Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Local oasis-dwellers told the Russians how the city came to be destroyed (in the fourteenth century, it is now known, a hundred years or so after Marco Polo’s visit). The last ruler of the city – one Kara-tsian-tsiun – putting his faith in his hitherto invincible army, determined to seize the throne of China for himself. The Emperor dispatched a considerable force against him and, after a series of battles, finally cornered the rebel in his capital. Finding that they could not take it by assault, because of its high walls, the Chinese decided to sever its only water supply, the Etsin-gol river. Filling thousands of bags with sand to form a dam, they managed to divert this away from the city. (As confirmation of this story, Koslov came upon evidence of the dam.) The defenders, desperate for water, began to dig a deep well in one corner of the fortress. Finding no water they resolved to face the Chinese in one last desperate battle. Kara-tsian-tsiun, anticipating defeat, had his treasury – filling eighty carts, it was said – lowered into the well. He next killed his two wives and his son and daughter, fearing what might happen to them if they fell into Chinese hands. Finally, he ordered a breach to be made in the northern wall, and through this he charged at the head of his troops. His once invincible army was wiped out and he himself killed. The Chinese reduced the city to ruins, having first tried to find the treasury which they knew must be somewhere near. But they failed, as all subsequent attempts had. This, it was said, was because Kara-tsian-tsiun had cast a spell over the spot before charging to his death.

  Koslov may not have found the royal treasure, but during the next few days he and his men brought to light enough manuscripts, books, coins and ‘objects of the Buddhist cult’ to fill ten chests. But they had other tasks to complete further south, for this was not primarily an archaeological expedition, and they had to press on. Determined to return on their way back, they dispatched their discoveries to the Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. ‘The ruins of Karakhoto had an irresistible attraction for us,’ wrote Koslov, ‘and we spoke of them daily.’ The following summer, on their way home, they dug there for a further month, this time discovering a number of beautifully preserved Buddhist paintings on silk, linen or paper in the tomb of a princess. These – some twenty-five in all – can be seen today in a special room in the Hermitage in Leningrad. They also found, stockpiled on the city walls, piles of rocks evidently intended for use against the Chinese besiegers had they come within range.

  As Koslov and his now heavily laden camels were leaving Karakhoto for home in the summer of 1909, a second Russian expedition was setting out from St Petersburg for the Silk Road, this time with archaeology as its sole aim. It was led by Academician Sergei Oldenburg, a leading Buddhist art historian and Indologist who some twenty years later was to incur the wrath of Stalin – and survive. Rather like Grünwedel, Oldenburg condemned the wholesale removal of works of art, preferring to leave them in situ and record them by means of photographs, drawings and measurements. He spent some six months visiting Karashahr, Kucha, Bezeklik and other northern Silk Road sites before returning to St Petersburg in March 1910. But despite his reluctance to remove works of art he did not return empty-handed, although he was careful to take damaged or deteriorating examples since they could at least then be saved for scholarship. It is probably due to his restraint that the Russians, whatever else the Chinese may feel about them, do not feature high on Peking’s archaeological blacklist. Most of what Oldenburg did bring back – mainly wall-paintings, including one that von Le Coq had left behind as too damaged, and sculptures – can be seen today in the Hermitage together with the acquisitions of Klementz and Koslov, and the antiquities purchased by Petrovsky in Kashgar. Apart from a brief visit by Oldenburg to Tun-huang in 1914, this was the sum total of Russian archaeological enterprise in a region which lay within such easy reach of them.

  In the winter of 1910, shortly after Oldenburg’s return to St Petersburg, the Japanese Zuicho Tachibana unexpectedly reappears on the Silk Road. After his brush with Shuttleworth in Kashgar and the official complaints lodged about him and Nomura by the British Government, he might reasonably have been expected to give the British a wide berth. Not a bit of it. Count Otani’s man this time chose as his travelling companion an Englishman. Just who this mysterious individual was – apart from his name – and what he was doing with a suspected Japanese agent, I have failed to discover. The only thing one can be quite certain of is that he was fated to die an unpleasant and lonely death.

  By now the Macartneys had returned from long leave in England and relieved Shuttleworth of his temporary duties at Kashgar. On January 13, 1911, Macartney received two telegrams from Kucha, some four hundred miles to the east. One, in Chinese, was from the British aksakal there informing him that a British traveller, a Mr A. O. Hobbs, had been struck down by smallpox. The second, a desperate plea for help, was from Hobbs himself who appears to have been unaware that it was smallpox that he was suffering from. In his telegram he grimly spelled out the symptoms. ‘I am suffering from skin disease which has affected all organs. I can only keep my eyes open for a few minutes at a time.… My mouth and throat covered with slime and I cannot swallow any food and very little water.… For ten days I have been like this and I have not left my bed.’ Neither this telegram nor the aksakal’s offered Macartney (who prided himself on knowing everybody’s movements in Chinese Turkestan) a clue as to who this man was or what he was doing all by himself in this remote spot. After dispatching his Indian medical assistant to Kucha, Macartney signalled to Hobbs to say that help was on its way. But on January 16 he received a telegram from the Ting-kuan (senior Chinese official) of Kucha informing him that Hobbs had died the previous evening. The Ting-kuan also came up with a startling piece of intelligence. Hobbs, he informed Macartney, was the travelling companion of the Japanese archaeologist Tachibana. The two men, it seemed, had quietly entered Chinese Turkestan via Russia some four months earlier and proceeded via Urumchi to Turfan. They had dug there together for a while before separating, agreeing to meet again at Kucha. Tachibana had then made his way to the remote desert site of Lou-lan where he was excavating when, unknown to him, his English companion was struck down.

  Macartney arranged with the Ting-kuan to have the Englishman’s body moved to Kashgar for burial, but because of bureaucratic prevarication (or fear, perhaps, of contagion) this took the best part of three months to achieve. The funeral took place immediately afterwards, Macartney reading the burial service. At the graveside was an unexpected mourner – Tachibana. He had raced to Kashgar on hearing at Kucha of the terrible fate which had befallen his companion. In Macartney’s reports on the affair, today in the political and secret files in the India Office Library, he tells us little more than just that. If he discovered from Tachibana, as presumably he must have done, precisely who Hobbs was, or why he was travelling with a man who claimed to speak no English, Macartney does not say. His references to Tachibana make no mention of British suspicions about him, merely describing him as ‘the Japanese archaeological traveller’.

  Reading the secret file of seventy years ago, one finds oneself wondering whether the experienced Macartney, half an oriental himself, was wholly convinced of Tachibana’s double role. He nonetheless continued to have the young Japanese shadowed as he proceeded on his treasure-hunt along the southern arm of the Silk Road towards his ultimate goal, Tun-huang. Near Khotan, for example, he learned that Tachibana had struck southwards across the Kun Lun into Tibet where all his baggage animals had perished and his servants had deserted him. When the ambans of Khotan and Keriya advised him to keep to the caravan route, offering him every assistance if he did, Tachibana had threatened to lay formal complaints about their obstructiveness. Once again, it seems, Tachibana was up to his old and unpriestly tricks of being nasty to the natives.

  On Christmas Eve 1911, he reached Tun-huang. There he found another Japanese, Koichiro Yoshikawa, anxiously awaiting him. Yoshikawa had been sent by Count Otani to look for him, for the 1911 Revolution had now broken out, quickly
spreading into Chinese Central Asia. Tachibana, who had been away from home for well over a year, had been reported missing – a victim, it was feared, of the revolution. The two men spent nearly eight weeks together at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas where they obtained from Wang some six hundred religious texts, mostly sutras, from the secret hoard. These the canny custodian had hidden inside his freshly sculptured Buddhas shortly before troops arrived with carts to remove to Peking everything that Stein and Pelliot had left. At this point Tachibana disappears from the story, via Urumchi and the Trans-Siberian Express, taking his secret – if he ever had one – with him.

  But before we finally leave the Japanese (the fate of their Silk Road hoard will be examined in a closing chapter), one possible explanation to the whole curious affair must be considered. Count Otani, who sponsored all three expeditions, was spiritual leader of the ‘Pure Land’ sect. But that is not to say that he was an unworldly cleric who spent his life in prayer and contemplation. It was a role which he had inherited on the death of his father. Before returning home to assume the leadership, he had spent much time travelling in Europe and elsewhere. He was, surprising perhaps for a Japanese in those days, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. A photograph of him in their possession shows him as a relaxed and urbane-looking young man in western dress, sitting back with legs crossed nonchalantly. Even when he had taken up his spiritual responsibilities, he continued to send the Society photographs and brief accounts of the expeditions he dispatched to Central Asia. This suggests that although his primary interest may have been to find archaeological evidence of his sect’s origins, he was also extremely interested in contributing to geographical knowledge, and being seen to do so. We know that shortly before the first Otani expedition of 1902, one of his young archaeologist-monks had spent a year studying geography at Oxford, presumably paid for by the Count. Otani certainly went out of his way to cultivate the handful of western explorers possessing first-hand knowledge of Central Asia, acting as host to Sven Hedin, von Le Coq and the Tibetan expert Captain (later Sir Frederick) O’Connor, to name three. The breadth of his interests is shown by the fact that he wrote two political works – one on China and the other on Manchuria – as well as one on Chinese porcelain.

  This, of course, may have all been an elaborate cover for a spymaster. Indeed, it may not be too far-fetched to postulate that this sophisticated and politically conscious aristocrat may have run some kind of private intelligence service of his own, perhaps even supplying the Mikado – his brother-in-law – with the information he garnered. On the other hand he may merely have been an earnest Japanese aristocrat who, through contacts in Europe, had caught the geography bug and wished to make his own mark in that field. Certainly the cost of his expeditions brought him close to insolvency, forcing him to sell his villa and disperse his treasures. But until the Japanese choose to open their secret intelligence files, or the Otani family choose to tell us, the Count’s true interests in Central Asia must remain a mystery.

  For a while the monasteries and sand-engulfed cities of the Silk Road were left in peace, though not for very long. In Srinagar and in Berlin those two veteran rivals, Stein (now Sir Aurel) and von Le Coq, were already preparing for a fresh onslaught on the past. Stein was particularly concerned lest the Germans should reach Miran before him and remove the wall-paintings which he had discovered in 1907, but which Ram Singh’s sudden blindness had prevented him from adding to his collection. ‘He seems bent on getting those Miran frescoes …’ Stein wrote nervously from Chini-Bagh to a friend. He need not have worried – not about the Germans, anyway. For von Le Coq’s expedition was to be dogged from the start by difficulties, including obstruction from the Chinese, a murderous attack on Bartus, financial worries and an illness which nearly cost him his life. It was to be von Le Coq’s last visit to Central Asia, and furthermore it was cut short by the outbreak of World War I. The unexpected withdrawal of the German party in 1914 left Stein – at fifty-two too old for military service – in sole command of the Silk Road. All his rivals had now left the scene, although not entirely without trace. However, when he reached Miran he was in for a shock. Scattered everywhere were fragments of painted plaster. In his On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, written many years later, Stein points an accusing finger at ‘a young Japanese traveller who lacked preparation, technical skill and experience equal to his archaeological zeal’. One only hopes that young Tachibana was more competent at spying (if that is what he was up to) than at archaeology.

  But if Miran was a blow, the remainder of the expedition made up for it. At Tun-huang he acquired five more cases of manuscripts from Wang’s apparently inexhaustible ‘nest egg’ – a few months later Oldenburg was to squeeze a further two hundred manuscripts out of him, as well as painted statues. Moving on to Karakhoto, Stein found that Colonel Koslov had not been very thorough, although the trail of smashed statues and frescoes bore witness to the enthusiasm of his excavation. Well pleased with what the Russian had inadvertently left him, he moved westwards across the Gobi to Turfan. His previous visit had been brief, and he had assumed that the Germans had stripped its sites bare. When he left the region two months later he took with him over one hundred large cases filled with frescoes, including many from Bezeklik.

  But Stein had not finished yet. One more site – the great cemetery of Astana where the dead of the Turfan region were once buried – had still to yield its secrets to him. Dating from the seventh century, it consists of a series of tomb complexes lying anything up to sixteen feet below the surface. Each was approached via a sloping, rock-hewn trench leading down to a subterranean passage at the end of which lay the burial chamber. Most of them appeared to have been robbed years before of any valuables they might once have contained. Because he was not regarded as a competitor by the local tomb-robbing fraternity, Stein had no difficulty in hiring an old hand in what he calls ‘this macabre line of business’ to take him on an underground tour of this city of the dead before he began his grim excavation. Even the wood from the coffins had been removed in many instances, presumably taken for use as fuel in this now treeless desert region.

  But the objects that meant most to Stein had not been taken. In the first place, inscribed in Chinese on a special funereal brick, was the name and date of birth of each coffin’s occupant, as well as biographical data. More important still were the quantities of very early textiles in which the corpses were wrapped. These – mostly silks – displayed a remarkable variety of designs ranging from purely Chinese motifs to others of obvious Middle Eastern origin. What makes these fabrics particularly important to textile historians is the fact that they can be dated with exactness from the inscriptions on the bricks. The unearthing of these ancient and beautiful silks, which were unceremoniously but carefully cut away from the bodies, proved a fitting conclusion to Stein’s career as the rediscoverer of the Silk Road. Yet when, in February 1915, he dispatched his forty-five camels laden with frescoes and other treasures on their two-month journey to Kashgar, he little realised that these would be the last he would ever remove from China.

  15. Langdon Warner Attempts the Unthinkable

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  In the autumn of 1923, two Americans floundered westwards along the old Silk Road in blinding rain and through rivers of mud so deep that they often reached to the bellies of their mules. When they arrived at one wayside inn, the men were so encased in the clinging black slime of Central China that they had to be scraped clean with sticks by the servants. And if this were not enough to complete their misery, there was also the very real and ever-present danger of being robbed, or even murdered, by bandits. The two bedraggled travellers, both of them orientalists, were Langdon Warner of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and Horace Jayne of the Museum of Pennsylvania. With their modest four mappas, or two-wheeled Chinese carts, and their secretary-interpreter Wang, they comprised the first American expedition to Chinese Central Asia.

  As far as the ancient town of Sian, where the Silk Road on
ce began its journey to distant Rome, they had been provided by the Chinese with a military escort. From now on, armed only with a shotgun and an automatic pistol, they were on their own. To discourage Chinese troops from commandeering their carts, and, with luck, bandits from troubling them, they had been advised by a friendly Chinese warlord to fly the Stars and Stripes prominently from each vehicle. The flags had been hurriedly run up by four Chinese tailors on the instructions of Warner and Jayne, neither of whom could quite remember just how many stars their national flag should bear. The tailors, however, had settled the issue by ruling that there was only room for six on each flag anyway.

  It was now eight years since Stein had left China with his final caravan-load of treasures. Between then and this first post-war expedition, no archaeologist had removed anything from Chinese Central Asia. This was partly because the war had halted all new foreign expeditions (Stein was already there when it broke out), and partly due to the ensuing political crisis in China. Not only was there a rising tide of feeling against all foreigners, which was to reach explosion point by 1925, but this was accompanied by an almost total breakdown of law and order throughout China as local warlords seized power and fought among themselves. Despite this, the Americans were determined to try their luck. The aim of this first (it was hoped) expedition was not, however, the mass removal of works of art, although Warner and Jayne certainly had no intention of returning empty-handed. It was, to quote Warner, a ‘scouting trip’ – in other words to discover what, if anything at all, was left after the excavators of six nations had taken first pick of the sites and their contents. They also hoped to resolve a number of art-historical conundrums. One of these was to ascertain, with the aid of the laboratories at Harvard, precisely what pigments were used by the master wall-painters of the T’ang dynasty, and from where these had been obtained.