Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  While they were in Urumchi, Pelliot met an old friend – or rather foe – from Peking days. Following the defeat of the Boxers, the Duke Lan, brother of the movement’s leader and himself deeply implicated in the uprising, had been exiled for life to Urumchi, where he devoted his remaining years to photography. ‘We had fought one another in 1900, but the passage of time heals all things,’ Pelliot wrote afterwards, adding: ‘We sealed our friendship with many a glass of champagne.’ When the day of their departure finally arrived, the Duke remarked sadly to Pelliot: ‘You are going, but I have to stay.’ Pelliot forbore from reminding the one-time Peking police chief that, some seven years earlier, there had been a day ‘when he had forced us to stay when we would have asked nothing better than to leave’.

  In fact, although the Duke probably did not realise it, it was an act of generosity by him which made Pelliot even more eager to get away from Urumchi and reach Tun-huang. During their stay in Urumchi they had heard vague stories about a mysterious cache of manuscripts that had been found in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Pelliot knew at once that this was more than a mere bazaar rumour when the exiled Duke presented him with a manuscript which he said had come from Tun-huang. ‘Pelliot had hardly unrolled this,’ Vaillant recounts, ‘when he realised that it dated from before the eighth century.’

  When the three men reached Tun-huang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas they found, just as Stein had, the manuscript cave locked and Wang absent. However, before long, they ran the priest to earth in the town. Dazzled no doubt by Pelliot’s Chinese, he agreed to show the Frenchman his finds. In view of the prolonged struggle that Stein and Chiang had had with Wang before being allowed to see the manuscripts, it may seem surprising that Pelliot managed it so relatively easily. Indeed, his enemies were to find it unbelievable. However, fear of discovery had been Wang’s great dread, as he repeatedly told Stein and Chiang. Now, because this new visitor from Europe did not even mention Stein (Pelliot still did not realise, it seems, that his rival had beaten him to the secret chamber), it must have appeared to Wang that the Englishman had kept his vow of secrecy. The discovery that these ‘foreign devils’ could be trusted not to talk must have been very reassuring to him. Furthermore, he had already begun to spend Stein’s ‘donation’ on his garish restorations, and now, no doubt, was looking for further contributions.

  But even Pelliot was made to bide his time. He recounts in a letter written from Tun-huang on March 26, 1908: ‘Wang arrived rather late and said he had left the key behind at Tun-huang. I had to wait again.’ It was then that Pelliot learned to his disappointment that Stein had already visited the secret chamber, but – he was assured – had spent only three days there. Had he known the true length of Stein’s stay he might have been less sanguine about his own prospects. As it was, he feared that in the eight years since its discovery much of the library inevitably would have disappeared. After all, the manuscript presented to him by Duke Lan, some four hundred miles away in Urumchi, was unlikely to be the only one to have escaped thus from the cave.

  Finally the key arrived from Tun-huang and nearly a month after their arrival at the great ming-oi Pelliot was allowed into the secret chamber. ‘I was stupefied,’ he wrote. He estimated that there were between fifteen and twenty thousand manuscripts in the cave. To unroll each one and examine it properly, he realised, would take him a minimum of six months. However, his mind was quickly made up. ‘If only cursory, examination of the entire library was essential,’ he wrote. ‘I must at least open everything, recognise the nature of the text and see whether it offered anything new.’ He decided to make two piles : first the cream, which he must obtain at all costs, and then the desirable but less essential manuscripts.

  Working by the light of a single candle, and crouched uncomfortably in the tiny space resulting (though he did not realise it) from the removal of Stein’s great haul, Pelliot spent three long and claustrophobic weeks sifting through the dusty bundles. In the Pelliot gallery at the Musée Guimet in Paris there is a memorable photograph of him at work in the secret chamber taken by Nouette. Behind him, as he crouches, can be seen a daunting mountain of tightly packed manuscripts. ‘During the first ten days,’ Pelliot wrote in a long letter to Senart in Paris, ‘I attacked nearly a thousand scrolls a day, which must be a record …’ He likened himself, somewhat flippantly, to a philologist travelling at the speed of a racing-car. It was an analogy that his critics were to fasten onto with glee.

  At the end of each long session in the cave, Pelliot would rejoin his two colleagues – ‘his greatcoat stuffed with his most interesting finds … radiant with joy’, Vaillant recalled years afterwards. ‘One such evening he showed us a Nestorian Gospel of St John; on another a description, dating from the year 800, of the curious little lake … situated in the high dunes south of Tun-huang; another time it was the monastery accounts.’ Pelliot ruled out any hope of persuading Wang to part with the entire collection, for the discovery was too well known in the district. ‘Mongol and Tibetan pilgrims came to read some of these precious documents as part of their pilgrimage,’ Vaillant explains. Pelliot’s great fear, however, was of leaving behind, or not recognising, any key document. ‘All the same, I do not think I overlooked anything essential,’ he wrote. ‘I handled not only every scroll, but every scrap of paper – and God knows how many bits and pieces there were.…’

  Now came the most anxious moment of all, when Pelliot had to persuade the little priest to sell him the two piles of manuscripts which he had set aside. The negotiations were conducted between the two men amid great secrecy. ‘We ourselves’, Vaillant recalled, ‘were compelled to speak of the discovery in only the most guarded fashion, even in our letters.’ Finally the figure of 500 taels (about £90) was agreed and the hoard was carefully and discreetly packed for shipment to France. Vaillant wrote: ‘Only when Nouette had embarked on the steamer with the crates containing our collections did Pelliot mention them openly and leave for Peking with a box containing samples of the manuscripts.’ He added: ‘They were a revelation to Chinese scholars, who could scarcely believe that such a find had been made.’ But as a result, a telegram was immediately sent by the Peking authorities to the sub-prefect at Tun-huang ordering him to place an embargo on whatever remained in the cave. Vaillant observed wryly: ‘The good monk must have had a bad quarter of an hour, and perhaps repented that he had accepted Pelliot’s money.’

  Although the acquisition of the Tun-huang manuscripts represented a great personal triumph for Pelliot – whatever one may think of the ethics involved – his two companions had also been far from idle during nearly four months there. Nouette had taken hundreds of black and white photographs of everything that Pelliot considered worthy of interest, and these were published later in six volumes. Although Pelliot never got around to writing an accompanying text, this corpus remains today the principal source of information on the paintings and sculptures, mainly because of the vandalism which was to occur only a few years later when White Russian soldiers were interned in the caves.

  When Pelliot finally reached Paris on October 24, 1909, he had been away for three years. He returned to a hero’s welcome, but also to find trouble brewing. This was to develop into a vicious campaign embracing not only himself but also Professor Chavannes and the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. During his absence, the long and often graphic letter he had written from Tun-huang to Senart in the first flush of excitement had been published in the widely read journal of the Ecole, where he was still officially employed. He might well have written differently had he known what capital his foes would make of it, and almost certainly would have omitted some of his more candid, and sometimes light-hearted, comments. We have already noted how Pelliot’s intellectual arrogance – as some saw it – had earned him enemies in the academic world. His letter to Senart gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for.

  That part of the campaign which involved Chavannes and the Ecole does not concern us here, but in
essence it sought to cast doubts upon the former’s scholarship and upon the competence of the entire staff of that prestigious institution. It was waged initially as a whispering campaign, but before long it had spread to the columns of some newspapers and periodicals, especially those concerned with Indo-China. Pelliot’s involvement was on two counts. As Professor of Chinese at the Ecole, he, like all other members of the staff, had to face general accusations of élitism and – more serious – of having to rely on local interpreters for assistance with the publication of their works. But in addition to this, as leader of the highly successful expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Pelliot found himself singled out for special attention. For this triumph by one so young had inevitably aroused envy in some other French orientalists who felt, perhaps, that they instead should have been chosen.

  Among his principal detractors was a senior librarian in the oriental department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the Tun-huang manuscripts had been deposited by Pelliot in a locked room to which only he had a key. Clearly furious (and perhaps understandably so) at being denied access to them, the librarian wrote a caustic letter to a French newspaper in which he endeavoured to cast doubts on the authenticity of Pelliot’s manuscripts as well as upon the young scholar’s capabilities as a sinologist. On the pretext of wishing to safeguard his own reputation as conservator of the Bibliothèque’s oriental manuscripts – which those in the locked room were due to join – he announced that he was forthwith disclaiming all responsibility for Pelliot’s Tun-huang purchases. Meanwhile, the other works of art brought back by the expedition – paintings, sculptures, textiles, wooden figures and terracottas – were put on public view in the Louvre, in a specially named Salle Pelliot. These, too, his detractors endeavoured to belittle. ‘One wonders how it is possible that a room in the Louvre, however small, should be devoted to so little,’ wrote one.

  In December 1910, this ‘malevolent campaign’, as one French scholar has called it, reached its climax in a particularly virulent attack on Pelliot, Chavannes and the Ecole in the anti-colonial journal La Revue Indigène. A mixture of the unctuous and the vitriolic, and filling twenty-three pages of the magazine, it purported to analyse the Pelliot ‘scandal’. The author – M. Fernand Farjenel, an old China hand and himself a Chinese speaker – first disposed of Chavannes, whose translations, he claimed, ‘were inaccurate on every line when not in every word’. His main target, however, was Pelliot. The ‘young explorer’, as he repeatedly calls him, was accused of frittering away public money in two years of ‘wandering’ which, Farjenel claimed, yielded nothing of any value. He implied that by the time Pelliot reached Tun-huang he was so desperate to justify his mission that his critical judgement was seriously impaired.

  In support of this, Farjenel quoted Pelliot’s letter to Senart in which he admits to being ‘stupefied’ at what he saw when he entered Wang’s secret chamber. So stupefied was he, Farjenel claimed, that he swallowed the priest’s tale ‘with credulous confidence’, apparently unaware that, shortly before, Stein had removed ‘twenty-nine cases’ of manuscripts and paintings from the chamber. ‘This must have pretty well emptied it,’ the writer argued. But Pelliot, he went on, ‘full of joy at the thought that he had just discovered a priceless treasure took no precautions whatever and made no attempt to check the monk’s claims’. The obvious conclusion, he added, was that the cave had been refilled with forged and other worthless manuscripts by the local people who knew that Europeans liked to buy such things. He reminded his readers that the Far East abounded with clever rogues, as Stein’s unmasking of Islam Akhun had shown. A scholar who, by his own admission, had to examine some thousand scrolls a day (Farjenel calculated that this meant two a minute) was a natural victim for such forgers, he added. The fact that the manuscripts remained even now behind locked doors, out of reach of other oriental scholars, could only reinforce his and others’ suspicions. He demanded that in view of ‘the very large sum that the expedition has cost’, Pelliot should reply at once to his critics. But Pelliot did not reply, confident that his detractors would have to eat their words sooner or later.

  The French public, of course, had no way of telling who was right. If Stein had cleaned out the secret chamber, then where had all these manuscripts come from? Anyway, why were they still under lock and key, unavailable to other scholars, a full year after being deposited in the Bibliothèque? It was not until 1912, when Stein’s Ruins of Desert Cathay came out, that Pelliot’s critics were finally put in their place. Had Farjenel been able to read it before launching so confidently into print, he would certainly have thought twice. For a start Stein made it perfectly clear that he had only been able to purchase part of the Tun-huang library, leaving behind him ‘masses of manuscripts’. Moreover, he had not been allowed to choose freely – as Pelliot had – from the secret chamber, being limited to the bundles that Wang brought him. Furthermore, unlike Pelliot, who – as Stein put it – had been ‘aided by his exceptional mastery of Chinese literature and bibliography’, he himself had been gravely handicapped by his lack of Chinese. Clearly aware of the campaign to discredit his young French colleague, Stein went out of his way to praise the excellence of Pelliot’s scholarship as well as to express admiration for his methods of excavation, evidence of which he had seen at Kucha.

  Although the campaign had failed signally to damage Pelliot’s reputation where it really mattered – in the world of learning – it had not been for want of trying. But did Pelliot’s detractors genuinely believe the charges they brought so vituperatively against him, or were they seeking to destroy a man whom they clearly loathed or perhaps envied? Today, some seventy years later, and with all the witnesses long dead, it is impossible to say. But a comment by Vaillant perhaps provides the answer. During their expedition, he recounts: ‘Pelliot made brief notes whose accuracy and detail astonished their recipients in France. They could not understand how, in the wilds and far from a library, he could possibly recall certain facts or texts … His prodigious memory enabled him to do without all reference material.’ This is confirmed by others. ‘When Pelliot has read a book, the whole thing remains in there,’ one colleague declared, pointing to his own forehead.

  The fact that his enemies found him too clever by half is perhaps thus explained. Until they learned, too late, just how clever he really was, they simply assumed that he was a braggart. To some extent Pelliot appears to have brought it upon himself. Like many other archaeologists, he found it difficult to get down to the drudgery of classifying and publishing his material. As we have seen, his detractors made much of the fact that, a whole year after arriving at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the manuscripts were still in their packing cases, and that Pelliot had not so much as produced an inventory. This had enabled them to suggest that he must have something to hide – the dreadful discovery, perhaps, that his Tun-huang purchases were all forgeries.

  Nor was this the only row in which he was to become embroiled, although it is the only one which concerns us here. Pelliot, who went on to carve out a brilliant career for himself as France’s foremost Chinese scholar, never again excavated in Central Asia – the only one of our principal characters not to return for more. But this was not because of any lack of interest on his part. When serving as French military attaché in Peking during World War I, he told the American archaeologist Langdon Warner that he had ‘several new sites up his sleeve’, but no money to work them. By the time there was money available it was too late, for the Chinese had finally shut the door in the face of western archaeologists.

  14. Spies Along the Silk Road

  * * *

  In the autumn of 1908, around the time when Pelliot was shipping his treasures home from Chinese Central Asia, British intelligence chiefs in Simla began to take an interest in the movements of two young Japanese archaeologists who had turned up on the Silk Road. Although unaware of it themselves, the men had been observed from the moment they entered Chinese Turkestan overland from Peking. In true Kim fa
shion they were shadowed for over a year by a succession of Moslem traders, native servants and others on the payroll of the Indian Government. Regular reports on their movements as they travelled from oasis to oasis, sometimes together, more often hundreds of miles apart, were compiled in Kashgar by Captain A. R. B. Shuttleworth, temporarily in charge of the consulate while Macartney was on leave in England. These were carried across the Karakoram by runner with the official mail to Sir Francis Younghusband, then British Resident in Kashmir, for onward transmission to Simla.

  Ostensibly, the two Japanese – scholar-monks from Count Kozui Otani’s monastery in Kyoto – were in Chinese Central Asia in search of its Buddhist past. For Otani was the spiritual leader of the Jodo Shinzu, or ‘Pure Land Sect’, a large and influential Japanese Buddhist sect which traces its origins back to that part of China. Indeed, this was not the first expedition he had sent there. As early as 1902, after learning of Stein’s first discoveries, he had dispatched two of his monks on a digging spree around some of the Taklamakan sites, and they had returned home with Buddhist texts, fragments of wall-paintings and sculptures packed in wicker baskets. But that visit had gone virtually unnoticed by other Central Asian scholars, let alone by intelligence experts in Simla. For not only did they not publish their results or publicise their discoveries, but this was before the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 when overnight the Great Powers had to recognise the Japanese as a new force in Asia, and a potential threat to anyone with political or commercial interests there. Thus the first of the three archaeological missions that Count Otani was to send to Chinese Central Asia between 1902 and 1910 had been accepted by those few who were aware of it at its face value – a pious if eccentric search by Buddhist monks for their spiritual ancestry. Indeed, it was they who had first discovered the artistic riches of Kyzil. But they had been driven away by an earthquake, losing all their notes and photographs, thus enabling von Le Coq and Grünwedel to be the first to reveal its treasures to the world some two years later.