Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Lesser storms too seem, from time to time, to have disturbed the tranquillity of the expedition. Men obliged to live in very close proximity, month in, month out, often under extremely disagreeable conditions, are bound at times to get on one another’s nerves. Here there were additional sources of irritation. For a start, von Le Coq was obviously disappointed at having to surrender command of a highly successful expedition to Grünwedel, a man whose scholarship he respected but for whom he clearly had little time as an expedition leader. Grünwedel’s late arrival, as we know, had also exasperated him. However, the main source of conflict between the two men arose over von Le Coq’s penchant for the wholesale removal of temple contents, particularly wall-paintings. Grünwedel’s approach is best summed up in an obituary of him written some thirty years later by a fellow-scholar. This declares: ‘His expedition reports made it clear that he condemned, and himself avoided, the superficial examination of sites and the “grabbing” of conspicuous paintings and works of art. His aim was to approach each site scientifically, and study it in its entirety. Hence his procedure of making drawings and plans of all new finds. Otherwise, he felt, the removal of frescoes was nothing better than treasure-hunting and robbery.’

  It was an approach for which von Le Coq and Bartus had little time, and it led to disagreements. When von Le Coq wanted to remove to Berlin the entire painted dome of one small temple, Grünwedel objected. He did this ‘so energetically’, wrote von Le Coq, ‘that to have insisted on it would have meant the end of all friendly relations.…’ Grünwedel instead proposed that drawings and measurements should be taken so that a reconstruction could be made at the museum. He raised a similar objection over another painted dome. This von Le Coq was able to remove on the following expedition, which he led himself, though he remarks in his book that the paintings had greatly deteriorated in the intervening seven years. Another time, when Grünwedel objected to the removal of a statue which von Le Coq believed to be of considerable importance, the latter arranged for Bartus to pack it without the expedition leader’s knowledge and smuggle it to Germany.

  Only once did Grünwedel decide to conduct an excavation himself. With relish von Le Coq describes how his chief carefully picked himself a temple which seemed certain to yield rich finds. He goes on: ‘There he began to work, but as he could not make the men understand, and the dust – which in such operations always rises in clouds and is very trying – worried him too much he soon gave up in his attempt …’ Bartus, von Le Coq tells us with ill-disguised pleasure, then took over and – where Grünwedel had decided there was nothing to be found – ‘soon brought to light whole layers of splendid big pages written in early Indian script’.

  By now the chronic dysentery from which von Le Coq had been suffering, and which perhaps helps to explain his antagonism towards Grünwedel, was beginning to undermine his health. Lest he fall seriously ill in this inhospitable region he decided to leave at once for home. (Huth, it should be remembered, largely through neglecting his health, had died soon after returning from the first expedition.) Von Le Coq collected together all the manuscripts they had found and prepared to leave for Kashgar – though not without one final prod at the unfortunate Grünwedel. They had just heard that Stein was proposing to visit Turfan. Von Le Coq therefore urged his already flagging leader to press on quickly to Bezeklik – some three hundred and fifty gruelling miles to the east – and excavate its remaining temples before Stein did. After all, Grünwedel had expressly asked that they leave these to him. (Had he not, von Le Coq implied, then the contents of all of them – and not just one – might now be safely in Berlin.) With that he left, no doubt much to Grünwedel’s relief.

  11. Secrets of a Chinese Rubbish Dump

  * * *

  Apart from having to share a room with his horse (for fear of rustlers) and an anxious moment when the cart carrying the manuscripts nearly toppled into a raging torrent, von Le Coq reached Kashgar without incident, though much debilitated by his illness. As chance would have it, he just missed meeting his rival Stein, whose place – and bed no doubt – he took over in the ever-hospitable Macartney household. Stein had left Chini-Bagh for the south on July 23. Von Le Coq arrived there just a week later – a near miss in such a vast arena as Central Asia. He had been anxious to press on at once with his precious cargo, but the Macartneys insisted that he stayed for a while to recuperate and meanwhile arranged for a British officer, Captain J. D. Sherer, also en route for India, to accompany him over the Karakoram.

  Their respective roles of invalid and escort were to be dramatically reversed before long when, on a nineteen-thousand-foot pass in the Karakoram, Sherer collapsed with enteric fever and pneumonia and could go no further. At the same time von Le Coq learned from his Turki servant that their caravan men were planning that night to steal their horses and slip away in the darkness. He sat up all night with a loaded rifle, threatening to shoot anyone who deserted. Next morning, leaving Sherer with the tent, the bulk of their provisions and his own loyal servants, von Le Coq set off along the skeleton-strewn trail to get help from Ladakh. Nine days later, after crossing three high and dangerous passes and living on nothing but flour-and-snow-water paste, he reached the nearest village, from where he sent back to Sherer fuel and provisions. Suffering badly from exhaustion himself, he swallowed nineteen raw eggs to restore his strength before dispatching a runner to the Moravian doctor at Leh with a description of Sherer’s symptoms and an urgent request for medicines. He himself then set off back to where he had left Sherer, taking with him a hastily improvised stretcher on which the sick man, after a nightmare journey, was finally brought to Leh just before the snow closed the passes for the winter.

  For this act of devotion and endurance von Le Coq was to receive the medal of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, struck for the first time in gold. The award was made on the recommendation of Sir Francis Younghusband, at that time British Resident in Kashmir, and a man with first-hand experience of the Karakoram passes himself. According to von Le Coq’s obituary in The Times, written some twenty-four years later, Younghusband’s commendation concluded: ‘That Le Coq, a mere road acquaintance of Captain Sherer’s and a man of different nationality, should cross the Sassar and Murghi passes three times in fourteen days, the third time in a blinding snow-storm, the first-named pass being 17,840 feet high and the summit consisting of some three miles of perpetual glacier, appears to be an act of self-sacrifice and devotion deserving of exceptional recognition.’ Sherer (who was later to become a general) was so ill that he had to remain in the mission hospital at Leh for six months.

  Von Le Coq finally reached Berlin with the manuscripts in January 1907 after being away for two and a half years. By the time Grünwedel, Bartus and Pohrt rejoined him at the Ethnological Museum later that year, after further fruitful excavations of their own-though not at Bezeklik – the total haul of the Third German Expedition amounted to one hundred and twenty-eight cases of treasures – twenty-five more than the previous expedition had yielded. With such a wealth of material to catalogue, conserve, publish and display, it was a further six years before the Germans, this time led by von Le Coq, were to return for more.

  Meanwhile it was Stein’s turn again, with the Frenchman Pelliot following close on his heels. As it happened, while Stein was staying with the Macartneys, Pelliot was temporarily stuck at Tashkent in Russian Turkestan, having, like Grünwedel, managed to lose his baggage. A brilliant linguist, the Frenchman filled in his time learning Turki, the principal language of Chinese Turkestan. Also in Central Asia at this time – in Ladakh – was the redoubtable Hedin. But he, for the moment anyway, was safely out of the running, his eyes being fixed single-mindedly on Tibet.

  For his second expedition, Stein had taken a different route from India, travelling over the ‘Pamir Knot’ – grim meeting point of the Pamir, Karakoram and Hindu Kush – and cutting across the eastern corner of Afghanistan. This meant passing through ‘badlands’ where there was a seriou
s risk of the party being attacked, particularly in view of Stein’s now widespread reputation as a ‘treasure-hunter’. As a precaution he took with him a modest armoury of rifles and revolvers. Also included in his small party were two old friends from his first expedition, Surveyor Ram Singh, seconded from the Survey of India, and Muhammadju, his old caravan man from Yarkand, who had braved the winter passes to join the expedition, narrowly surviving a terrifying brush with an avalanche which killed seven of his companions. Finally there was his fox-terrier Dash, whose predecessor had accompanied the first expedition. The new expedition, which was to last two years and seven months, was jointly sponsored by the British Museum in London and the Government of India. The museum’s trustees had put up two-fifths of the cost and Calcutta the remainder. It was agreed that the material Stein brought back should be divided pro rata between the two sponsors. His principal target was Hedin’s mysterious site of Lou-lan, discovered, it will be recalled, thanks to a forgotten spade. To reach it would mean crossing the dreaded Lop desert, but Stein was determined to be the first archaeologist to reach it and to explore its secrets thoroughly.

  Although he intended to travel eastwards along the southern arm of the old Silk Road, his first port of call lay to the north, at Kashgar. There he would renew his friendship with the Macartneys, catch up on the gossip of Central Asia and, by previous arrangement with George Macartney, take on his payroll a young Chinese called Chiang Ssu-yeh. Chiang’s role was to teach Stein elementary conversational Chinese, act as interpreter with Chinese officials, and help him to evaluate any Chinese documents they might come across. The appointment was a great success, for Chiang proved a first-class companion, ever ready to face hardship and, moreover, taking a highly intelligent interest in the work. ‘He took to archaeological work like a duck to water,’ Stein was to write years later, ‘… How often have I longed … for my ever-alert and devoted Chinese comrade, now, alas, long departed to his ancestors!’

  The departure of their caravan from Kashgar was held up for a day by an event which much saddened the townspeople and in particular the small European community. This was the death of Father Hendricks, who had arrived in Kashgar in 1885 to open his one-man mission in a miserable mud-built hovel which served as both his bedroom and chapel. With his beard, dilapidated clerical hat and semi-Chinese costume he was a familiar and much-loved figure, although he made only one convert, an old Chinese shoemaker. His past was somewhat mysterious and in all his years in Kashgar he never received one letter from home. At first, his daily Masses were attended by a solitary Pole, who had found his way to Kashgar after exile in Siberia for taking part in the hanging of a Russian priest during a Polish uprising. One day, however, the two men fell out and the Pole was thereafter excluded from attending Mass. But undeterred, and unknown to the priest, he would crouch by the door with his ear to the keyhole, following the service.

  When Macartney first arrived in Kashgar he and Hendricks became firm friends. Not only was the Dutchman highly intelligent and a brilliant linguist but he was also a first-class source of local intelligence – ‘a living newspaper’, Stein once called him. Macartney had found Hendricks subsisting on scraps given him as charity. He invited the Dutchman to share his own meals and eventually to live at Chini-Bagh. The old priest, however, insisted on moving out when, in 1898, Macartney returned from leave in England with a bride. Macartney eventually persuaded the local authorities to find Hendricks a house, but the Russian consul-general Petrovsky, who had a curious dislike of the priest, put pressure on the Chinese to withdraw the offer. This had resulted in popular demonstrations in support of Hendricks. Finally he was found a home in a squalid hovel in town.

  It was here, on the morning that Stein was due to leave for the south, that Macartney found his old friend dead from cancer. ‘Alone in his ramshackle house he had persistently rejected all offers of nursing and help,’ wrote Stein in Ruins of Desert Cathay. ‘So there was no one to witness the end. It was a pathetic close to a life which was strangely obscure even to the old Abbé’s best friends.’ Petrovsky, who had not spoken one word to Macartney between November 1899 and June 1902 – let alone to Father Hendricks – had now retired, and the new Russian consul-general, a more amiable man, undertook (for reasons that are not clear) to arrange the old priest’s funeral for the next day. By the following morning the coffin was still far from ready so the Russian and several of his Cossack escort visited the carpenter’s shop to hurry things along, first fortifying themselves with plenty of drink. When the coffin was finished, the body – ‘terribly reduced by long sufferings’, Stein recounts – was transferred reverently to it by the Cossacks who, bareheaded, carried it through the noon heat to the Russian cemetery.

  That afternoon Stein and his party set off on the long journey along the southern arm of the old Silk Road. Because of the sweltering summer heat they soon began to find daytime travelling unbearable, and decided instead to move by night, lying up during the day. At first they tried sheltering in kung-kuans, the official Chinese rest-houses, in the villages where they halted. However, for ceremonial reasons these always faced south and thus absorbed the full heat of the midday sun. Moreover they were invariably filthy, so Stein and his men sought refuge instead in the homes of well-to-do villagers. During these brief halts Stein worked on the remaining page proofs of Ancient Khotan, the weighty, two-volume account of his first expedition, mailing them off in batches to Oxford, via Ferghana in Russian Central Asia.

  Although Lou-Ian was his principal target, Stein aimed first to excavate, or re-excavate, a number of other sites on the way, including Khadalik, Domoko, Rawak, Niya and Miran. There was little point, he knew, in hurrying. Lou-Ian lay in the waterless and uninhabited heart of Marco Polo’s ‘Great Desert of Lop’ and could only be reached and worked safely in winter. Moreover, thanks to George Macartney in Kashgar, Stein was kept fully briefed about the movements of his rivals via the native mail service. So it was that after five months of successful digging his heavily laden caravan finally reached the small and isolated oasis of Charkhlik, easternmost of the southern route towns. It was from here that Stein planned to launch his raid across the frozen sands to Lou-Ian.

  His caravan for the desert crossing consisted of his own small party, two local guides, fifty labourers, his seven baggage camels and eighteen locally hired ones. Each camel carried up to five hundred pounds’ weight of ice, the expedition’s sole source of water once they had crossed the Tarim. In addition, Stein hired thirty donkeys to ferry more ice in bags to a point two days beyond the last available water. There it was dumped, carefully stacked to face the sub-arctic winds which howled across the desert from Mongolia. Fa-hsien and Hsuan-tsang had both in their day crossed this desert, as also had Marco Polo, and all three were convinced that it was haunted. ‘For this reason bands of travellers make a point of keeping very close together,’ wrote the Venetian. But more recently – some five years before – Hedin had crossed it, and Stein had the benefit of his map.

  Despite Macartney’s reports on his rivals’ movements, Stein was nonetheless apprehensive lest Pelliot had reached Lou-lan first. He wrote to a friend: ‘It is an anxious thought, you can imagine, whether I shall find the French there already.… We shall then have to find a modus vivendi.’ The slow journey, never more than fourteen miles a day, was a grim one for both men and camels. When the latter developed sore feet these were ‘re-soled’ by the ancient but effective Taklamakan remedy of stitching pieces of leather to their skin. At times the desert air was so clear that Stein could see simultaneously the snow-capped peaks of the T’ien Shan, two hundred miles to the north, and the Kun Lun slowly receding to the south.

  On the eleventh day, when there was still no sign of Lou-lan, and the party’s spirits seemed to be sinking, to boost morale Stein offered a generous prize in silver coins to the first man to sight one of the ruined structures. The pace of the caravan noticeably quickened, and before many hours had passed there was a shout from one of the camel men
who had climbed to the top of a small feature. He pointed excitedly to a tiny blob on the horizon to the east. The prize was his, for Stein was able to confirm with the aid of binoculars that it was a ruined stupa. They had reached Lou-lan, remotest of all the desert sites. ‘What a desolate wilderness, bearing everywhere the impress of death,’ Stein wrote to a friend. As he and his party looked around them they found it hard to believe that this totally lifeless tract had once nurtured a large and thriving community. He need not have worried about Pelliot. The place was utterly deserted. No one had been near it since Hedin’s visit in 1901.

  Stein knew that Lou-lan, like Dandan-uilik, he owed to Hedin. Not only had the Swede discovered it, but it was the remarkable accuracy of his map which had got them there safely. Although they had approached it by different routes, Stein’s own triangulation work and astronomical observations fixed Lou-lan in a position less than one mile in latitude, and a fraction more in longitude, from where Hedin showed it. It was, Stein wrote gratefully, ‘a variance truly trifling on such ground’.

  For the next eleven days he and his men dug among the sand-filled buildings, always in the teeth of icy gales, keeping themselves from dying of exposure by burning the bleached and desiccated trunks of centuries-dead trees. They were to discover no great fresco masterpieces, no colossal sculptures. Unlike Bezeklik and Kyzil, Karakhoja and Rawak – all of which were religious centres – Lou-lan was a garrison town. This much had already been shown by Hedin’s fruitful if amateur probings. But Stein’s more systematic excavations were to add graphically to the story. For they were to reveal a poignant sequel – that of a small imperial outpost totally cut off from the shrinking empire and left slowly to die.