Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  During his excavations, of course, Stein was unaware of the message contained on the scraps of paper and wooden slips he discovered. He could not read Chinese, and he had left his Chinese assistant Chiang – protesting loudly – at the village of Abdal, fearing that the harsh desert crossing might prove too much for him. As it was, many of them were written in archaic Chinese, and it would take Chavannes and other scholars years of patient work to decipher all these fragments and piece together their meaning.

  As we already know from Hedin’s finds, Lou-lan had once been a flourishing military and mercantile community placed in this remote spot to watch over China’s western frontier and to safeguard the free flow of goods along the Silk Road. It was a perpetual struggle and one which, on the collapse of the Han dynasty in AD 220, the Chinese temporarily lost to their Hunnish foes. Many of the dated documents which Stein brought to light belong to the middle of the third century when the Western Chin emperor was struggling to reassert control over the western regions – a campaign in which the Lou-lan garrison played a key strategic role.

  On an ancient rubbish dump (Stein was a connoisseur of these) he came upon military records which provide occasional glimpses of this frontier warfare, including reports of actions on distant fronts. That these efforts were doomed to failure we know from the Chinese annals, for the new dynasty was not strong enough to control China proper for long, let alone the outlying regions. Eventually, as Stein’s rubbish heap was to prove, the barbarians succeeded in severing Lou-lan from all communication with the distant capital. But it did not die immediately, having long since learned to be independent of outside supplies or orders. Indeed, although it had lost all touch with home, the tiny garrison soldiered on for a surprising number of years. This we know from one revealing piece of evidence recovered by Stein. It is the last of the many dated documents he found at Lou-lan. Written in the year 330, it records a payment made to a barbarian (probably a mercenary) on the authority of the Emperor Chien-hsing. No one had told the beleaguered garrison commander that not only had this emperor ceased to rule fourteen years before, but that his whole dynasty had been swept away.

  There is a curious, latter-day footnote to the story of Lou-lan. For it is not far from where this little outpost once stood that seventeen centuries later, in the 1960s, China’s defence chiefs chose to site their nuclear weapons – pointing towards their new foe beyond the Great Wall, the Russians. Chinese historians today are particularly bitter about the documentary material removed from Lou-lan by Hedin and Stein because knowledge of this period of their nation’s past is so meagre.

  Lou-lan had two other surprises for Stein. One was the discovery of a metal tape-measure which Sven Hedin had left behind in 1901, and which Stein was able to return to him at a dinner given in London by the Royal Geographical Society. The other was the unexpected arrival on Christmas Eve of his ‘dak’ man, or mail runner, carrying letters from Macartney and from home. Having trekked all the way westwards to Khotan with Stein’s outward mail, he had then – after only one night’s rest – covered the normal thirty days’ journey back to Abdal in a record twenty-one. Although he had no clear idea of Stein’s whereabouts, he nonetheless set out across the desert with a local tracker to look for him. On the fifth day their modest supply of ice had run out. Had they not found the party on the sixth, both men would undoubtedly have perished. Yet the ‘dak’ man’s first request to Stein was that he should examine the seals on Macartney’s letters to make sure they were intact. Grateful to him for the happy Christmas he had thus ensured, Stein feasted the men on what modest luxuries his larder could provide. That night he sat up late in his tent reading his mail by flickering candlelight, momentarily forgetting the searing cold and the pain from his badly chapped hands.

  At Lou-lan he made one other discovery of significance. In addition to the rich haul of Chinese official documents and papers, he also brought to light quantities of Kharoshthi tablets. This was something of a surprise to Stein, who wrote afterwards: ‘I had scarcely ventured to hope for records in ancient Indian script and language so far away to the east.’ These records indicated, Stein explains, that the Chinese military authorities had allowed the indigenous administration to continue undisturbed in the hands of the local ruling family. The discovery of these Kharoshthi documents raised another interesting possibility. They seemed to indicate that, at some time in its history, Lou-lan – on the very frontiers of China – had served as a far-flung eastern outpost of an ancient Indian empire of which modern scholars had no knowledge.

  By now Stein’s ice supply was almost exhausted. It was time to move on again. His first call, after collecting Chiang from Abdal, was at Miran where, in a ruined Buddhist temple, he uncovered a series of magnificent murals, including one delicately painted dado of winged angels. ‘I felt completely taken by surprise,’ wrote Stein of this latter find. How on earth, he asked, could such classical depictions of cherabims have found their way to ‘the desolate shores of Lop-nor, in the very heart of innermost Asia’? Nor was this the only painting of distinctly western character that he found at this site. Some of them were signed with the single name ‘Titus’ and Stein could only conclude that perhaps the artist was a Roman, trained in the classical tradition, who had somehow made his way across Turkestan to the borders of China. (Indeed, there may even have been a Roman town at that time in Chinese Central Asia. Such is the belief of one American sinologist.)

  ‘During the next few days,’ wrote Stein, ‘I often felt tempted to believe myself rather among the ruins of some villa in Syria or some other eastern province of the Roman empire than those of a Buddhist sanctuary on the very confines of China.’ But the icy winter winds, sometimes turning to gales, were a constant reminder of where he really was. Having stripped Miran of its finest frescoes, Stein packed these and his finds of the previous four months and dispatched them by camel to Macartney in Kashgar, a journey which would take two months. Finally, on February 21, 1907, he himself set out once more across the frozen Lop desert, this time heading north-east, for Tun-huang, some three hundred and eighty miles away. It was a journey which would cause the Chinese, in the words of one of their scholars, ‘to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred’.

  12. Tun-huang – the Hidden Library

  * * *

  Locked away in the heart of the Gobi desert, four days’ camel ride from the nearest town, lies one of the least-known of China’s many wonders, the ‘Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ at Tun-huang. Here, carved in irregular rows into the cliff face and filled with magnificent wall-paintings and sculptures, are more than four hundred ancient rock temples and chapels. The greatest and most extensive – it stretches for a mile – of all Central Asia’s ming-oi, or rock temple complexes, it was for centuries renowned throughout the Buddhist world as a centre for prayer and thanksgiving. The reason for this is its geographical position. Situated in a small green valley and surrounded by towering sand dunes, it stands some twelve miles south-west of the township of Tun-huang, which, from Han times onwards, served as China’s gateway to the West. Tun-huang, which means ‘Blazing Beacon’, was thus the last caravan halt in China proper for travellers setting out along the old Silk Road. Pilgrims, merchants and soldiers about to leave China for the spiritual darkness and physical dangers of the Taklamakan desert prayed at Tun-huang’s shrines for deliverance from the goblins and other perils ahead. In the same way, travellers reaching Tun-huang from the West gave thanks there for their safe passage through the dreaded desert. Because it was the point where the northern and southern arms of the Silk Road converged, all travellers coming to or from China by the overland route had to pass through Tun-huang. As a result of this heavy caravan and pilgrim traffic, the oasis itself acquired considerable prosperity over the centuries, for its markets offered the caravanners their last chance to lay in supplies of food and water before passing out through the celebrated Jade Gate towards the first of the Taklamakan oases.

  The rock temples of Tun-huang, and the o
rigin of their name, are said to date from AD 366 when the monk Lo-tsun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas in a cloud of glory. He persuaded a rich and pious pilgrim to have one of the smaller caves painted by a local artist and then dedicated as a shrine to his own safe return. Others followed suit, and for hundreds of years more and more temples and chapels were hewn out of the cliff and decorated in the belief that this would ensure the donor protection during his travels. At one time there were more than a thousand of these grottoes, of which four hundred and sixty-nine remain today. At the height of Tun-huang’s glory numerous monasteries, too, stood among the protecting groves of poplars and elms which face the honeycomb of caves. In addition to the paintings and sculptures, many inscriptions have survived which recall the pious hopes of their donors. One of these, put up by an infantry colonel on the 2nd of August in the year 947, invokes the goddess Kuan-yin’s protection ‘so that the district will prosper and the routes to the east and to the west will be open and free, and that in the north the Tartars and in the south the Tibetans will cease their depredations and revolts’.

  Unlike so many oasis-towns further along the Silk Road which had to be abandoned to the barbarians or to the desert, Tun-huang and its cave temples survived the ups and downs of the centuries more or less intact. Enshrined there today are the paintings and sculptures of more than fifteen hundred years. ‘One of the richest museums in the world,’ one western art historian has called it. ‘A great art gallery in the desert’ is Mildred Cable’s description. But because of its remoteness, until the early years of this century very few western travellers had so much as set eyes on it, and even now only a privileged trickle ever get to see it. Prejevalsky visited it in the year 1879, as also, by chance, did members of a Hungarian geological expedition.

  Although Stein had no plans to excavate there, or to remove any of its magnificent wall-paintings, he had long dreamed of visiting the site after hearing of its splendours many years earlier from Lajos Loczy, a geographer accompanying the Hungarian expedition. On the morning of March 12, 1907, travel-stained and weary, and in the teeth of an icy buran, Stein entered the town, never thinking for a second that Tun-huang would be the scene of his greatest discovery. Indeed, at that moment his thoughts were directed towards something else he had just found in the frozen desert on the way from Miran. This was a line of ancient watchtowers which, he believed, once formed part of a long-lost westward extension to the Great Wall referred to in the Chinese annals. His intention, therefore, was to pay a brief visit to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, replenish his supplies of food and water, then return to the Lop desert for further investigation and excavation of this mysterious wall.

  But very soon after arriving in Tun-huang he heard an extraordinary story from an Urumchi trader to the effect that a Taoist priest called Wang Yuan-lu, who had appointed himself guardian of the sacred caves, had some years earlier accidentally stumbled upon a vast hoard of ancient manuscripts walled up in one of them. Determined to investigate this, Stein wasted no time and set out across the twelve miles of desert for the caves. On arriving there, he found that Wang had left on a begging tour of neighbouring oases to raise money for his restoration work which, Stein winced to see, had already been crudely begun. The priest, moreover, was not expected back for several weeks, and the key to the manuscript cave (which had been fitted with a door since its discovery) was firmly in his possession. Stein’s enquiries, pursued through his Chinese assistant Chiang, suggested that the manuscripts amounted to ‘several cartloads’. The discovery had been reported to the Chinese authorities at Lanchou, and it was the Viceroy who, after seeing specimens of the manuscripts, had ordered them to be kept securely under lock and key.

  Stein’s excitement need hardly be described. He had found what appeared to be a long-lost extension to the Great Wall of China, he had stumbled upon an unknown library, and now he was wandering through cave after cave of magnificent paintings and sculptures which ever since he was a schoolboy in Hungary he had dreamed of seeing. It was while hurrying enthralled from grotto to grotto, with Chiang close on his heels, that he ran fortuitously into a young Ho-shang, or Buddhist monk, who, it transpired, knew of the whereabouts of a manuscript which Wang had loaned temporarily to one of the shrines. ‘It was a beautifully preserved roll of paper about a foot high and perhaps fifteen yards long,’ wrote Stein in Ruins of Desert Cathay. Together he and Chiang carefully unrolled it. Its text was written in Chinese characters, but Chiang was forced to admit he could make no sense of it. It would not be the last time that Stein would curse his own ignorance of written Chinese. However, one thing was now certain. If they wanted to examine the rest of this amazing find, there was nothing for it but to await the return of Wang. In the meantime it seemed wise to maintain their friendship with the obliging priest who had produced the scroll. Stein decided on a judicious offering, but here Chiang advised stealth. Too large a sum, he pointed out, would be likely to arouse suspicions about their motives. They finally proffered him a small piece of silver. ‘The gleam of satisfaction on the young Ho-shang’s face’, Stein recalled, ‘showed that the people of Tun-huang, whatever else their weaknesses, were not much given to spoiling poor monks.’

  Having done all he could at Tun-huang in Wang’s absence, Stein set out once again into the still-frozen desert to pick up the trail of his mysterious wall. He was accompanied by what he described as ‘the craziest crew I ever led to digging – so torpid and enfeebled by opium were they’. Stein was lucky to have even them, however, as a rebellion by a fanatical Moslem group some forty years before had severely depleted the local population, resulting in an acute labour shortage. During the next few weeks, although Stein’s thoughts were never far from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and Wang’s cache of manuscripts, he and his motley team of diggers made a succession of important discoveries which proved beyond question that the ruined watchtowers they had stumbled upon were the remains of an extension to the Great Wall dating back some two thousand years. They had located, moreover, the original site of China’s famous Jade Gate, that historic frontier post through which all incoming and outgoing traffic along the Silk Road had to pass. The American archaeologist Langdon Warner, whose own Central Asian enterprises we shall look at later, has described Stein’s finding of this stretch of the wall as ‘one of the most dramatic discoveries of our time, and one which has had the most far-reaching effect on elucidating the early history of China and Central Asia’. On a subsequent expedition, Stein was to follow this wall, which he likened to the Roman limes, for a further three hundred miles to Etsin-gol, near the present Mongolian frontier. ‘I feel at times as I ride along the wall to examine new towers as if I were going to inspect posts still held by the living,’ he wrote to friends in England. ‘Two thousand years seems so brief a time when the sweepings from the soldiers’ huts still lie practically on the surface in front of the door.…’

  By the time Stein returned to Tun-huang, laden with relics and documents chronicling frontier life in Han times, the all-important Wang Yuan-lu had arrived back from his begging tour. But Stein was forced to bide his time for a further week as the annual religious fair which filled the valley with thousands of townsfolk and villagers from nearby oases was now in full swing. Finally, on May 21, 1907, he returned to the sacred caves where he found the Abbot Wang, as he is sometimes called, awaiting him. So began what was to be hailed in Europe as Stein’s greatest triumph, and denounced by the Chinese as an act of shameless trickery, not to say of theft. Like the Elgin Marbles controversy, that surrounding the Tun-huang library may very well rage on for ever, but here we are concerned only with how Stein and Chiang persuaded the guardian of the manuscripts to part with that priceless trove.

  Stein records his impressions of the Abbot Wang at their first brief meeting on that May morning thus: ‘He looked a very queer person, extremely shy and nervous, with an occasional expression of cunning which was far from encouraging.’ Stein added: ‘It was clear from the first that he would
be a difficult person to handle.’ Of course, nothing was said to Wang about his hoard of manuscripts. Stein – or so the little priest was allowed to believe – had come to Tun-huang to survey the principal shrines and photograph some of the wall-paintings. Indeed, it was while he was taking photographs near the side-chapel in which Wang had discovered the manuscripts that Stein noticed to his dismay that the secret chamber containing them had now been bricked up. Previously it had been secured only by a rough wooden door. At the same time an ominous rumour reached Stein’s ear that the Viceroy of Kansu, in whose province the caves stood, had given orders for the entire library to be moved to Lanchou. His hopes of ever seeing the manuscripts, let alone of acquiring any of them, were beginning to look bleak. Anxious to discover what precisely was going on, Stein dispatched the shrewd Chiang to see Wang in the grotto where he lived. After a long absence Chiang returned, bearing somewhat more encouraging news. In the first place, the entrance to the cave containing the manuscripts had been walled up by Wang merely to keep out inquisitive pilgrims during the religious festivities of the previous week. Secondly, after a random selection of the manuscripts had been examined at Lanchou, the provincial capital, officials there had decided to leave the remainder where they were, in the charge of their self-appointed guardian. They were, Stein wrote, ‘evidently dismayed at the cost of transport’. Whatever their reason, it would appear that the provincial authorities were well aware of the discovery of the walled-up library at Tun-huang.

  Stein and Chiang, whom Stein liked to refer to as ‘my literatus’, now held a council of war to decide upon a strategy by which to win the confidence – and, hopefully, the co-operation – of the priest. During Chiang’s meetings with Wang he had asked him whether they might be allowed to see the manuscripts. The priest had been non-committal, but when Chiang held out the prospect of a ‘liberal donation’ to the shrine he was so zealously restoring to what he believed to be its original glory, Wang seemed more receptive. That is until Chiang, exceeding his instructions from Stein, hinted that his employer might be interested in actually purchasing some of the manuscripts. At this, Wang became highly perturbed – a mixture of religious scruple and the fear of being found out, it seemed to Stein. Chiang quickly dropped the subject. ‘To rely on the temptation of money alone as a means of overcoming his scruples’, Stein writes in the Ruins of Desert Cathay, ‘was manifestly useless.’ It would be equally futile, on the other hand, to try to present to this semi-literate priest archaeological arguments for being allowed to see, or acquire, his manuscripts.