Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

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Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Page 15

by Peter Hopkirk


  10. ‘The Finest Paintings in Turkestan …’

  * * *

  It took them one and a half months to reach Kashgar. Riding ahead, von Le Coq arrived first, followed several days later by Bartus with the caravan of slow-moving mappas. To their dismay there was no sign of Grünwedel, nor any news of him either. Two weeks later they received word from him that he had lost his luggage somewhere in Russia (he had obviously not bribed the station-master in Moscow) and would be delayed for an indeterminate period. Von Le Coq and Bartus were furious. Not only had they hurried the whole inhospitable length of Chinese Turkestan to be there on time, but they had thrown away the chance of visiting Tun-huang in quest of the secret library. They comforted themselves with the thought that there was probably no library there. Both men had burned their fingers before by listening to native tales. Von Le Coq had once made a long and time-wasting detour to inspect a mysterious ‘inscription’ which a villager had told him about only to discover that the scratches were the work of a glacier. Bartus, too, had once spent a week looking for a non-existent site near Turfan during which the guide’s dog had died of thirst and fatigue and the men and horses had very nearly shared the same fate. Nonetheless Grünwedel’s failure to make the rendezvous was to affect their relationship with him throughout the expedition.

  As there was no German consul in Kashgar, von Le Coq and Bartus stayed with the Macartneys while waiting for Grünwedel to arrive. There were two reasons for their preferring the hospitality of the British to that of the Russians. In the first place von Le Coq spoke English, had lived in England and spoke no Russian. Secondly, he did not like what he had heard of Petrovsky, and ‘had no wish to put himself in the power of such a tyrannical ruler’. Grünwedel and the unfortunate Huth had made the mistake of staying with Petrovsky during the first German expedition two years before. This had proved a disaster. Huth was Jewish, and the arrogant Petrovsky had once threatened to have ‘this Jew flogged’ after a disagreement. There were no such scenes at Chini-Bagh, the Macartneys’ official residence, and von Le Coq, like all other travellers, writes warmly of this remarkable couple who lived for so long in that remote spot. Having become accustomed to the Turkestan way of life, the Germans took a little time to adjust to the comforts provided by their hostess. ‘When Lady Macartney had installed me on an English bed in a well-furnished room, I thought I was in Heaven,’ von Le Coq wrote. ‘But after a short time … I felt as if I should suffocate; I got up, took my rug, spread it on the verandah, used my saddle as a pillow and, wrapped in a light fur, slept out in the open air. It was some time before I could get accustomed again to the narrow confines of a bedroom.’

  While von Le Coq and Bartus await Grünwedel’s arrival it is worth taking a brief look at the remarkable talents and character of Bartus. The son of a Pomeranian weaver, he had spent many years at sea on sailing vessels. For a time, too, he had been a squatter in the Australian outback, where he had learned to ride a horse well and also to endure discomfort. This, allied to a natural resourcefulness and to the many practical skills he had learned on a wind-jammer, made him the ideal man to accompany such an expedition as this. Furthermore he was an excellent companion, blessed with perpetual good humour, courage, enormous strength and enthusiasm. He had joined the Ethnological Museum as a handyman on discovering, during a visit to Germany, that he had lost his life’s savings when an Australian bank collapsed. He was to accompany all four German expeditions to Chinese Turkestan, working from dawn to dusk for months on end with great zeal and ingenuity. Indeed, as we have seen, he became such an enthusiastic digger himself that von Le Coq occasionally entrusted him with minor excavations of his own.

  At last, on December 6, Grünwedel arrived in Kashgar exactly fifty-two days late. He came ‘on an old pony at walking pace’, wrote von Le Coq, making little attempt to hide his impatience. Worse, however, Grünwedel was ill, and it was another three weeks before the expedition – officially called the Third German Expedition – could start. They finally left Chini-Bagh on Christmas Day 1905, after lunching with the Macartneys. Also invited to the lunch were the Russians who, for reasons of their own, ‘refused to touch a single bite of the festive meal’, von Le Coq recalls, explaining somewhat lamely to their hosts that they had already eaten.

  Grünwedel was still far from well, but the four Germans (Grünwedel had brought a Chinese-speaking assistant with him) felt that they could not take advantage of the Macartneys’ generosity any longer, and there was important work to be done. Moreover, with Stein preparing for a second expedition, the Russians doing likewise and rumours of a French expedition in the wind, there was no time to be lost if claims were to be staked for the most promising sites. Grünwedel therefore travelled lying on a mattress in a hay-filled cart, an awning strung overhead to shield him from the sun. Their target was the complex of rock temples at Kyzil, in the T’ien Shan foothills, some thirty miles short of Kucha, on the northern arm of the old Silk Road.

  Meanwhile, waiting impatiently in India for official approval of his plans for his second great raid across the Karakoram, was Aurel Stein. Like the Germans held up in Kashgar, he was worried about the intentions of his rivals in a region which so far he had virtually had to himself. His friend Macartney had written informing him of the delay facing the German expedition and also referring to ‘jealousies’ between von Le Coq and Grünwedel. In this Stein took Grünwedel’s side, commenting to a friend that: ‘Grünwedel is a slow-moving man who wants to do things thoroughly.’ He added that he hoped that Grünwedel would manage to confine ‘his young museum assistants’ to Turfan. However, it was with relief that he heard finally from Macartney that the Germans proposed to stick to the Kucha region. Stein’s own sights were set elsewhere, and now his worries switched to the French. ‘The true race’, he wrote, ‘will be with the Frenchmen.’ He had heard that the brilliant young French sinologist Paul Pelliot proposed to set out from France in the spring. Stein was ‘wicked enough’, he confessed to a friend, to hope that the route across Russia might be barred to Pelliot, forcing him to take the far slower route through India, thereby giving Stein a head’s start. In the meantime, while bureaucrats in Calcutta and London pondered unhurriedly over his proposals, Stein worked feverishly on the proofs of his two-volume masterpiece Ancient Khotan, a massive and scholarly account of his first expedition aimed, unlike his earlier Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan, at archaeologists and students of Central Asian history. As he fretted over the prospects of his rivals stealing a march on him (he had just heard that the Russians were planning an expedition), he lamented to a friend: ‘… if only this great Indian machine could move quicker’.

  The Germans, after briefly examining Buddhist ruins at Tumchuq which they decided to leave until later (in the event the Pelliot expedition beat them there), pressed on to the Kyzil region, which they knew to be rich in sites. They had been told by one of their native attendants of a huge ming-oi (local term for a complex of cave temples) hidden in the mountains nearby, which some Japanese travellers had visited. After working there for three months in April 1903 the Japanese had apparently been driven away by a severe earthquake. Von Le Coq and Bartus rode off to examine the site. They came upon the ming-oi overlooking the cascading Muzart river – ‘a marvellous settlement of many hundreds of temples in the steep cliffs of a mountain range …’ wrote von Le Coq. Knowing that other expeditions were on their way, von Le Coq hired the sole habitation in this remote and desolate spot, a miserable, two-roomed mud hovel erected by a local farmer. Having thus staked their claim to this site, the Germans continued to Kucha where they paid their respects to the Chinese governor. They then rode on to Kumtura where they explored another ming-oi, but found that it had already been stripped bare by treasure-seekers. Further along the river valley they discovered a number of individual temples with their murals still intact, as well as sculptures, manuscripts and other Buddhist relics. ‘We worked here with zeal and delight,’ wrote von Le Coq, ‘for hardly a day passed without some
new and exciting discovery.’ Grünwedel, who had by now almost recovered, made careful sketches of the paintings in situ and prepared plans of the grottoes.

  Von Le Coq made a number of prospecting trips to sites in the region, but found for the most part that these had been ruined by damp and were not worth excavating. In one village he was warmly received by a Chinese official who found him lodgings in a small inn. He had just got into bed, he tells, when ‘there suddenly appeared a tall young woman in a little Chinese jacket and splendidly embroidered undergarments’. She was accompanied by two pretty young attendants playing stringed instruments. ‘I found that the beautiful lady was a well-known demi-mondaine who was anxious to offer her services to the foreign gentleman.’ Von Le Coq assures us hastily that he ‘dismissed the somewhat offended beauty’ after buying a pair of fine earrings from her.

  By now, two Russian excavators – the Beresovsky brothers – whom they had been expecting, had arrived in the Kucha region. When they found the Germans there, it very nearly led to violence. There was a history to this. At the time of the first German expedition, Grünwedel had for some reason come to an arrangement with St Petersburg by which the Germans would confine themselves to the later sites around Turfan, while the Russians would work the earlier ones in the Kucha district. However, when von Le Coq and Bartus had called at the Russian consulate in Urumchi, Dr Kochanowky had been surprised to learn that they were on their way to Turfan. For he had received letters from St Petersburg requesting him, in von Le Coq’s words, ‘to visit the Turfan settlements with the greatest possible speed in order to secure for Russian science all that was to be found in the way of pictures, manuscripts, etc’. Indeed, he had already removed what he could from Karakhoja, although he was unable to take any wall-paintings.

  Von Le Coq had been angry at discovering this double-dealing by St Petersburg when, he felt, the Russians had already got the best of the bargain. He had tried to explain to Kochanowky that Turfan was in the agreed German sphere of influence, but the Russian had replied that he knew of no such agreement and was merely concerned with obeying his instructions. Von Le Coq had decided then and there that these instructions rendered Grünwedel’s agreement with St Petersburg null and void, and he now managed to persuade Grünwedel of this. Furthermore, he pointed out that Kumtura and Kyzil (which they had still to excavate) were technically outside the Kucha region ‘and therefore could not be affected by the literal wording of the agreement’. But when the Russians eventually arrived they found von Le Coq and Grünwedel excavating at a temple-complex called Simsim which was, beyond any question, within the Kucha region. Furious at finding their rivals operating on what they regarded as their territory, the Russians denounced them angrily. Von Le Coq managed to placate them, but not before the elder of the two Russians had threatened to evict them by force of arms. Realising that the Russians represented no real threat, however, having neither the means nor the expertise to remove wall-paintings, the Germans gave way gracefully, moving on instead to the far richer prize of Kyzil.

  The seventh-century Chinese traveller Hsuan-tsang, who passed through this region on his celebrated pilgrimage to India, has left us a detailed account of life in the Kingdom of Kucha (which then included Kyzil) over a thousand years before Grünwedel and von Le Coq dug there. He told his faithful biographer Hui-li of the kingdom’s great size (it measured more than three hundred miles from east to west, and two hundred from north to south) and also of the luxuriance of its well-watered oases where even corn and rice were grown. We also learn that K’iu-chi, as he called it, produced grapes, pomegranates, plums and other fruit. Hsuan-tsang reported: ‘The ground is rich in minerals – gold, copper, iron, lead and tin. The air is soft and the people honest.… They excel other countries in playing the lute and pipe. They clothe themselves with ornamental garments of silk and embroidery [von Le Coq noted the excellence of the local embroidery he examined in one village]. In commerce they use gold, silver and copper coins,’ the pilgrim added.

  In his day, outside the western gate of Kucha there towered two ninety-foot-high figures of Buddha, one on each side of the road. Here, every year during the autumn equinox, priests from all over the kingdom assembled for a ceremony lasting ten days. ‘The King and all his people, from the highest to the lowest, abstain on this occasion from public business, and observe a religious fast,’ Hsuan-tsang records. On the fifteenth day of each month as well as on the last day the king and his ministers met to discuss affairs of state ‘and after taking counsel of the chief priests, they publish their decrees’, he added. He describes a number of monasteries, and it seems more than likely that during his stay he visited the one at Kyzil and admired the very paintings and sculptures that twelve hundred years later the Germans removed to Berlin. The wall-paintings from Kyzil are perhaps the richest haul (Bezeklik included) that the Germans made during their four expeditions. For art historians regard the Kyzil frescoes as one of the high points of all Central Asian art.

  Von Le Coq himself writes of those from one temple: ‘The paintings were the finest that we found anywhere in Turkestan, consisting of scenes from the Buddha legend, almost purely Hellenistic in character.’ When the Germans first entered this temple it appeared to be quite empty. However, they soon found that the walls were coated with a one-inch-thick layer of snow-white mould. Von Le Coq recounts: ‘I fetched Chinese brandy – no European can drink it – and washed down all the walls with a sponge’, thus revealing the frescoes. That night he had an agonising headache and a temperature, presumably the effect of brandy fumes.

  In another superbly painted temple nearby they were dazzled by the extravagant use of brilliant blue pigment – the precious ultramarine beloved by Renaissance artists, for which they were prepared to pay twice its weight in gold. One picture from here shows King Ajatashatru taking a ritual bath in melted butter while an earringed courtier, who dare not break to him the news of Buddha’s death by word of mouth, does so by means of a painting. Other beautifully preserved works found here showed Buddha’s temptation, scenes of him preaching, the distribution of sacred relics and his cremation.

  The breathtaking finds from the Kyzil sites ‘far surpassed any earlier achievements’, von Le Coq declares. ‘Everywhere we found fresh, untouched temples, full of the most interesting and artistically perfect paintings, all of early date.’ In none of them was there yet any trace of Chinese influence, unlike those from all the other sites they had excavated. This was because, prior to AD 658 when it accepted Chinese rule, Kucha had its own distinct school of painting, as well as its own language. In spite of more recent discoveries made there by Chinese archaeologists, current knowledge of Kuchean painting is derived largely from the frescoes and manuscripts brought back by the German expedition from Kyzil.

  One day when all four men were working there in different temples there was a noise like a clap of thunder and an avalanche of boulders suddenly cascaded down upon them. Von Le Coq, Bartus and their labourers fled down the hillside ‘pursued by great masses of rock, tearing past us with terrifying violence’. The river, von Le Coq could see, was ‘in wild commotion – great waves beating against its banks’. Further up the river a huge pillar of dust rose heavenwards. ‘At the same instant,’ von Le Coq recounts, ‘the earth trembled and a fresh roll, like pealing thunder, resounded through the cliffs. Then we knew it was an earthquake.’ They watched the shock-wave as it continued to move violently down the valley, pillars of dust marking its progress. To their relief both Grünwedel, who had retreated with his sketchbook into a corner of his cave, and Herr Pohrt, his Chinese-speaking assistant, were unharmed. On another occasion, in a temple in which every blow of the pick dislodged a shower of pebbles and sand from the ceiling, von Le Coq again had a close shave. After examining the remains of some wooden figures he had found, he leaned against the cave wall, dislodging part of the facing. As he stepped back in surprise, a huge block of stone crashed down onto the spot where he had been standing. Others were less lucky. In ano
ther rock-fall one of the locally employed labourers was seriously injured and was paid compensation equivalent to £3. This, von Le Coq assures us, represented ‘a considerable sum of money’ in Chinese Turkestan where, he claims, a large family could live ‘in comfort’ for a month on twelve shillings. In another incident two men from a neighbouring town perished in a violent storm while on their way to seek work with the Germans.

 

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