Born in Berlin on September 8, 1860, the son of a wealthy Huguenot wine merchant, it was assumed that he would follow in his father’s footsteps. However, while still a schoolboy, he became involved in what his German obituarist describes as ‘a forbidden alliance’ but then dismisses as a ‘harmless little peccadillo’. Whatever this was, it resulted in his being expelled. His father, who had been educated at an English public school, was furious, though we do not quite know what ensued. His obituarist skates over this period rather discreetly, picking up the thread again when he was twenty-one. By this time his relations with his father appear to have been restored, because he was sent first to London and then to America to train for the family business. While in the United States he also studied medicine. It was a skill which was to prove useful more than once, later on. At the age of twenty-seven he returned to Germany and joined the firm of A. Le Coq, wine merchants in the town of Darmstadt, which had been founded by his grandfather. His heart was not in it, however, and after thirteen years he sold the business and moved to Berlin. There he studied oriental languages for several years, including Arabic, Turkish and Persian at the School of Oriental Languages, and Sanskrit under the scholar Pischel. In 1902, at the age of forty-two, he joined – initially as an unpaid volunteer – the Indian section of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, just as Grünwedel was mounting the first German expedition to Chinese Central Asia.
Now, only two years later, it was his turn. His expedition consisted of just himself and Theodor Bartus. They left Berlin in September 1904, first visiting St Petersburg to obtain the official passes necessary to see them across Siberia. They were also given letters of recommendation by savants at the Russian Academy of Sciences which, before very long, would be dispatching its own expeditions to the region. Their plan was to take the Trans-Siberian Express as far as Omsk, catch a boat there down the River Irtysh to Semipalatinsk, and then travel by horse-drawn tarantass to the frontier post at Bakhty from where they would continue to Urumchi and finally Turfan. But in Moscow they ran into difficulties. The station-master there objected to the amount of baggage (over a ton in weight) accompanying them, insisting that he would have to put on an extra luggage van to carry it all. In Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, von Le Coq’s account of the expedition, he describes with relish (for he had no time for the Russians) what followed. ‘… holding a 50-rouble note behind my back, I passed up and down before the Cerberus, gently waving the paper. When I had passed him three or four times the note disappeared and the station-master said: “Well, we’ll manage.” And sure enough they did manage.…’
After travelling for five days in a train packed with Russian officers (only a few of whom ‘came up to our idea of officers’) bound for the Russo-Japanese War, they reached Omsk. The Irtysh steamer took them as far as Semipalatinsk (‘an appalling hole’) where they hired their tarantass to carry them across the melancholy Siberian landscape to the Chinese frontier. At Chuguchak, their first halt in Chinese territory, they were warned by the Russian consul that civil war was raging locally and that the country was unsafe. Von Le Coq, who was carrying twelve thousand roubles in gold, sat on top of it, rifle in hand, for the remainder of the journey to Urumchi, then the capital of Chinese Turkestan. Few European travellers have a good word to say for this seedy, flyblown town with its blood-stained past. Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who lived there for a time, recalled its ‘jaded, unhealthy-looking people’ and its ‘sordid streets … typical of its sordid civic life’. In their day it teemed with police informers. ‘A secret report can always command a price,’ they wrote in The Gobi Desert, ‘and promotion often depends upon supplying it, therefore no man trusts his neighbour.’ They added that ‘no one enjoys life in Urumchi, no one leaves the town with regret, and it is full of people who are only there because they cannot get permission to leave.…’
Urumchi’s traditions of hospitality ‘are all its own’, observes Peter Fleming in News from Tartary, adding by way of explanation that ‘the death rate at banquets is appalling’. This is a reference, not to food-poisoning, but to two notorious banquets, held there some twelve years apart, and both attended by the able but autocratic Governor, General Yang Tseng-hsin. To the first of these – in 1916 – he invited all those whom he suspected of plotting his overthrow. When his guests were well filled with drink, Yang brought in the executioner and, while the band played outside, had them beheaded one by one, before calmly continuing with his own meal. The second banquet took place in 1928. This time it was the General’s turn to die – with other officials – in a hail of bullets, just as a toast was being drunk to the Soviet consul-general, who hastily sought refuge with his wife in a lavatory.
Despite the eighty-six-course banquet laid on for them by the Chinese (which happily everyone survived), the two Germans found Urumchi every bit as unsavoury as most other European travellers. One of the first things they witnessed on arrival was a particularly cruel form of execution in progress in the town’s main street. The victim was incarcerated in a specially built cage known as a kapas. His head, firmly secured, stuck out of the top, while his feet rested on a board. The latter was gradually lowered, day by day, until on about the eighth day his neck finally broke. Von Le Coq took a photograph of the dying man in his cage which appears in Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan. ‘The traffic’, he wrote, ‘went on as usual past this barbaric apparatus.’ Beside it, the photograph shows, a melon dealer sits surrounded by his fruit, totally unperturbed by his neighbour’s dying agonies. The sight, von Le Coq wrote, ‘made a very unpleasant impression on me’. The two Germans were also horrified by the behaviour of the Russian consul. It was his custom to drive imperiously through the town in an open carriage, his escort of forty mounted Cossacks lashing across face or shoulders with their whips anyone who failed to jump aside. Von Le Coq protested to the consul about this but was told that this was the only way to treat such people.
The two Germans then continued their journey to Turfan, one hundred miles further into Chinese Turkestan, where they were soon introduced to the repulsive insect life. In addition to mosquitoes, fleas, sandflies, scorpions and lice there were two particularly unpleasant varieties of spider. There were the jumping kind, with bodies the size of pigeons’ eggs, whose jaws produced a crunching sound and which were said to be poisonous. Then there were the smaller ones, black and hairy, which lived in holes in the ground. These were particularly feared for their bite, which, if not actually lethal, could be extremely dangerous. However, it was the huge Turfan cockroaches which the Germans found most repellent. ‘It was enough to make a man uncontrollably sick to wake in the morning with such a creature sitting on his nose, its big eyes staring down at him and its long feelers trying to attack its victim’s eyes,’ von Le Coq wrote. ‘We used to seize the insect in terror and crush it, when it gave off an extremely disagreeable smell.’ A pleasant surprise, for a change, lay in the rapturous welcome received by Bartus, who was fondly remembered by the natives from Grünwedel’s expedition of the previous year. At first the two Germans had been mistaken for Russians, who were greatly disliked locally. Then a butcher, an enormous Uighur, recognised Bartus and raised the cry of ‘Batur! Batur!’, meaning ‘Hero! Hero!’, a pun on his name.
On November 18, 1904, the two men reached Karakhoja, an ancient ruined city built of mud lying in the desert to the east of Turfan, where they planned to spend some time excavating. It was to yield them rich finds. But as they stood there on that first day the prospects could hardly have looked very promising. Much of the old city had been levelled by local villagers so that the rich soil could be used for cultivation. Buildings had been demolished by farmers in search of frescoes whose bright pigments, it was believed, made a potent fertiliser. Quantities of ancient beams and other timber had been removed for use as building material or fuel. Where paintings depicting men and beasts had survived the fertiliser-seekers, the eyes and mouths had been picked out. ‘For the belief still exists’, von Le Coq wrote,
‘that painted men and animals, unless their eyes and mouths at least had been destroyed, come to life at night, descend from their places, and do all sorts of mischief to men, beasts and harvests.’ Even in the short time that had elapsed between Grünwedel’s visit and their own much fresh damage appeared to have been done.
But this initial disappointment was not to last long. For in the heart of this great, mud-walled city of the dead, peasants led them to the remains of a six-foot-high fresco they had just found. An imposing male figure with a halo, and surrounded by acolytes of both sexes, dominated the painting. It proved to be an auspicious start to their expedition, for it almost certainly depicts Manes, the founder of the Manichaean faith. If so, it is the first portrayal of this mystical figure ever to come to light. Writing in 1926, four years before his death, and surrounded by the staggering wealth of art treasures he, Grünwedel and Bartus had removed from the Silk Road, von Le Coq still felt that this ninth-century wall-painting represented one of the most important of all their finds.
From the discoveries that followed, it is clear that around the middle of the eighth century Karakhoja (or Khocho, to use its ancient name) had nurtured a flourishing Manichaean community. This strange and ascetic faith had been founded in Persia some five centuries earlier by Manes. His heretical ideas provoked intense hostility among believers of rival faiths, including Christians, Moslems and Zoroastrians, and after being defeated in a debate with Zoroastrian priests, he was crucified as a heretic. In the Middle East and Balkans the faith suffered savage persecution, to the point of extermination, with the result that no traces of its written records or religious literature have survived there. To escape persecution, some five hundred Manichaeans fled eastwards to Samarkand, today in Soviet Central Asia, where they found refuge. From there their creed and art (Manes himself was a renowned artist) was gradually carried further eastwards along the Silk Road, absorbing Buddhist influences as it travelled, until it eventually reached Karakhoja. It is the dearth of evidence of the Manichaeans elsewhere that made von Le Coq’s discoveries at Karakhoja so important.
The finds included beautifully and brilliantly illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, hanging paintings executed on cloth, and other textiles. All of these, as might be expected, showed strong Persian influences. The manuscripts – on silk, paper, parchment and leather, and displaying superb calligraphy – were to contribute much to scholars’ meagre knowledge of this long-extinct faith. The contribution might have been far greater, von Le Coq argues, had the German expeditions reached Karakhoja earlier, in time to prevent the wholesale destruction of much of the old town. For it was here that he learned of the Manichaean library which a frightened peasant had tipped into the river. It was here also that he himself came upon another library, irretrievably damaged by muddy irrigation water, in a Manichaean shrine. ‘The loess water had penetrated the papers,’ he wrote, ‘stuck everything together, and in the terrible heat of the usual summer … all these valuable books had turned into loess. I took specimens of them and dried them carefully in the hope of saving some of these manuscripts; but the separate pages crumbled off and dropped into small fragments, on which the remains of beautifully written lines, intermingled with traces of miniatures executed in gold, blue, red, green and yellow, were still to be seen.’ He added sadly: ‘An enormous treasure has been lost here.’ Given the immense strides that modern technology has enabled conservationists to make in recent years, one suspects that nowadays something might have been retrieved from this mess. An Agatha Christie-like footnote to this find was the discovery of the dried-up corpse of a murdered Buddhist monk, still wrapped in his blood-stained robe, at the entrance to the library. For Buddhism appears to have coexisted with Manichaeism here.
Nor was he the only murder victim they were to stumble on at Karakhoja. ‘In one of the southern domed buildings … we made a horrible discovery,’ wrote von Le Coq. After breaking open the door they found the heaped-up corpses of at least a hundred Buddhist monks, many still showing horrifying wounds. One skull had been split from crown to upper jaw with a single savage blow. Von le Coq attributes this thousand-year-old massacre to religious persecution by the Chinese authorities.
In Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, now long out of print, von Le Coq describes vividly the day-to-day discomforts he and Bartus suffered during their months at Karakhoja. They began work at sunrise, sometimes at 4 a.m. or before, and worked on in the extremes of heat and cold until 7 p.m., when the workmen received their daily wage and the two Germans settled down to recording and packing the day’s finds. One of the curses of excavating at Karakhoja was the dust which rose in suffocating clouds. ‘In the evening,’ von Le Coq complains, ‘we often used to cough up solid streams of loess from our bronchial tubes.’ Although this dust took some of the heat out of the cruel Turkestan sun, it also made photography difficult and all their early pictures were under-exposed. Meals were extremely monotonous – ‘rice mixed with mutton-fat or … mutton-fat mixed with rice’, von Le Coq records. In summer, moreover, the mutton-fat was invariably rancid. This unappetising diet was supplemented all the year round with grapes and fresh melon as well as dried fruits and the excellent bread baked by their landlady. Just occasionally the Germans allowed themselves to crack one of their precious bottles of Veuve Cliquot Ponsardin, which they first cooled Turkestan-style in a piece of wet felt. For a case of this had thoughtfully been provided by von Le Coq’s sisters as a farewell gift.
Even when they had finished their day’s work there was no respite for von Le Coq. The courtyard of the house in which they were staying would soon fill up with sick people, many of whom had travelled great distances and all of whom expected instant cures from the ‘foreign gentleman’. As most of them were suffering from rheumatism or malaria, with the help of aspirin and quinine and the medical training he had received in America, von Le Coq soon acquired an unwanted reputation as a miracle healer and inevitably the number of his patients multiplied. One evening, by chance, he discovered an old woman at the gate in tears. She explained that she could not afford the ‘fee’ to see him. On further questioning he discovered to his horror that his landlord Saut was making a profitable sideline by charging all the sick a fee before allowing them into the courtyard. Von Le Coq was so angry that he gave him a couple of lashes with a riding whip – ‘the only time I had ever struck a native’, he wrote. He also threatened to report the miscreant to the Wang of Lukchun, the local potentate, who, Saut knew, would punish him with the ‘big stick’, a heavy cane with an oar-shaped end. One stroke of this was sufficient to draw blood and twenty-five would kill a man. No sooner had the two Germans retired to bed that night than a loud wailing began outside. The wily Saut had sent his grandmother, mother, wife, beautiful daughter and all his other female relations to intercede on his behalf with sobs and gifts. Von Le Coq allowed himself to be persuaded on a promise of better behaviour in future.
One day, when the Germans had been working at Karakhoja for some time, two local dignitaries called on them saying: ‘Sir, it is not good that you two should live alone. You must marry.’ Von Le Coq explained that they already had wives, but this was brushed aside. The dignitaries’ own daughters were ready to marry them, the Germans were told. ‘This’, wrote von Le Coq ‘was an unpleasant revelation.’ Anxious not to hurt local feelings, he thanked the men profusely, saying that in Berlin he and Bartus would receive twenty-five strokes with the big stick if they were discovered by the Kaiser to have taken second wives.
In spite of such distractions, work at Karakhoja continued steadily, yielding a rich flow of interesting, if not spectacular, finds. Apart from the remarkable wall-painting of Manes, the most impressive discovery was a beautiful, near life-size statue of Buddha in Gandhara style, unfortunately headless. It had once been embellished with brilliant colours, but these had mostly been washed away over the centuries by melting snow and the rare but torrential rainstorms. In describing it, von Le Coq betrays a strong bias towards classical as oppose
d to oriental art. He writes: ‘The drapery falls in noble lines, not yet degraded by Eastern Asiatic misunderstanding of classic forms.’ He was much puzzled by this classically influenced Buddha and other Hellenistic sculptures found here and elsewhere. How was it, he wondered, that sculptures had managed to retain their Greek character while the wall-paintings had already absorbed Chinese influences? This mystery was to be solved months later when, at another site, Bartus stumbled upon an ancient workshop full of stucco moulds for mass-producing parts of large sculptures. Clearly these were intended to be used again and again, which accounted for the survival of an archaic sculptural style. Subsequent finds suggested that, around the ninth century, casts were redesigned to depict oriental features, including slanting eyes, shorter noses and straighter hair.
Another startling find at Karakhoja was a small Nestorian church which lay outside the walls of the old city. It contained the remains of a distinctly Byzantine-style mural showing a priest and people carrying branches – possibly intended to depict a Palm Sunday service. For the most part, however, the Karakhoja finds consisted of coins, fragments of silk and other woven fabrics, and many scraps of sacred texts, the latter apparently torn up deliberately, though by whom is not clear. Among the manuscripts they found which had escaped such vandalism, twenty-four different scripts were later identified.
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Page 13