Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  At Endere Stein had reached the easternmost point of his first Silk Road journey. Delighted with all he had found and learned, he knew it was time to start the homeward journey. But he was in no hurry, and there were still several sites which he intended to visit en route. In Keriya he heard that wild rumours were already circulating among the oases about what he had found in the lost desert cities he had visited. His camels, it was said, were returning heavily laden with gold and other valuables. Luckily Stein was able to convince the local amban that his ‘treasures’ were of quite a different variety by showing him some of the Kharoshthi documents.

  His next target was the ruined town of Karadong. This lay far out in the Taklamakan at the ‘mouth’ of the Keriya-daria, and Stein had learned of it too from Hedin’s book Through Asia. They reached it after a particularly unpleasant journey, for the season of sandstorms had now begun with a vengeance. Even goggles, Stein found, offered little protection from the dust and sand which got into everything. Forced to shelter when he could no longer see the route, he sent his locally employed guides ahead to find the ruins. Soon one returned with a piece of old pottery, saying that the site lay some three miles to the west. But Karadong was a disappointment, and represents one of Stein’s rare failures. Although he and his men dug continuously for two days, they came upon nothing of consequence except for small quantities of ancient wheat, rice, oats and a kind of local porridge which Stein found useful for gluing envelopes. Most of the buildings had been totally obliterated by what he calls ‘the full force of erosion’, long before being swallowed up by the protective desert.

  In Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, his account of this first expedition along the Silk Road, Stein observes that to describe Karadong as an ancient city ‘would imply more imagination than an archaeologist need care to take credit for’. This appears to be a gentle dig at Hedin for sending him on a totally wasted journey, and an unpleasant one at that. Considering how much he owed Hedin (Dandan-uilik for a start), the remark seems somewhat uncharitable as well as uncharacteristic of Stein. His ill-humour was soon to evaporate, however, for his next site, the spectacular Rawak, would make up for everything.

  It was on leaving Karadong that Stein received by runner from Macartney a message informing him briefly of the death of Queen Victoria. Although not yet officially British, he was already a true servant of the Empire. He calls Queen Victoria ‘our Queen-Empress … the greatest ruler England has known since her expansion over the seas began’. Stein adds: ‘I could see that my two Indian followers, to whom I communicated the news, understood, and in their own way shared the deep emotion which filled me.’

  Rawak, which lies in the desert north of Khotan, means ‘high mansion’. His guide had spoken simply of ‘an old house’ lying half-buried in the sand. However, Stein’s first glimpse revealed a large stupa standing alone among the sand dunes. It was by far the most imposing structure he had yet seen. Much of it lay buried beneath some twenty-five feet of sand, but other parts were exposed to view. To his amazement Stein saw, scattered about on the ground, the shattered heads of colossal stucco figures which had obviously been cast aside by native treasure-seekers looking for hidden gold. Realising that he had found a site of major importance, he immediately sent a message to the nearest village, a day’s march away, asking for labourers to be sent post-haste.

  During the next nine days Stein and his men uncovered row upon row of huge statues representing Buddha and Bodhisattvas. In all, they retrieved from the dunes ninety-one of these, as well as many smaller figures of attendant deities and saints, and a number of small frescoes. Stein realised regretfully that, because of their size and condition, none of the larger-than-lifesize statues could be removed. Even if he had known what he was going to find here, and come provided with specially made crates, it would have been impossible to transport safely these massive but delicate sculptures all the way to India or Europe. He had to content himself with photographing them and recording their precise position, noting as he did so their very close affinity to early Gandhara works.

  Conscientiously Stein replaced the sand he had so painstakingly removed from around the statues. ‘It was a melancholy duty to perform,’ he wrote, ‘strangely reminding me of a true burial, and it almost cost me an effort to watch the images I had brought to light vanishing again, one after the other, under the pall of sand which had hidden them for so many centuries.’ As it turned out, his efforts to safeguard these astonishing works of art, which had survived some fifteen hundred years in this utterly barren region, proved to be in vain. It had been Stein’s hope that one day Khotan would have its own museum into whose protective care the sculptures could be placed. But on returning to Rawak some five years later he found to his dismay that a party of Chinese tomb-robbers had visited the stupa and smashed all the sculptures in the belief that they might conceal treasure.

  Stein’s first expedition to Chinese Turkestan was now finally over. Although it was only April, the heat of the desert was such as to make further work there impossible. But before setting out for home, his camels and ponies laden with works of art and documents, he had one more task to perform. The results of it were to cause a stir among orientalists, and a great deal of embarrassment to one in particular. Stein headed south, through the blazing desert heat and suffocating dust-storms, to Khotan.

  7. The Unmasking of a Forger

  * * *

  Before starting the long journey which would take him and his treasures back to London, Stein was determined, once and for all, to discover the truth about Islam Akhun. Although he now had sufficient evidence to brand the Khotan treasure-hunter a liar, and furthermore had, in his own excavations, failed to find any trace of writing in Akhun’s ‘unknown characters’, this did not prove conclusively that his ‘old books’ were all forgeries or that he was a forger. There was only one way to determine this. Stein had to confront the man ‘whose productions’, as he put it, ‘had engaged so much learned attention in Europe’. He first took Pan-darin, the friendly and scholarly Chinese amban of Khotan, into his confidence. ‘As an attempt on the part of Islam Akhun to abscond was by no means improbable,’ Stein wrote, ‘and as time was getting short, I took care to impress the learned Mandarin with the necessity of prompt and discreet action.’

  On the morning of April 25, 1901, Akhun was produced by the amban’s men from a nearby village where he had spent the winter practising as a hakim, or native doctor. Caught completely off his guard, he was marched before Stein accompanied by ‘a motley collection of papers’ which had been found in his possession and at his Khotan home. It was no surprise to Stein to recognise, among these, pieces of artificially discoloured paper bearing the now familiar unknown characters. Despite this damning evidence, Akhun protested total innocence. ‘The examination of this versatile individual proved a protracted affair,’ wrote Stein, ‘and through two long days I felt as if breathing the atmosphere of an Indian judicial court.’ Akhun’s defence was that he had merely sold the manuscripts to Macartney and others in Kashgar for certain persons at Khotan, since dead or absconded, who, rightly or wrongly, told him that they had discovered them in the desert. On realising how eagerly these books were sought by Europeans, he had simply asked those persons to find him more. ‘Now, he lamented, he was left alone to bear the onus of the fraud – if such it was,’ Stein adds.

  Akhun named the individuals responsible for landing him in this embarrassing situation as Muhammed Tari and Muhammed Siddiq, who had fled to Yarkand and Aksu respectively, while a third man had conveniently died. Stein observes: ‘It was a cleverly devised line of defence, and Islam Akhun clung to it with great consistency and with the wariness of a man who has had unpleasant experience of the ways of the law’ – as indeed he had. For posing once as Macartney’s agent and blackmailing villagers, Akhun had been flogged and imprisoned. Again, for forging another sahib’s handwriting to obtain money he had been forced to wear the huge and dreaded Chinese punishment collar of heavy wood, designed to pr
event a prisoner from feeding himself.

  Before beginning what Stein calls his ‘curious semi-antiquarian, semi-judicial inquiry’, he gave Akhun his personal assurance that he had no intention of pursuing the matter in the amban’s court, ‘… for I was aware that such a step, in accordance with Chinese procedure, was likely to lead to the application of some effective means of persuasion, i.e. torture.’ Stein added: ‘This, of course, I would not countenance; nor could a confession as its eventual result be to me of any value.’ How then was he to obtain the confession that he needed? Stein had one trump card still to play – the Hoernle report itself.

  In the course of his protestations, Akhun had denied ever having been to any of the places from which the books were said to have come, claiming that only his three suppliers had been there. He had merely passed details of these sites, together with the finds, to the eventual purchasers. What he did not know, or perhaps had forgotten, was that Macartney had meticulously taken down his often graphic descriptions of his personal role in these treasure-seeking expeditions. Indeed, these had gone verbatim into Hoernle’s report, which Stein now produced. When he began to read aloud from it, Akhun was visibly taken aback. It had never occurred to him that the stories he had told years before would even be remembered, let alone recorded permanently in an official document which would be quoted against him.

  Akhun’s defence now began to crumble fast. His first line of retreat was to admit that he had seen old books being manufactured at a deserted shrine by three men for whom he had eventually sold them. But then, realising that he stood before Stein convicted by his own past lies, he confessed to more and more. Finally he admitted everything. Until 1894, he told Stein, he had only dealt in coins, seals and other such antiquities which he acquired from villages around Khotan. But then he had heard from Afghan merchants of the high prices being paid by sahibs for the old books that Turdi and others had unearthed at Dandan-uilik. He determined to get in on this act. ‘But the idea of visiting such dreary desert sites, with the certainty of great hardships and only a limited chance of finds,’ Stein wrote, ‘had no attraction for a person of such wits as Islam Akhun.’ So it was that he hit upon the idea of writing his own ancient manuscripts.

  Before long, he and at least one other partner were producing from their small factory a steady stream of such manuscripts. Their best customers were the two rivals, Macartney and Petrovsky, both of whom were eager to buy – Macartney especially so following Calcutta’s instruction to its Central Asian representatives to try to obtain antiquities. So, while Islam Akhun cultivated the Englishman, one of his partners, Ibrahim Mullah, supplied the Russian. Ibrahim possessed a smattering of Russian, signs of which could be detected (in hindsight) in the shapes of some of the unknown characters produced by this unholy alliance. Indeed, scholars had noticed these, but had assumed that the Cyrillic-looking characters were of ancient Greek origin. Stein would have liked to have interrogated Ibrahim Mullah together with Akhun, but the former had judiciously vanished from Khotan the moment he heard of Akhun’s arrest.

  The forger’s first handwritten manuscript was produced and sold in 1895. At first, Akhun told Stein, he had attempted to imitate the cursive Brahmi characters found in genuine manuscripts from Dandan-uilik. Indeed, in this he and his partners were entirely successful, for many of these had found their way into major museum collections in Europe where scholars continued to scratch their heads over them. The factory prospered and the partners gained confidence. Stein writes in Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan: ‘As Islam Akhun quickly perceived that his “books” were readily paid for, though none of the Europeans who bought them could read their characters or distinguish them from ancient scripts, it became unnecessary to trouble about imitating the characters of genuine fragments.’ Each of the partners, therefore, was allowed to invent his own ‘unknown characters’. Stein adds: ‘This explains the striking diversity of these queer scripts, of which the analysis of the texts contained in the British collection at one time revealed at least a dozen – not exactly to the assurance of the Oriental scholars who were to help in their decipherment.’

  Akhun and his partners soon found that they could not keep up with the demand, since it took time and care to prepare these forgeries. They therefore decided to step up production by means of the only technology at hand – block printing. In 1896 they produced their first block-printed books. So successful were they, however, that forty-five of these were fully described and illustrated by Dr Hoernle in his scholarly report of 1899. ‘These too’, Stein writes, ‘showed an extraordinary variety of scripts in their ever-recurring formulas, and were often of quite imposing dimensions in size and bulk.’

  Once his defence had collapsed, Islam Akhun told Stein everything he wanted to know about the operations of the strange little factory in this remote corner of China which had for so long deceived Hoernle and other scholars. ‘In fact,’ writes Stein, ‘he seemed rather to relish the interest I showed in them.’ The paper they used, he told Stein, was bought locally. This was then stained yellow or light brown with toghruga, a dye obtained from a local tree. Once the writing had been added, either by hand or by block printing, the pages were hung over a fire ‘so as to receive by smoke the proper hue of antiquity’. This was sometimes done with insufficient care, for Stein notes that some of the books in the Calcutta collection showed scorch marks. However, even these had failed to put Hoernle on his guard. Next the pages were bound up. The way this was done should have added the final nail in their coffin, so far as authenticity was concerned. For they were bound in crude imitation of European volumes, particularly the later ‘discoveries’. In the event, even this anomaly failed to persuade Macartney, Petrovsky, Hoernle and others that they were being hoodwinked. Last of all, before being taken to Kashgar and offered to their unsuspecting purchasers, the forgeries were thoroughly encrusted with the fine sand of the Taklamakan as they would have been had they come from a sand-buried site. ‘I well remember’, Stein recounts, ‘how, in the spring of 1898, I had to apply a clothes brush before I could examine one of these forged “block prints” that had reached a collector in Kashmir.’

  Stein had decided not to ask for any charges to be brought against Akhun, and had already given him such an assurance in order to obtain a frank confession. He felt anyway that every bit as much to blame as these semi-literate counterfeiters were those who had unwittingly encouraged them by snapping up their forgeries so eagerly and undiscriminatingly. In Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, Stein omits any names, though he clearly indicts his friend Macartney and the Russian Petrovsky. Nevertheless, when he reflected on the valuable time wasted by Hoernle and other scholars on these worthless works, he felt quite glad that Akhun had been punished by the Chinese authorities, albeit for other villainies.

  All the same, Stein was clearly intrigued by this remarkable and enterprising scoundrel. He was, Stein wrote, ‘a man of exceptional intelligence for those parts, and also possessed of a quick wit and humour’. He found himself wondering whether Akhun could be of Kashmiri descent, which would explain this wiliness. Stein added: ‘He greatly amused me by his witty repartee to honest old Turdi, whom with humorous impudence he adduced as a living demonstration of the fact that “there was nothing to be got out of the desert”.…’ Akhun, Stein relates, was greatly impressed at seeing his own handiwork so perfectly reproduced in the photogravure plates of the Hoernle report, and was keen to learn how this was done. ‘I had no doubt’, Stein adds, ‘he was fully alive to the splendid opportunities for fresh frauds which this “Wilayeti” [town] art might provide. How much more proud would he have felt if he could but have seen, as I did a few months later, the fine morocco bindings with which a number of his block-printed Codices had been honoured in a great European library!’

  Stein was anxious to obtain some of the wood blocks used by the forgers to produce their books, since this would provide irrefutable corroboration of Akhun’s story, especially if one of them could be matched up with an act
ual page from one of the counterfeits. Akhun, who had been held between sessions of Stein’s cross-examination in the amban’s lock-up, was released so that he could go and find some. But the next morning he produced one only, and that from his own house. Word of his disgrace had quickly spread through the bazaars of Khotan and he now found all doors barred against him – especially those of his former associates. In the course of the two-day ‘trial’ Stein had flippantly told Akhun that he was far too clever to waste his life among the ignorant townsfolk of Khotan. This had been intended as no more than a joke, but Akhun evidently took it seriously. On the eve of Stein’s departure from Khotan, Akhun turned up and begged to be allowed to travel to Europe with him, an idea prompted, Stein reflected, by the thought that there might be wider opportunities there for his special talents than in Chinese Turkestan.

  It was now time for Stein to leave Khotan and to say his farewells to those who had served him so faithfully during that harsh winter in the desert. Stein’s most regretful parting was from Turdi, who travelled with him as far as Zawa, the last village of the Khotan region. Turdi’s experience and local knowledge had been invaluable to the success of the expedition. He had, at Dandan-uilik, probably saved Stein’s life. Stein rewarded him with more ‘treasure’, as he put it, than the old treasure-seeker had brought back from all his own humble expeditions into the desert put together. He had also secured a steady local job for Turdi, who felt he was getting too old to wander around the Taklamakan any more in search of gold. Their farewell was a touching one, for Turdi, whom Stein was never to meet again, began to weep. ‘I could see how genuine the tears were that at our parting trickled over the weather-beaten face of the old treasure-seeker,’ Stein wrote later. He, too, was clearly much affected by this leave-taking. However, before long he was approaching the shrine of the sacred pigeons which he had passed seven months before, and his thoughts turned to a more cheerful theme – ‘the results I was bringing back from Khotan’. His expedition had been more successful than he had ever dreamed, and this was merely the first. Stein halted briefly at the shrine, offering to the birds ‘a liberal treat of maize and corn as my grateful ex-voto on leaving Khotan’.