Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Twelve days after bidding farewell to Turdi, Stein was back in Kashgar enjoying the hospitality of the Macartneys. He had not seen another European for eight months and was worried lest he should exhaust his hosts ‘by a pent-up torrent of talk’. The next two weeks were spent disbanding his caravan, selling off his camels and ponies, and repacking his treasures for transportation to London via the Russian railhead at Andijan, the eastern terminus of the Trans-Caspian Railway. His ponies, he records proudly, were sold practically without loss, despite the fact that they had served him for eight wearying months, while the camels lost only a quarter of their original price. Had he been able to wait until the caravan season into Russia was once again in full swing, Stein writes, ‘I should probably have recovered for the Government the whole of the original outlay on my Turkestan transport.’

  Finally, exactly one year after first setting out from India, it was time for him to take leave of his hosts and depart with his twelve crates of treasures for London. On May 29, 1901, he left Kashgar for Osh, the nearest Russian town across the frontier, his antiquities and other baggage carried by eight ponies. Before departing, however, he had another painful leave-taking, this time from Dash, the little fox-terrier who had travelled so far with him. There could be no question of the dog accompanying him to England, and it was decided that he would return to India with Ram Singh. ‘Equal as my little companion had proved to all the hardships of mountains and deserts,’ Stein wrote, ‘it would have been cruel to subject him to weeks of a wearisome journey by rail merely to leave him at the end to a confinement of quarantine on reaching England. Yet I confess I felt the separation from the devoted companion of all my travels until we joyfully met again one November night on a Punjab railway platform.’ (The two-month trek from Kashgar, over the Karakoram, to India was to be the little dog’s last great journey. For he died, apparently of a broken heart, when once again Stein had to leave India for London. He is buried in alpine Kashmir which, wrote Stein, ‘he loved like his master’.)

  Stein’s first task on reaching England was one of the utmost delicacy. He had to go and see Hoernle, now living in Oxford, and break it to him that he had been made a fool of by a group of semi-literate villagers. Knowing that the great scholar was already working on the promised second part of his report on the Calcutta collection, due for publication that year, he had written him a warning letter. But now he had the deeply embarrassing task of telling him to his face. His embarrassment was heightened, moreover, by the fact that he had good reason to be grateful to Hoernle, for it was this scholar who, more than anyone else, had encouraged him in his venture and given it his full official backing. Furthermore, Hoernle was the leading scholar in Stein’s own field – the linguistics of India and Central Asia – as well as being a personal friend from Calcutta days. And now Stein’s very triumph was to result in Hoernle’s humiliation. It certainly could not have been with any feelings of pleasure that Stein caught the train to Oxford that July morning.

  Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernle, son of an Anglican missionary of German extraction, was born in India in 1841, making him Stein’s senior by some twenty-one years. After graduating in Switzerland, he travelled to London where he spent several years studying Sanskrit under the scholar Goldstucker. In 1865 he returned to India, initially to teach philosophy at a college in Benares. From then on he devoted his working life to the study of Indo-Aryan and other languages and to the deciphering of ancient Indian manuscripts. (In all, he published more than one hundred and fifteen books, articles and papers, including his Comparative Grammar of the North Indian Vernaculars, which took him five years to compile.) Moving to Calcutta, then the capital of British India, he became a leading light in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, over which he eventually presided, before finally retiring to Oxford.

  He had first found himself in the front rank of orientalists in 1881 when confronted with fragments of a manuscript in an archaic Indian script discovered in a north-west frontier village. It had aroused considerable curiosity among Indologists, but no one succeeded in reading it until it was sent to Hoernle. ‘He attacked it at once and with striking success,’ wrote a contemporary. ‘Although it had neither beginning nor end, and consisted merely of disorganised fragments with not a single leaf complete, he succeeded in deciphering the greater part of it.’ Hoernle proved it to be an ancient mathematical treatise by an unknown author. Although its literary significance was not great, its decipherment marked out Hoernle as a philologist of rare talent. Thus, exactly ten years later, he was the natural choice for the task of deciphering the famous, and immensely more important, Bower manuscript. It was his brilliant work on this manuscript that resulted in Hoernle being entrusted with the so-called British Collection of Antiquities from Central Asia, and which indirectly led to the international scramble for further manuscripts and antiquities from this region.

  Precisely what passed between Stein and Hoernle no one will ever know. Stein tactfully avoids any mention whatever of this meeting in Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, his otherwise detailed account of the expedition. Indeed, fellow scholars in this field appear to have closed ranks in an effort to spare Hoernle’s feelings. Other than in the second part of Hoernle’s own report on the Calcutta collection, there appears to be no mention of Stein’s sensational and embarrassing discovery in scholarly publications or newspapers of the time. When Hoernle died in 1918, at the age of seventy-seven, his six-page obituary in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society made no mention of this humiliating episode.

  The meeting between the two men was clearly friendly, for Stein stayed with Hoernle and his family for several days. However, the shock that Stein’s revelations must have caused the great Indologist is more than hinted at by Stein in a letter to his brother Ernst, then living in Hungary. ‘Understandably,’ Stein reported, ‘he is deeply disappointed by Islam Akhun’s forgeries, but to my satisfaction has recovered and I am spared a painful discussion.’ No doubt Stein’s remarkable linguistic finds offered some solace to Hoernle in his discomfiture, enabling him to turn his mind to something fresh. Indeed, his work on the Stein manuscripts was to lead, among other things, to the discovery of the long-lost language of Khotanese.

  But a much more immediate problem faced Hoernle. In his 1899 report on the Calcutta collection he had discussed the possibility of the ‘old books’ being forgeries, but had firmly rejected it. How was he to extricate himself from this humiliating error of judgement? He confided to Stein that he wanted to have the report destroyed. That much we know from a second letter Stein wrote to his brother. However, the impossibility of this must have struck Hoernle almost at once. The report had been published as an extra number of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and had been widely circulated. Suppression, therefore, was out of the question. There remained, moreover, the awkward matter of the promised second part. Hoernle had no choice but to go ahead with this. He had here two alternatives: either he could make a clean breast of his error, or he could gloss it over, hoping that his readers would not compare Parts 1 and 2 too closely. He was only human and chose the latter course.

  So skilfully was it done that unless one turned back to the original report of 1899, or had read and remembered it at the time, one would have had the greatest difficulty in realising – from Part 2 – that he had ever been fooled at all. Far from admitting that he had originally come down on the side of the manuscripts and books in his care being authentic, he omits any reference to this now highly embarrassing verdict. He cleverly avoids having to do this by declaring – in Part 2 – that when he wrote the 1899 report ‘the question of forgery was still an open one’. (This was only too obviously true, though anyone who had read Hoernle’s original verdict might not have thought so.) He now put the record straight, albeit without conceding that it was he who put it wrong in the first place, by declaring that ‘… Dr. Stein has obtained definite proof that all “blockprints” and all the manuscripts in “unknown characters” procured from Khotan since 189
5 are modern fabrications of Islam Akhun and a few others working with him’. He directs readers who might wish to see what these forgeries look like to a publication by the Russian scholar Dmitri Klementz (perhaps to show that the Russians were fooled too), as well as to an article, also containing plates, which he himself had contributed to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He carefully avoids drawing attention to the most obvious source of such illustrations – Part 1 of his own report – with its damning text. There he leaves the matter, for the bulk of the second part of his report was understandably concerned with genuine manuscripts, pottery and terracottas in the British Collection.

  Hoernle, it might be added, was undoubtedly fortunate in the age in which he lived. Were such a distinguished scholar to be hoodwinked today by a semi-literate oasis-dweller living in Central Asia, next morning he would find half Fleet Street camped on his doorstep demanding a public explanation.

  Meanwhile, Stein’s discoveries from his first expedition had caused a sensation in antiquarian circles throughout Europe. Here was evidence of a previously unknown Buddhist civilisation going begging in one of the world’s backyards, complete with its own remarkable art and literature. Hitherto, archaeologists had been concerned almost entirely with classical, ancient Egyptian and biblical sites. Central Asian archaeology was something new. When the 13th International Congress of Orientalists was held the following year in Hamburg, a special resolution was passed congratulating Stein on his amazing discoveries. This was to prove both an asset and a liability to him. While it undoubtedly helped him to obtain permission and funds from the Indian Government for a second expedition (albeit after much prevarication), it also attracted the interest of orientalists in Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg to the region’s possibilities. For some time, scholars there had been urging their governments to dispatch archaeological expeditions to this remote corner of China. Here was the spur they needed.

  Curiously though, it was not an expedition from Europe which next chose to brave the hardships of the Taklamakan, but one from nearer the spot. Indeed, it was not a proper expedition at all, but a small and somewhat disorganised party of Buddhist monks from Japan which left for Central Asia in August 1902. Far more important, however, was the interest engendered in Germany by Stein’s finds. For it was from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin that Stein’s first serious rivals were to emerge. Just two months after the Hamburg conference a powerful German expedition, led by Professor Albert Grünwedel, set out to try its luck in Chinese Turkestan.

  8. The Race Begins in Earnest

  * * *

  With the arrival of the Germans and the Japanese on the scene in 1902, there now began what has been described as an ‘international race’ for the ancient Buddhist treasures of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts. It was to last a quarter of a century and, by the time it was over, to have involved the archaeologists of seven nations. The vast quantities of antiquities which they removed were to end up in more than thirty museums and institutions spread across Europe, America, Russia and the Far East. On the whole, in public anyway, the rival expeditions were conducted in gentlemanly manner. Just occasionally, however, feelings ran high, and once, in a quarrel over who had the right to dig a particular site, the Germans and the Russians all but came to blows, the latter threatening angrily to expel the former by force of arms.

  Stein, on the other hand, was content with the occasional scoff at his competitors, usually in private correspondence. The Germans, he wrote to a friend, ‘always go out hunting in packs’. Considering the modest size of their expeditions (though not of their archaeological hauls) to call these ‘packs’ was patently absurd. But it indicates the irritation their presence caused him in a field which he felt he had pioneered, and would obviously have liked to have kept to himself for a few years longer. There was, in fact, ample room for all comers in this vast, archaeologically untouched region, with its multitude of sites. Yet it is clear that the rival groups spent much time looking over their shoulders.

  The first of the four German expeditions which were to operate in Chinese Turkestan between 1902 and 1914 consisted of three Europeans, all on the staff of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It was led by Professor Albert Grünwedel, head of the museum’s Indian section and author of a notable work on Buddhist art. His second-in-command was Dr George Huth, another art-historian, who was to die soon after their return from Central Asia, largely as a consequence of the hardships he suffered in the course of the expedition. Finally there was the colourful, ever-resourceful Theodor Bartus, the museum’s handyman, who was to accompany all four expeditions.

  For some time Grünwedel and his colleagues in the Indian section had had their eye on Chinese Turkestan and pondered on its archaeological potential. Like Stein, they had guessed from the clues that had begun to emerge from the region that this might prove to be an ancient meeting point between the art of classical Greece and that of Buddhist Asia. However, they were discouraged from venturing there by fear of the dangers and discomforts they were likely to encounter. But when the intrepid Hedin returned unharmed to tell his dramatic tale, followed soon afterwards by Stein with his impressive haul, the Germans decided it was time to join in the hunt.

  They chose as their target the region around Turfan, on the northern arm of the Silk Road. Some five years earlier it had been visited by the Russian scholar Klementz, who had brought back frescoes, manuscripts and inscriptions to St Petersburg, and reported seeing at least one hundred and thirty Buddhist cave temples in the region, many containing well-preserved wall-paintings. Unlike Stein, whose first expedition was largely a gamble, the Germans knew that if Klementz was to be believed, then they were virtually guaranteed a rich harvest of treasures from around Turfan. Moreover, it was more accessible than Stein’s far-flung sites along the southern caravan route, and its ruins apparently less plundered by native treasure-seekers.

  The town of Turfan lies one hundred and fifty miles north of the top-secret site near Lou-Ian where China tested her first generation of nuclear weapons. A green fertile oasis, it stands in a huge natural depression of some thirty thousand square miles, said by geographers to be the deepest anywhere on earth. Surrounding the town are earthquake-scarred hills, destitute of all life, and equally sterile deserts. To the north lies the snow-capped Bogdo-Ola (‘Mountain of God’), higher than anything in Europe and forming the easternmost spur of the great T’ien Shan. Sir Eric Teichman, the British traveller, was reminded by the region’s stark and dramatic scenery, of the Grand Canyon when he passed that way in the winter of 1935. So cold was it that his party had to light fires beneath the engines of their vehicles each morning to get them to start – ‘a very dangerous procedure’, he pointed out, but in that part of the world regarded as routine. By contrast, the heat in summer is so intense that the mercury often soars to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, driving even the residents underground into specially dug cellars. Yet scattered across this barren, rainless landscape are some of the most fertile oasis-villages anywhere in Chinese Turkestan. In the heyday of the Silk Road, wines, melons and fresh grapes were supplied from here to the imperial court at Ch’ang-an. The secret of this surprising lushness lies in an ingenious irrigation system, originally borrowed from Persia, which brings the melted snow from the mountains of the north via deep subterranean channels to these communities which could not otherwise exist.

  Mildred Cable and Francesca French, those two intrepid missionaries who spent many months in the region during the 1920s and ’30s, describe the oasis vividly in their book The Gobi Desert. ‘… Turfan lies like a green island in a sandy wilderness, its shores lapped by grit and gravel instead of ocean water, for the division between arid desert and fertile land is as definite as that between shore and ocean. Its fertility is amazing, and the effect on the traveller, when he steps from sterility and desiccation into the luxuriance of Turfan is overwhelming.’ However, not all the oases in the Turfan region fared so well over the centuries, many of them having been abandoned. I
t was from among the scattered ruins of these that the Germans were to make a series of rich discoveries between 1902 and 1914, when the war brought their enterprise to a close.

  The first expedition, led by Grünwedel, was away from Berlin for a year, but spent less than five months exploring and excavating in the Turfan region. The rest of the time was taken up in getting there and back. Financed largely by Friedrich Krupp, the arms’ king, this first foray served primarily as a reconnaissance. However, Grünwedel’s discoveries (forty-six cases of them), whilst modest compared with those of the three subsequent expeditions, caused a considerable stir among German Asiatic scholars, and even caught the imagination of the Kaiser himself. The finds included Buddhist frescoes, manuscripts and sculptures. As a result of the expedition’s success, a committee was formed to organise a longer and more ambitious programme, and a fund was set up to equip it, both Krupp and the Kaiser contributing personally to this. But Huth’s untimely death and Grünwedel’s ill-health meant that an interim leader had to be found. The committee chose Albert von Le Coq, a man who was to prove as remarkable in his own way as either Hedin or Stein, and every bit as determined.