Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  By 1908, when the second Otani mission arrived on the scene, they were regarded in a very different light. Moreover, if the British suspected that they were there for some reason other than archaeology (that well-known cover for espionage), then the Russians, still smarting from their defeat at the hands of the Japanese, were even more convinced of it. Captain Shuttleworth was assured by his Russian opposite number in Kashgar that one of the two Japanese, Zuicho Tachibana, was in fact an officer in the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other, Eizaburo Nomura, an army officer. But besides digging up old ruins, and removing large quantities of antiquities, what were they really up to? The question was to cause considerable head-scratching in British Indian intelligence circles – and, no doubt, in Russian ones too.

  The two men had reached Urumchi overland from Peking in October 1908, halting there a fortnight before pressing on to Turfan. After digging for more than two months at a number of sites in the area, including Karakhoja, they continued westwards to Korla and Karashahr where they parted. Tachibana headed for Lop-nor, excavating sites around Lou-lan and Charkhlik before proceeding westwards along the southern arm of the Silk Road, digging at Niya, Keriya and Khotan. Meanwhile Nomura spent nearly two months excavating at Kucha before continuing westwards along the northern arm of the ancient trade route, eventually reaching Kashgar, where he awaited the arrival of Tachibana. According to a brief account of the expedition entitled Central Asian Objects brought back by the Otani Mission, published by the Tokyo National Museum in 1971, the two Japanese archaeologists were reunited on July 7, 1909, after five months of travelling apart. According to Captain Shuttleworth (unless the diminutive Tachibana managed to slip into town without him knowing), it was a whole week later.

  The task of shadowing the two men for many weeks and over hundreds of miles had been made considerably easier by the network of aksakals (literary ‘white-beards’) which had been established by Macartney in the main population centres. They were usually the senior Indian – and therefore British – trader in each of the main oases. Officially they were responsible for the well-being and good behaviour of their expatriate community, and with assisting any British traveller who might pass through their territory. However, as Shuttleworth’s secret reports (now in the so-called ‘Political and Secret’ files in the India Office Library) reveal, they sometimes turned their hands to the Great Game.

  On June 12, 1909, for example, Shuttleworth received a letter from Badruddin Khan, his man in Khotan. Dispatched twenty-two days earlier, it contained the following intelligence. ‘One Japanese traveller, accompanied by one Chinaman and a Kuchari Mohammedan interpreter, has arrived in Keriya. He lives in European fashion and can talk Chinese. He has visited all the places visited by Dr. Stein. He has also explored many ruined cities. The Amban of Keriya gave him the services of Ibrahim Beg who was with Dr. Stein. The Amban has asked me to prepare my house for his reception if he comes here. If he comes to Khotan I will report his movements and tell you what he has done in the town.’ From this it seems clear that the Chinese had no suspicions that Tachibana and Nomura were anything more than itinerant scholars in search – like Stein and others before them – of the past. What was it then that made the British (and the Russians) think so differently and issue orders to Shuttleworth to have them shadowed?

  The political and secret files provide the answer. It is to be found in a report on the activities of the two men sent to the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, in London. According to this the Indian Government had been informed by the Japanese consulate in Calcutta in September 1908 that Tachibana and Nomura, the former described as a priest and the latter as secretary to Count Otani’s Buddhist temple in Kyoto, were travelling from Peking via Chinese Central Asia to India ‘to make investigations in matters of religious interest’. The report goes on: ‘We had some reason, however, to suspect that they were secret intelligence agents.’ One reason was their connection with ‘a third so-called priest’, a Mr Ama, who was already suspected by the British authorities of being a Japanese spy. Ama, Lord Morley was informed, ‘was in affluent circumstances, and though the avowed object of his travels was to inspect Buddhist relics, his knowledge of the subject was ascertained to be of the most superficial nature’. While on a visit to northern India in the summer of 1908 he had been refused permission to visit certain lakes on the Tibetan border, whereupon he undertook to return from Leh to Srinagar by the most direct route. ‘Instead of doing so,’ the report adds, ‘he made an unusual deviation in the direction of Tibet’ (although it was thought unlikely that he could have reached the Tibetan border in the period that elapsed between his leaving Leh and reaching Srinagar). The authors of the report do not enlarge on what they believe to be the real connection between the mysterious Mr Ama and the two Japanese archaeologists beyond the fact they all three were suspected of being spies. But if their suspicions of Tachibana and Nomura were initially founded on nothing more than guilt by association, then they must have felt vindicated as Shuttleworth’s reports began to reach them through Sir Francis Younghusband in Srinagar.

  The first hint that they might be right came on March 10, 1909, when the two Japanese had already been in Chinese Turkestan for nearly five months. The aksakal at Kucha reported their arrival there to Shuttleworth, adding that although they claimed to be ‘in search of Buddhistic remains’ they were also sketching and surveying. This, in fact, was not inconsistent with their being archaeologists, although neither Shuttleworth nor the aksakal seem to have realised this, presumably never having seen an excavator at work. Stein not only surveyed every one of the sites he dug, but also thousands of square miles of Chinese Turkestan, while Russian travellers like Prejevalsky had done likewise, not to mention Hedin. However, Chinese Central Asia was both a British and a Russian sphere of influence, and as for Hedin, what threat was a Swede to anyone? But for the Japanese to trespass there and start surveying into the bargain was definite cause for alarm.

  By now, moreover, other clues had begun to emerge, adding weight to suspicions that Tachibana and Nomura were not merely archaeologists or, for that matter, even Buddhist monks. For a start there was Tachibana’s behaviour towards the natives, which appeared more consistent with the Russian claim that he was a naval officer than his own that he was a holy man. The tip came from the Fu of Yarkand who complained that Tachibana had been beating Chinese subjects and making himself a general nuisance. Suspicions deepened further when Shuttleworth’s agents discovered that the two Japanese were carrying with them a small library of English naval and military books – hardly the devotional reading expected from holy men, particularly when both claimed to speak no English. Nor was that all. In Yarkand, Tachibana had endeavoured to acquire maps and other records of the town, thus incurring the suspicions of the Fu, while from Kashgar they had mailed off numerous bulky letters which Shuttleworth suggested might contain maps and reports. Considering that these packages were sent through him, it is perhaps surprising that he did not discreetly open one of them. This, after all, would have settled the matter once and for all.

  By now, the two Japanese having joined forces again in Kashgar, Shuttleworth was able to observe them at first hand, even inviting them to dinner at Chini-Bagh. He reported to Younghusband: ‘Nomura was seen sketching around the walls of the city with what looked like a plane table. Tachibana sketched the road from Maralbashi to Yarkand … and was also seen examining the telegraph poles and measuring the distances between them.’ During their stay in Kashgar the two archaeologists (if that is what they were) did not exactly endear themselves to Shuttleworth. It had been his task to break it to them that if they wished to return home through India, then they must travel together via the Karakoram and not, as they were now requesting, by different routes. On being informed of this ruling by Calcutta, Shuttleworth reported, ‘Tachibana was cheeky to me … and I had to sit on him severely.’

  If they were indeed carrying out secret intelligence work, as Shuttleworth was by now convinced,
then they were a miserable advertisement for their spymasters. They even managed to run out of money and were forced to approach Shuttleworth for a consular loan of 2,000 taels (around £360) to get them home. He refused, pointing out that they were on Chinese territory and that the correct person to approach was the Taotai. Furthermore, they had no security to offer and since public money was involved he did not feel justified in advancing such a large sum.

  Had it not been for their request for a loan, then this might well have been the end of the affair. As it turned out, it was to give the British Government the very excuse it was looking for. By now the intelligence chiefs who had instructed Shuttleworth to have the two men shadowed were as convinced as he was that Tachibana and Nomura, besides being archaeologists, were ‘links in the general system of intelligence which the Japanese Government has instituted’. This was their verdict in the secret report on the two men sent to Lord Morley. They were forced to admit though that it was far from clear what Japan’s interest could be in this remote backwater of China.

  Whatever that interest, it is clear from the correspondence in the political and secret files that the British Government was not going to let the Mikado’s Government get away scot-free with espionage, however amateur, so close to India’s frontiers. An official letter was therefore sent to Count Komura, the Japanese Foreign Minister, by Sir Claude MacDonald, the British Ambassador in Tokyo. It complained about the overbearing behaviour of Tachibana and Nomura and made much of the fact that they had endeavoured to obtain a loan from the British consulate without first approaching the Chinese. While the ways of diplomacy never cease to amaze the layman, it is hard to believe that a complaint so utterly trivial as this would normally be brought to the personal attention of the Foreign Minister. It seems more likely that it was nothing other than a diplomatic device for warning the Japanese secret service to keep away from a British sphere of influence. MacDonald’s letter ends with the suggestion that ‘it would be of advantage to all concerned if Your Excellency could kindly inform me whether Tachibana and Nomura possess any claim to consideration or title to official recognition’. Count Komura’s reply was short and to the point. He made no attempt to apologise for the behaviour of his countrymen and washed his hands of both of them, declaring that he had ‘no concern with or cognisance of’ either. To readers of spy literature his words have a familiar ring – a government disowning agents foolish enough to be caught. To those with less imagination the letter merely reads like that of a busy Foreign Minister putting down an ambassador who has troubled him with a trifling complaint.

  Tachibana and Nomura, if they were spies, were not the only ones at work on the Silk Road during this period. Nor were they alone in combining it with treasure-hunting. Another was a man destined many years later to become world-famous – Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim, then a newly promoted colonel in the Tsar’s army who had distinguished himself in the Russo-Japanese War. Mannerheim was Finnish, but at that time Finland was an autonomous state within Tsarist Russia. In the autumn of 1906, on instructions from the Russian General Staff, he set out on horseback across Chinese Central Asia to study the political and economic situation there and carry out what he described in his diary as ‘tasks of a military nature’. Not a man to waste opportunities, he also undertook to conduct a programme of archaeological, ethnological and anthropological work for a new museum which the Finns were planning. The Finns, rather like the Hungarians, trace their ancestry back to the warlike hordes who once inhabited the Asian steppes, and their scholars were anxious to enlarge their knowledge of the peoples and history of this region.

  As Mannerheim rode, in addition to mapping his route and recording military intelligence, he also measured human heads with callipers, collected everything from rustic surgical instruments to rolling pins, and purchased antiquities and manuscripts. Most of the latter he obtained from Khotan where by now there was a thriving market in antiquities. He also bought a certain amount in Turfan where he noted that the prices were far higher than in Khotan, and was tempted to remove three Buddhist wall-paintings from one site he visited. But he decided not to risk ruining them and to leave them to what he calls ‘more qualified collectors’. Turfan marked the end of his archaeological activities and he thereafter rides eastwards out of our narrative, though not out of history. For in 1940, at the age of seventy-two and the veteran of five wars, Field Marshal Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim led Finland’s heroic but hopeless defiance of Stalin’s invading armies. Today the antiquities he acquired on his lone ride across Asia thirty-three years earlier are to be seen in the National Museum in Helsinki.

  By now rivalry between the Great Powers for the treasures of the Silk Road was intensifying. We have seen how, one by one, Stein, Grünwedel, von Le Coq, Pelliot and Count Otani’s Japanese joined in the archaeological free-for-all begun by Hedin. But apart from briefly noting the presence of the Beresovsky brothers at Kucha (it was a shopping expedition rather than an archaeological one) we have paid scant attention to the Russians. There are several reasons for this. First, no single figure stands out. Secondly, they pulled off no great coups, despite the fact that the sites were more accessible to them than to anyone else. Thirdly, they were moderate in the quantities they removed. And lastly they were slow to act, despite the fact that they had been aware for years that the remains of a lost civilisation of some kind lay on their doorstep.

  The first Russian to report seeing sand-buried ruins in China’s great deserts, as we have already noted, was the celebrated Colonel Nikolai Prejevalsky. In 1876 – just ten years after Johnson had become the first European to see such ruins – the Russian reported finding what he described as ‘a very large city’ in the Lop desert. But Prejevalsky was first and foremost a zoologist and was actually rather bored by archaeology. He made no attempt to explore it, and went on his way. The next Russian to come upon traces of this lost Central Asian civilisation (which he correctly identified as Buddhist) was Dr Albert Regel, a botanist. In 1879, while on what appears to have been a spying mission in the eastern T’ien Shan (Tsarist Russia and Manchu China were involved at that time in a border dispute), he had discovered the great walled city of Karakhoja. But due to harassment by the Chinese he had been unable to explore it further. To reach it in the first place he had been obliged to give his guards the slip in Turfan. When he returned there he found them already undergoing the punishment of slow hanging in the dreaded bamboo cage which von Le Coq was later to witness. Although he reported his discovery on reaching home, no Russian made any attempt to explore the region archaeologically for a further nineteen years.

  The next to do so was Dmitri Klementz who, accompanied by his botanist wife, was sent in 1898 by the Academy of Sciences and the Imperial Russian Geographical Society to investigate reports by a Tsarist army officer that the entire Turfan area was rich in ancient ruins. Academician Klementz had been a noted revolutionary in his youth and had spent some time in prison (from which he had managed to escape) and also in exile in Siberia before settling down to become a prominent member of the scientific establishment in St Petersburg. He explored a number of sites around Turfan, including Karakhoja, Astana and Yarkhoto, taking many photographs, drawing ground plans of buildings, copying inscriptions and acquiring samples of manuscripts and antiquities. In all, he counted one hundred and thirty cave temples, many of which contained well-preserved wall-paintings. He removed several small murals, the first of so many which were to be cut from the walls of these temples and carried off to Europe. News of his startling finds was published by the Academy shortly after his return to St Petersburg, and caused considerable excitement there among Central Asian scholars and art historians. But, as we have already seen, it was in Germany that the news was to have the most immediate and far-reaching results. The Russians virtually presented Turfan to the Germans as a gift. Not only was the Klementz report published in German but a subsequent book by him contained a large folding map showing the precise whereabouts of all the sites he had discov
ered as well as photographs of them. This, too, was published in German (it was not uncommon at that time for Russian academics to publish in German or French). Having thus drawn the attention of potential rivals to the rich harvest to be reaped around Turfan, only just across their own frontier with China, the Russians sat back and did nothing.

  It was not until 1905, when the Beresovskys set out on their buying trip to Kucha and a Committee for the Exploration of Central and East Asia was set up by the government, that they began to make up for lost time. Even then it was somewhat half-hearted. Indeed, it was not until 1908 (by which time the British, Germans, French and Japanese were already well entrenched on the Silk Road) that the Russians made their first – and only – discovery of major importance. This was Karakhoto, meaning ‘Black City’, and not to be confused with Karakhoja. Lying just inside China’s present border with Mongolia, it is undoubtedly Marco Polo’s long-lost ‘City of Etzina’. It was discovered, or rather rediscovered, by Colonel Petr Koslov, a protégé of Prejevalsky’s, who was leading an expedition to explore parts of the Sino-Mongolian frontier region. At a remote spot in the Gobi he and his men were astonished to see rising from the desert a huge fortress town. ‘The walls of the town are covered with sand, in some places so deeply that it is possible to walk up the slope and enter the fortress,’ Koslov reported. The awe-struck Russians made their entry, however, through the great western gateway. ‘Here we found a quadrangular space whereon were scattered high and low, broad and narrow, ruins of buildings with rubbish of all kinds at their feet,’ Koslov added.