Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Stein decided upon a two-pronged strategy. Knowing that it was the pride and joy of the priest’s life, he first asked Wang whether they might be allowed to see over the shrine he was so industriously restoring. It would incidentally enable them to study at closer quarters the lay-out of the cave. As he had expected, the suggestion was accepted with alacrity. Stein describes vividly his guided tour. ‘As he took me through the lofty antechapel with its substantial woodwork, all new and lavishly gilt and painted, and through the high passage or porch giving access and light to the main cella, I could not help glancing to the right where an ugly patch of unplastered brickwork then still masked the door of the hidden chapel.’

  Stein knew that this was hardly the moment to express any curiosity about what might lie behind that fresh brickwork Instead he had to show a polite yet convincing interest in the priest’s restoration programme, and at the same time conceal his private horror on observing the huge and hideous new sculptures which this one-time soldier turned holy man had commissioned for the shrine. These, Stein added, showed ‘only too plainly how low sculptural art had sunk in Tun-huang’. Yet he could not but admire the single-mindedness of this simple Chinese peasant ‘whose devotion to this shrine and to the task of religious merit which he had set himself in restoring it, was unmistakably genuine’. From the extreme modesty of Wang’s lifestyle, and everything that Chiang had heard about him in Tun-huang, it was quite clear that every penny he had left after providing for himself and his two acolytes went into restoring the shrine.

  Having thus established some degree of rapport with Wang, Stein played his second card. He had been reminded ‘by this quaint priest, with his curious mixture of pious zeal, naive ignorance, and astute tenacity of purpose’ of the early Buddhist pilgrims who had travelled westwards along the Silk Road in search of the holy places of their religion. Perhaps if he mentioned the name of his own adopted patron saint, Hsuan-tsang, beloved also by so many Chinese, it just might touch a similar chord in Wang’s affections. At once ‘a gleam of lively interest’ appeared in the priest’s eyes. It soon transpired that both men held Hsuan-tsang in equal veneration, although their concepts of him differed vastly, Wang seeing him apparently as a sort of ‘saintly Munchausen’. But such divergences hardly mattered. Stein had found what he needed. It was the way into the little priest’s confidence, and thence into the cave, but it would need a great deal of time and patience. Stein began by telling Wang, ‘as well as my poor Chinese would permit’ of his devotion to the saintly traveller. Warming to his theme, he went on to relate ‘how I had followed his footsteps from India for over ten thousand li across inhospitable mountains and deserts; how in the course of this pilgrimage I had traced to its present ruins, however inaccessible, many a sanctuary he had piously visited.…’

  The effect of this was instantaneous. The little priest, bursting with pride, led Stein outside to a newly built verandah which he had commissioned a local artist to decorate with legendary scenes from the saintly pilgrim’s life. Enthusiastically, Wang pointed out and explained each picture – Hsuan-tsang forcing a dragon which had swallowed his horse to disgorge it, Hsuan-tsang saving himself from a demon by the force of his prayers, and so on. However, there was one episode which Stein realised contained an omen which might have useful implications for him. This showed Hsuan-tsang standing on the bank of a raging torrent, his horse, laden with sacred Buddhist manuscripts, beside him. A large turtle swims towards him, apparently to help carry the holy writ safely across the river. ‘Here was clearly a reference to the twenty pony-loads of sacred books and relics which the historical traveller managed to carry away safely from India,’ Stein wrote. ‘But would the pious guardian read this obvious lesson aright, and be willing to acquire spiritual merit by letting me take back to the old home of Buddhism some of the ancient manuscripts which chance had placed in his keeping?’ Stein decided to keep this card up his sleeve for use at an appropriate moment. He left Chiang behind with the priest in the hope that he might now be able to persuade his fellow-countryman at least to lend them some of the manuscripts for study. But Wang remained hesitant, merely promising that he might do so later. Chiang reported this back to Stein. ‘There was nothing for me to do,’ Stein wrote, ‘but wait.’

  But not for very long, as it turned out. Late that same night Chiang came silently to Stein’s tent and excitedly produced several manuscripts from beneath his coat. Stein could see at a glance that the rolled texts were very old. Concealing them again under his clothes – for the priest had insisted on absolute secrecy – Chiang slipped away to his little monk’s cell at the foot of a huge seated Buddha cut out of the cliff-face. He spent the remainder of the night poring over the manuscripts, endeavouring to identify their texts and pinpoint their possible dates. At dawn he returned to Stein’s tent, his face ‘expressing both triumph and amazement’. He reported elatedly that these Chinese translations of Buddhist sutras bore colophons stating that they had been translated by Hsuan-tsang himself from originals he had brought back from India.

  Here, surely, was an amazing portent – a ‘quasi-divine hint’, Stein called it – that even the nervous Wang could hardly fail to recognise. After all, when the little priest removed the manuscripts from his secret hoard he could not possibly have known of their link with Hsuan-tsang. Chiang hastened away to break the news to him. There could only be one possible explanation, he assured Wang. From beyond the grave, Hsuan-tsang had himself chosen this moment to reveal these sacred Buddhist texts to Stein so that ‘his admirer and disciple from distant India’ could return them whence they came. Chiang had no need to press the point. The omen was not wasted on the pious priest. Within hours the wall blocking the recess where the manuscripts lay had been taken down, and before the day was out Stein was peering into the secret chamber by the light of Wang’s primitive oil lamp. The scene reminds one of another, some fifteen years later, when Howard Carter gazed into the tomb of Tutankhamun by the light of a flickering candle.

  To an archaeologist, what Stein saw was no less staggering. ‘The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open’, he recounts. ‘Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet.’ It was, in the words of Sir Leonard Woolley, the discoverer of Ur, ‘an unparalleled archaeological scoop’. The Times Literary Supplement declared: ‘Few more wonderful discoveries have been made by any archaeologist.’

  Stein could see at a glance that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for him and Chiang to examine this mountain of manuscripts while they remained stacked inside the secret chamber. This ‘black hole’, as he called it, was so cramped that there was hardly room for the two of them to squeeze in, let alone work there. The obvious solution was to shift all the manuscripts to the temple’s more spacious cella for scrutiny there. But Wang was quick to point out that they would be in full view there of any members of his congregation who happened to drop in to pray at this shrine whose restoration their alms had paid for. Word would get around like lightning that the shrine’s sacred texts were being defiled by foreigners. Wang insisted, therefore, that he himself must remove the manuscripts from the chamber, a bundle at a time, and convey them discreetly to a small room nearby, where Stein and Chiang might examine them at leisure and unseen. Before embarking on this marathon task Stein searched for some clue which might indicate just when it was that the guardians of this ancient library had walled it up. Judging stylistically from what survived of the paintings which had once covered the entrance to the secret chamber, he cautiously estimated that this could not have happened any later than the twelfth century. Subsequent research, based upon those manuscripts found to bear dates, indicates that it took place even earlier, perhaps around AD 1000. The date when the library was walled up is one question, but why is another. It seems probable that it was done to save the
sacred texts from falling into the hands of barbarian tribes who at that time threatened to overrun Tun-huang, and probably did, although there are other theories.

  Once Wang could see that Stein’s examination of the manuscripts could be carried out without risk of detection, he became bolder and began to hump load after load from the ‘black hole’ – known more prosaically to present-day scholars as ‘cave 17’ – to what Stein called his ‘reading room’. Initial attempts to list all the manuscripts soon had to be abandoned. ‘It would have required a whole staff of learned scribes’, Stein explains in Ruins of Desert Cathay, ‘to deal properly with such a deluge.’ He examined the manuscripts for signs of damp, the destroyer of so many of man’s written records. Luckily, there was not the slightest trace. As Stein observes, it would be hard to find a better storeroom for manuscripts than a sealed cave in the middle of a moistureless desert.

  As day after day their work at Tun-huang continued, not only did countless manuscripts in Chinese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Runic-Turki and Uighur, as well as in unknown languages, emerge from the secret chamber, but also a rich harvest of Buddhist paintings. Some, from their triangular tops and floating streamers, Stein recognised at once as temple banners, others as votive hangings. All were painted on incredibly fine silk or on paper. Many were badly crushed, their creases ‘ironed’ into place through lying for nine centuries beneath the heap of manuscripts. The importance of these paintings lies in their age, and consequent rarity, rather than in their quality. Paintings of the T’ang Dynasty, as these all turned out to be, are exceptionally rare – even the products of local ateliers such as these. Most were destroyed in the mid-ninth century during a wave of anti-clericalism which resulted in the closure or destruction of some forty thousand Buddhist temples and shrines throughout China. Fortuitously Tun-huang fell into Tibetan hands in AD 781 and remained in their possession for the next sixty-seven years. Its temples and shrines thus escaped the destruction wrought elsewhere in China at that time.

  Some of the silken banners found among Wang’s manuscripts proved to be so long when finally unfurled, that scholars believe they could only have been designed to hang from the tops of the cliffs at Tun-huang. Most of the paintings on silk Stein found it impossible to open out as they had been compressed over the centuries into hard, fragile little packets by the crushing weight of the manuscripts. Later with skill akin to brain surgery, they were successfully unfolded in the laboratories of the British Museum after first being chemically treated. It was an operation which was to take the best part of seven years.

  By now Stein and Chiang had established a regular routine of removing each night to Stein’s tent a selection of manuscripts and paintings for ‘closer study’. Wang raised no objections to this, and before long had even agreed to allow certain categories of manuscripts to be earmarked for transfer to a ‘temple of learning in Ta-Ying-Kuo’ (England) in exchange for a substantial donation to his temple. He had, as Stein candidly admitted, ‘been gradually led from one concession to another, and we took care not to leave him much time for reflection’. One night, however, Wang appeared to get cold feet about the whole affair, for he suddenly locked up the shrine and disappeared off to Tun-huang oasis. Stein and Chiang spent an anxious week wondering what he was up to and whether, on his return, his attitude towards them would have changed. Their fears proved groundless. The little priest had evidently been reassured by contact with his patrons that his secret had not leaked out and that, as Stein put it, ‘his spiritual influence, such as it was, had suffered no diminution.’ From then on things suddenly got easier, and more and more manuscripts passed into Stein’s hands, including Buddhist texts in Chinese which Wang had previously excluded from any negotiations. In an account of the episode published later in his On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, Stein recalls: ‘On his return, he was almost ready to recognise that it was a pious act on my part to rescue for Western scholarship all those relics of ancient Buddhist literature and art which were otherwise bound to get lost sooner or later through local indifference.’

  The saga was now all but over, although Wang made one last condition. For his own protection, he insisted that the transaction should be kept secret for as long as Stein remained in China. It was a promise that Stein was only too happy to make, not least because he hoped to acquire further manuscripts from Wang’s secret hoard. Wang and his visitors parted in perfect amity, Stein noting that the priest’s face ‘had resumed once more its look of shy but self-contented serenity’. Indeed, by now he had such confidence in the Englishman’s discretion that when, four months later, Stein and Chiang were again in the area he readily agreed to part with a further two hundred bundles of manuscripts. Despite this, Stein felt unable to relax while his precious booty remained on Chinese soil. As he wrote long afterwards: ‘My time for true relief came when, some sixteen months later, all the twenty-four cases, heavy with manuscripts, and five more filled with carefully packed paintings, embroideries and similar art relics, had safely been deposited at the British Museum in London.’ All this had cost the taxpayer a mere £130 he noted with satisfaction in a letter to a friend.

  Stein’s second expedition was still far from over, however. Although his triumphant progress so far – the superb Miran wall paintings, the extension to the Great Wall and, now, his spectacular purchases from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas – would have been more than enough to satisfy most archaeologists, Stein pressed on indefatigably. There was further serious work to be done on the Great Wall; large areas of the Nan Shan mountains to be mapped; and fresh sites along the northern arm of the Silk Road to be explored and possibly excavated. This was Stein’s first opportunity to visit the ruins north of the Taklamakan, and he was particularly eager to see what his German rivals had been up to at the highly prized sites around Turfan. When eventually he reached the depression, and toured the sites which Grünwedel, von Le Coq and Bartus had cleared, he was dismayed by what he considered to be the crudeness of their methods. While not a hint of any criticism appears in his published works, Stein does not spare the Germans in private correspondence. To a close friend in England he complained: ‘Big temples, monasteries, etc, were dug into with the method of a scholarly treasure-seeker, barely explored with any approach to archaeological thoroughness. The places most likely to yield “finds” had been reached by this system.…’ he added. Not for nothing perhaps did Sir Mortimer Wheeler once declare: ‘Archaeology is not a science, it is a vendetta.’ In his Ruins of Desert Cathay, on the other hand, Stein refers politely to Grünwedel as ‘a high authority on Buddhist art’ and von Le Coq as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’. He also points out – evidently for the benefit of the niggardly authorities in Calcutta – that his rivals’ excavations were conducted ‘with the help of abundant State means’, not to mention the personal patronage of the Kaiser.

  Stein decided to leave these violated sites alone. But he did discover a small group of temples at Kichik-hassar, or ‘Little Castle’, which the Germans had left intact, and from these he removed fragments of frescoes and stucco, and also Chinese, Uighur and Tibetan manuscripts, before moving westwards to Karashahr. At Shikchin, some fifteen miles south-west of the town, he paid a most fruitful visit to a rich ming-oi site, which had been only briefly explored by the Germans. Again he was dismayed at what he found. ‘What distressing traces they have left behind!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘Fine fragments of stucco sculptures flung outside or on the scrap heap; statues too big for transport left exposed to the weather and the tender mercies of wayfarers, etc. I cannot guess what made them dig here with quite an inadequate number of labourers, and still less this indifference to the fate of all that was left in situ.’ He adds, with more than a trace of self-righteousness, that despite the far greater physical difficulties of digging in what he calls ‘the true desert’ he always spent time and labour tidying up afterwards. One wonders whether this particular site, left looking (in the words of Stein’s biographer Jeannette Mirsky) like’a hit-and-runac
cident’, was not in fact one of those explored by the handyman Bartus during one of his solo forays. Stein nonetheless left the site well satisfied with his ten heavy cases of antiquities.

  This particular temple complex has, somewhat confusingly, come to be known as Ming-oi, although it is merely one of several such ming-oi (‘a thousand rooms’) excavated by archaeologists around the desert perimeter. As von Le Coq explains, there is no such place as Ming-oi, and the Turki term should be linked to the nearest inhabited place – thus the ming-oi of Kyzil, Kumtura, Shorchuk, etc. Anyone seeking to find a place called Ming-oi on the map of Chinese Turkestan will be disappointed, although the British Museum still seems convinced that it exists.

  Stein’s two-and-a-half-year expedition was by no means over even now, but there is no space to recount more than a few highlights. One of these was his bold southward crossing of the Taklamakan, a far more hazardous undertaking than the reverse. When Hedin crossed it he had first followed the northward-flowing Keriya-daria which ensured his water supply well into the desert. After that he knew, provided he continued to march northwards, he would sooner or later strike the eastward-flowing Tarim. A successful southward crossing, on the other hand, depended on hitting the ‘mouth’ of the Keriya-daria, a feat of desert navigation requiring absolute precision. The last few days of Stein’s crossing were indeed anxious ones, and water had to be severely rationed. Following this exploit came two personal calamities. The first was when one of his faithful Indian assistants – Naik Ram Singh – was suddenly and agonisingly struck blind with glaucoma. Entrusted with the mission of photographing and removing further frescoes from Miran while Stein was in Khotan packing his collections, Ram Singh had doggedly insisted on continuing with his task when the sight of one eye was lost, and in spite of terrible pain. Only when totally blind did he admit defeat and allow himself to be led back to a horrified Stein. Although he could see nothing, to avoid breaking caste rules he insisted on cooking his own meals until he reached Khotan where Stein was able to engage a Hindu cook for him. Ram Singh never regained his sight, but as a result of pressure from Stein was awarded a special pension by the Government of India. Within four months, however, he was dead.