban and the other guests that he knew nothing beyond the fact that the foreign legations were safe. It was clear to Stein that they did not believe him, but attributed his reticence to his wishing – in the oriental manner – to hold back unpleasant tidings. It was equally clear to him that it was apprehension ‘about their own individual fortunes, not those of the nation’ which secretly troubled them.
His camels and ponies now having recovered, Stein’s party continued eastwards along the Silk Road. Apart from the fertile and cultivated regions around the oases, with their snow- and glacier-fed water supplies from the mountains, most of the going now was across totally barren desert. On one stretch they found the route marked by wooden posts placed there to prevent travellers from straying away from the caravan trail at night or during a sandstorm as so many unfortunates had done over the centuries. To their left, in the dust haze, stretched the Taklamakan, while on the right, in the far distance, rose the mighty snow-capped ranges which form Tibet’s northern bastion. The heat and glare of the sun and the ankle-deep dust of the road were made less disagreeable for Stein, however, by his awareness of history and of those who had preceded him.
‘Walking and riding along the track marked here and there by the parched carcases and bleached bones of animals that had died on it, I thought of travellers in times gone by who must have marched through this same waterless, uninhabited waste’, he wrote. ‘Hiuen-Tsiang, who travelled here on his way back to China, has well described the route. After him it had seen Marco Polo and many a less-known medieval traveller to distant Cathay. Practically nothing has changed here in respect of the methods and means of travel.…’
After passing through tiny Siligh Langar (‘a collection of wretched mud-hovels’) and Hajib Langar (‘another uninviting wayside station’), they found themselves once again amidst the fertile gardens and fields of another river-fed oasis, this time Guma. Somewhere in the desert between Guma and Khotan, one hundred miles to the east, lay the mysterious sites where Islam Akhun claimed to have found many of his books and manuscripts. Here was Stein’s chance to discover the truth, to see who was right, himself or Hoernle. ‘It was at Guma’, he wrote afterwards, ‘that I first touched the ground where it was possible to test the treasure-seeker’s statements by direct local inquiries.’ It was to take him just one day.
He started by asking the elders and officials whether they knew of the discovery of any old books in the desert around Guma. Nobody had. Of the list of sites which Islam Akhun had included in his itinerary published by Hoernle, only two were known to them. As both lay close to Guma, Stein rode out to inspect them. ‘Riding to the north-east with a lively following of Begs [local officials] and their attendants, I soon reached the area of moving sand-dunes 20 to 30 feet high which encircle Guma from the north.’ Three miles further on he came upon Qarā Qöl Mazār (to use Hoernle’s spelling), where Islam Akhun claimed to have discovered an immense ruined graveyard some ten miles long. The name of this spot translates as ‘shrine of the black lake’. All that Stein could find was a small reed-covered saline pond and a sandhill from which protruded some poles hung with votive rags, indicating the supposed resting place of a saint. ‘Of the vast cemetery round the shrine where Islam Akhun alleged that he had made finds of ancient block-prints, I could discover no sign,’ Stein recorded. Three miles further on they came to the oasis of Karatagh-aghzi surrounding which, Islam Akhun claimed, were ruined sites from which he had removed old books and other curious finds. The inhabitants, when closely questioned, knew nothing of such sites and still less of such discoveries. This was no proof, of course, that the books were forgeries. It proved, however, that the Khotan-based treasure-hunter was a liar, though it was still possible that he had invented these sites to protect the real source of his finds. Hoernle himself had suggested that Akhun might have stumbled upon an, ancient library, whose whereabouts he wished to keep secret.
His enquiries momentarily over, Stein left Guma the following morning for Khotan, five days’ march to the east. Several times he turned away from the trail to investigate ruins which he heard of from various sources. All proved disappointing. Apart from fragments of pottery, all traces of these once flourishing settlements had been wiped out by the corrosive effects of winds and sandstorms over the centuries. One or two of the sites he examined were on Islam Akhun’s ‘itinerary’. But Stein decided that the physical conditions absolutely ruled out any possibility of manuscripts or books surviving there. He noted: ‘There was a weird fascination in the almost complete decay and utter desolation of the scanty remains that marked once thickly inhabited settlements.’
As Stein finally approached the oasis of Khotan, celebrated throughout Central Asia for its jade and rugs, he remembered a curious legend related by Hsuan-tsang. About thirty miles to the west of the town, the seventh-century traveller had noticed ‘a succession of small hills’ which the local people assured him had been formed by the burrowing of sacred rats. These creatures, led by a rat-king, were protected and fed by the locals because, it was said, they had saved the Buddhist inhabitants of Khotan from a great army of Huns by consuming their leather harness and armour. Of the rodents Stein saw no sign, though, interestingly, he found modern Moslem wayfarers piously feeding other sacred creatures – thou sands of pigeons maintained in a kind of bird monastery. ‘I too’, Stein confessed, ‘bought some bags of Indian corn from the store of the shrine and scattered their contents to the fluttering swarms.’
After crossing the dry river bed of the Kara-kash, or ‘Black Jade River’, some three-quarters of a mile in width, Stein and his caravan entered the town of Khotan. He had carefully avoided alerting the local treasure-hunters of his approach lest inadvertently he set the forgers to work on his behalf. However, on his arrival he at once arranged for small prospecting parties from the town’s ‘fraternity of quasi-professional treasure-seekers’ to act as scouts for him. To scour the area thoroughly, he was told, would take some time, so in the meantime he and Ram Singh set out on ponies with their surveying instruments with the aim of mapping unexplored regions of the Kun Lun and fixing, for the first time, the exact position of Khotan.
One night, from their camp on the mountainside, Stein looked down upon the moonlit Taklamakan, thousands of feet below. He described lyrically what he saw: ‘It seemed as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains. Could it really be that terrible desert where there was no life and no hope of human existence? I knew that I should never see it again in this alluring splendour. Its appearance haunted me as I sat shivering in my tent, busy with a long-delayed mail that was to carry to distant friends my Christmas greetings.’ After a modest meal and ‘a last look at the magic city below’ Stein turned in for the night.
His survey work in the Kun Lun (‘Mountains of Darkness’) finished, Stein descended from their inhospitable heights where, he declared, ‘the utter barrenness of Nature had given no chance for history to leave its traces’. Awaiting him in Khotan with their various finds were the prospectors who had been scouring the desert during his month’s absence. One man who had not approached him, Stein noted wryly, was Khotan’s most famous treasure-seeker, Islam Akhun. Indeed, he appeared to have left town rather hurriedly. However, one old book which had reportedly passed through his hands was offered to Stein. When this was subjected to the ‘water test’, the mere touch of his wet finger was sufficient to wipe away the ‘unknown characters’. To Stein’s highly trained eye, moreover, it looked suspiciously like certain of the books in Hoernle’s collection in Calcutta.
/>
The treasure-seeker whose discoveries most excited Stein was an old Taklamakan hand called Turdi, who had been digging up ruins in search of gold for thirty years, and his father before him. He produced several pieces of fresco bearing Indian Brahmi characters, fragments of stucco reliefs clearly Buddhist in origin, and an ancient piece of paper with cursive Brahmi of a Central Asian variety on it. Carefully questioned by Stein about the location of the site from where he had obtained his ‘samples’, Turdi indicated that it lay some nine or ten marches north-east of Khotan, far out in the Taklamakan.
Although the old treasure-seeker called it Dandan-uilik, or ‘place of houses with ivory’, from his description Stein believed that this must be Hedin’s ‘Taklamakan’. He knew, moreover, that in one brief day’s digging there Hedin had stumbled upon remarkable traces of the lost Buddhist civilisation that he himself had come to find. How much more might he, an archaeologist, bring to light in a serious and unhurried excavation? Mysterious Dandan-uilik, Stein decided, would be the target of his first sortie into this wasteland which had swallowed up an entire chapter of China’s imperial history. He immediately set about preparing for a winter in the Taklamakan.
6. Stein Strikes it Rich
* * *
Dandan-uilik, with its ‘ghostly wrecks of houses’, was reached after a journey of eleven days, the last six across the frozen Taklamakan. During the day the temperature never rose above zero, and at night sometimes fell to ten degrees below. Even in his heated tent, Stein found it impossible to work when the mercury dropped below six degrees. Sleeping, too, had its problems. ‘It was uncomfortable’, he wrote, ‘to wake up with one’s moustache hard frozen with the respiration that had passed over it.’ Ultimately he had to adopt the device of pulling his fur coat over his head and breathing through the sleeve.
At the village of Atbashi, the last oasis on the edge of the Taklamakan, he had recruited thirty labourers, each with his own ketman, or native hoe. The men, understandably enough, had been reluctant to venture into the desert, fearing, among other things, the jins, or demons. However, pressure from their headman, the attractive rates of pay, and reassurance about the desert from Turdi and two other veterans Stein took with him changed their minds. But before they set out Stein had everybody provided with the thickest winter clothing available locally.
As the caravan pressed further and further into the desert, the feet of both men and camels sank into the soft sand, making the going slow and exhausting and holding the progress of the heavily laden party down to a mere one and a half miles an hour. The day’s march, consequently, rarely exceeded ten miles. They finally reached Dandan-uilik, ‘amid its strange surroundings, pregnant with death and solitude’, a week before Christmas. At a glance Stein could see that treasure-seekers had already been there, for there was much visible damage. (Perhaps he counted Hedin among them, although tactfully he does not say so.) Turdi himself admitted to a number of visits, though he had yet to find what he was really hoping for – gold. But this did not deter Stein in the least. He knew that these small raiding parties did not have the resources to stay in such a god-forsaken area for more than a day or two at a time. They had dug freely into the visible structures, but left alone those which had been swallowed up by the dunes. Here Turdi’s familiarity with the site was to prove invaluable since he was able to point out to Stein the buildings which had not been looted.
Stein’s most immediate problem was to keep his men from freezing to death at night in the sub-zero temperatures, despite their thick clothing. He somewhere had to find a source of fuel for fires. Fortunately it lay close at hand – centuries-old timber from the orchards which had once blossomed in this city of the dead. Having pitched his camp, he dispatched the camels to the Keriya-daria, three days’ journey to the east, where they would find fodder and gain strength for the marches that lay ahead.
Excavations began next morning, for every minute was precious. It was the moment for which Stein had been waiting and planning for years. His theories, knowledge and skills would be tested here at Dandan-uilik, his first Taklamakan site. He started work on the remains of a small square building immediately to the south of his camp. It had long before been dug into by Turdi, who told him it was a but-khana, or ‘house of idols’. However, Stein was less concerned with finding antiquities in this first building than with familiarising himself with the lay-out and construction of such shrines.
Jeannette Mirsky, his biographer, explains: ‘Dandan-uilik was the classroom where Stein learned the grammar of the ancient sand-buried shrines and houses: their typical ground plans, construction, and ornamentation, their art, and something of their cultic practices. He also used it as a laboratory in which to find the techniques best suited to excavating ruins covered by sands as fluid as water, which, like water trickled in almost as fast as the diggers bailed it out. He had no precedents to guide him, no labour force already trained in the cautions, objectives and methods of archaeology.… He felt his way from what was easy to what was difficult, from what he knew he would find to discoveries he had not dared to anticipate. His approach was both cautious and experimental.’
Despite his caution, and the fact that the temple had already been plundered, the first day’s digging yielded a steady stream of ancient Buddhist frescoes and stucco reliefs. Each was carefully photographed in situ before removal and labelled with the details of where it had been found. In all, one hundred and fifty finds were thus prepared for their long and perilous journey to the British Museum. Next day Stein switched his operations to a small cluster of buildings buried under some eight feet of sand. Here, too, he found frescoes, though mostly too fragile to move. But so far, apart from one small scrap of paper, no manuscripts had come to light. Yet it was precisely these, with their revealing data, that Stein most wanted to find. He decided, therefore, like Hedin, to offer a cash reward, in silver, to the first man to uncover one. Within less than an hour there was an excited shout of ‘khat!’ – the Turki word for ‘writing’.
The find was an oblong-shaped leaf of ancient paper bearing words in a non-Indian language. It proved to be a single leaf from a pothi, a characteristic Indian manuscript form in which a number of leaves are placed together, perforated with a circular hole and tied together with string. From then on manuscripts turned up in quick succession, all Sanskrit texts of the Buddhist canon. Some of them appeared to date back to the fifth and sixth centuries. Stein quickly realised that the building they were clearing must harbour an entire library, probably that of a Buddhist monastery.
What was puzzling, though, was how these manuscripts came to lie in a room which other relics showed to have been a kitchen. Moreover, they were found embedded in loose sand several feet above the original floor. There was only one possible explanation. They must have fallen from an upper room – the library of a small monastery – into the kitchen below, all traces of the upper structure having long before been reduced to dust by wind and sand.
On Christmas Day 1900, he began work on a group of sand-filled buildings apparently a temple complex, lying half a mile to the north-east of his camp. Although these showed the usual signs of having been ravaged by treasure-seekers, intuition told him that careful excavation might still yield important discoveries, as indeed it did. He first came upon two paintings on wood. The larger of these, when the encrusted sand was carefully removed months later at the British Museum, was seen to depict a human figure, but with the head of a rat wearing a diadem and seated between two attendants. It was clearly meant to represent the king of the sacred rats which had saved Khotan.
The next finds to turn up were two scraps of paper bearing characters which Stein at once recognised as belonging to a ‘peculiar cursive form of Brahmi’ already familiar to him from Dr Hoernle’s collection. Soon other similar scraps emerged from the dry sand. With fingers numbed by the cold, Stein opened these crumpled documents. Cursory examination – later confirmed by Dr Hoernle – suggested an obvious connection between them and the
similar ones in the Calcutta collection. Stein thought it highly probable that the latter represented finds made by Turdi during his earlier visits to Dandan-uilik. Detailed examination of the faded and flimsy sheets subsequently showed them to be records of official and private transactions, including deeds of loan and requisition orders, dating from the eighth century.
Christmas Day still had some surprises in store, including the discovery of documents in Chinese. One of these, when translated later by Macartney, proved to be a petition for the recovery of a donkey. It had been hired out to two men who, after ten months, had still not returned it, and indeed had apparently disappeared themselves. But more important, it bore a precise date – the sixth day of the second month of the sixteenth year of the Ta-li period, which corresponds to the year 781 of the Christian calendar. The place referred to in the petition could be variously read as Li-sieh, Lieh-sieh or Li-tsa. This almost certainly was the original name of Dan-dan-uilik. Other like documents also bearing this name had already found their way to Calcutta. Very possibly these too had originally been dug up by Turdi, for he well remembered finding similar-looking ones in Chinese characters here some years previously which he had sold to a dealer in Khotan.
Stein’s last adventure that Christmas Day was one which, but for Turdi, might have ended in tragedy. Walking back to camp with his men as evening approached, Stein picked up a Chinese coin at the foot of a sand dune. Its date showed it to be some twelve hundred years old, and he lingered there looking for more while his men went on ahead. He later recounted what followed. ‘When after a while I set about to return in the twilight I mistook the track, and then after tramping through the low dunes for about a mile vainly attempted to locate my camp. There was no sound nor any other indication to guide me.’ Realising the danger he now faced of getting completely lost in the dark and freezing to death during the night he at once started to retrace his footsteps while he could still see them. Suddenly he recognised, protruding from the sand, the remains of some ancient walls which he had noticed some days before at a considerable distance to the south-east of his camp. ‘Trusting to my recollection of their relative position,’ he wrote, ‘I turned off to my right and, keeping along the crest-line of the dunes which I knew to be running mainly from north-west to south-east, made my way slowly onwards until I heard my shouts answered by some of my men.’ Turdi, growing uneasy at his absence, had sent the men out in couples in search of him. ‘The shelter of my tent and the hot tea that awaited me were doubly welcome after this little incident,’ wrote the relieved and grateful Stein with much understatement.
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Page 9