Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

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by Peter Hopkirk


  Right up to the time of their departure from Peking there had been serious doubts about the wisdom and safety of the entire undertaking. ‘But imagination flouts the counsels of prudence,’ Warner wrote afterwards in The Long Old Road in China, his account of their journey. ‘Holy men from India crossing the Roof of the World … Mongol hordes, embassies of emperors, emeralds from India and stuffs from Cathay, horse dealers, beggars – the splendour, squalor, suffering, and accomplishment of travel older than history – stood always before our eyes and would not be denied.’ Of the squalor, especially in the filthy wayside inns with their ‘hopping and crawling legions’, both men were to experience about as much as they could stomach. Great suffering, too, was to test the courage of Jayne before many months were up.

  The expedition had really begun in Sian on September 4, 1923, when they bade farewell to their ten-man armed escort. Shortly before, as if to remind them of the scant regard for human life in these parts, three bound prisoners had been summarily executed by Chinese soldiers not a hundred yards from where they stood. Warner recounts with distaste: ‘… three heads rolled off from three luckless carcasses and the soldiers shuffled on, leaving the carrion to be swept up’. But Sian – the Ch’ang-an of ancient times – has long been associated with death. Stein’s ‘patron saint’ Hsuan-tsang is buried there beside some of China’s greatest emperors and statesmen. As Warner and Jayne made their way westwards out of the walled city they noticed on either side of the road a series of ancient tumuli, or graves. ‘So holy are they,’ Warner wrote, ‘that no man can dig near them and no one can guess what treasures they contain.’ He added wryly: ‘To pass among these mounds, scattered as far as the eye could reach, big and little, near and far, was an experience in self-restraint for the digger.’

  Langdon Warner, leader of the two-man expedition, was not, as Pelliot had been, an unproven youngster out to make his name. A large man with red hair, he was – at forty-two – a veteran art historian and archaeologist, who had made a reputation for himself in the study of early Japanese Buddhist art. Graduating from Harvard in 1903 he had then travelled to Russian Central Asia as a member of Raphael Pumpelly’s geological and archaeological expedition. There he had visited the old Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bokhara, and also – as the first American ever to set foot there – the still independent khanate of Khiva. Shortly after his return to New England, at the age of twenty-four he had shown his mettle when he saved the life of a young soldier who had fallen in front of a train, by leaping onto the line, clasping him in his arms, and hurling the two of them clear. He had then vanished into the crowd. This daring act would never have become known had it not, by chance, been witnessed by a Harvard professor. The latter wrote to Warner’s father describing what he had seen but without naming the hero. His letter simply ended: ‘Possibly Langdon Warner could tell you about it.’

  About this time Warner took the first of a series of museum and university posts which he was to combine with regular Asiatic travels and expeditions. At Harvard he started a course in oriental art which for many years was the only one offered by any American university. Warner was thus responsible for launching the careers of a large number of the present generation of American orientalists. Although he did not get there until 1924, he had long had his eye on Chinese Turkestan. In 1908, when he was studying Japanese Buddhist art at Nara on secondment from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he had been invited to take an expedition there, but although $10,000 had been set aside for this, for some reason it fell through. Then, in the summer of 1913, he was invited to go to Peking to open an American school of archaeology – to be run on somewhat similar lines to the Ecole in Hanoi – where both Chinese and American archaeologists could be trained. It was the brain-child of Charles L. Freer, a Detroit millionaire and collector of oriental art whose monument is the great collection bearing his name in Washington.

  Warner travelled to Peking via Europe, where he visited London, Paris, Berlin and St Petersburg. He met Pelliot, Chavannes and other prominent orientalists, and examined the collections of Central Asian and other oriental art. After seeing von Le Coq’s treasures in Berlin’s Ethnological Museum (von Le Coq himself was away in Chinese Turkestan at the time), he observed: ‘On the whole, without criticising the importance of the collection, the things brought back by Stein to the BM surpass them in beauty.’ This is the only comparison between the various collections made by one of the contestants that I have been able to find, apart from von Le Coq’s own patriotic assertion that the German collection was by far the best. Freer’s dream of an American archaeological school in Peking never materialised owing to the outbreak of the war. However, it gave Warner the opportunity to travel within China and also to Mongolia, although his efforts to reach Sian were frustrated by the reign of terror unleashed by a bloodthirsty local bandit known as the White Wolf. But while in Peking he met Pelliot once again. The French scholar, temporarily serving as military attaché, proposed that after the war the two of them should excavate in Central Asia together. Warner, excited at this prospect, wrote home: ‘If he could be attached to our expedition it would add the best known scholar in the world.’ But that too came to nothing. Now, at last, Warner found himself in Sian, about to lead the first American expedition – sponsored by Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum – into Chinese Central Asia. As it turned out, he and Jayne had come only just in time, for the door was already beginning to close.

  Their first target was Karakhoto, the great walled ‘Black City’ on the Sino-Mongolian border where Koslov and Stein had both already dug. This meant following the old Silk Road via Lanchou as far as Suchou where they would turn off the main caravan route and take the lonely Gobi trail to Karakhoto. Very shortly after leaving Sian they ran into almost incessant rain which made the road at times impassable. For two whole days just short of Lanchou they found themselves marooned in a dank, wayside inn. They whiled away the time reading Stein’s Ruins of Desert Cathay – ‘till we could read no more for sheer envy’, wrote Warner. When finally they reached Lanchou after fourteen wet and weary hours on the road, Chinese soldiers leaped out of the dark and seized the heads of their mules, announcing that they were being confiscated ‘for military purposes’. Warner exploded, and grabbing the nearest corporal by the scruff of the neck he demanded to be taken to the amban, whose troops they were. At the yamen he was told that the amban was in bed but would see them in the morning. In that case, Warner declared, it was time that the amban got up, lest the foreign devils be forced to come in and help him dress. The unprecedented threat achieved what Warner had hoped. Fifteen minutes later the startled-looking official appeared to find himself confronted by two furious foreigners, dripping mud on his furniture and carpets, and demanding that his thieving soldiery give them back their property. After much arguing he agreed to write a note ordering the soldiers to return the carts. If Warner’s behaviour appears a little high-handed, it was because he knew that the whole expedition was at stake – together with the Fogg Museum’s investment in it – if he failed to recover their transport.

  As the two Americans travelled they occasionally met Europeans who had chosen to work in these outlandish and dangerous parts of China. One of the most remarkable was George Hunter, the legendary explorer-priest of Central Asia who (apart from thirteen months in a Soviet prison cell) for fifty-seven years preached the gospel to the Chinese and their subject peoples. Hunter, who translated the gospels into three Central Asian languages and knew more about the region than any other living man, died only in 1946 and is buried at Urumchi. He told Warner and Jayne, who met him passing through Liangchou, that he too had fallen foul of Chinese soldiery shortly before. But all they could learn of the incident from the Scottish-born priest was that: ‘The puir lads are rough and it soon comes to fechtin’. They laid hands on me two-three times an’ I’d a time persuading them to lat me free.’ He was much more interested in learning of their own plans, for he had known Stein, von Le Coq and Pelliot from Urumchi, where
he had lived since 1906. Lower down the social scale was the bearded Frenchman from Lyons, a former railway engineer who had been selling watches on the Tibetan border. He insisted on regaling them with his lurid life story. ‘His loves had been many and of various races,’ Warner wrote. ‘Some of the raciest apparently had been Tibetans, redolent of rancid butter.’

  As they continued westwards, the two men became aware of something else. ‘For days now,’ Warner recounts, ‘there had been a strange, half-felt presence on the Great North-west Road, as of other foreigners with us.… Every chamber of every inn and many bare walls in abandoned towns were scrawled with Russian names and regimental numbers and dates not many months old.’ More foreigners had trodden the Silk Road in the previous three years, he added, than in the two thousand years before. These were the White Russian refugees, civilians and soldiers, fleeing eastwards from the Bolshevik terror. Many were already living in Peking and Shanghai, while some had gone even further east. Warner wrote: ‘… Japanese cities saw, for the first time in history, white men and barefoot women begging from Asiatics by the roadside.’ Except for the occasional straggler, almost all the refugees had now left the Silk Road. They did, however, come upon one lonely, ragged sixteen-year-old Russian boy to whom they gave what money they could spare. His ‘fresh blue eyes’ were to haunt Warner for the rest of his life. He often wondered what became of that boy ‘in the cynical school to which I left him – a North China winter and the scant mercy of the yellow man’.

  Finally Warner and Jayne came to the small town of Suchou, at the extreme end of the Great Wall, where they exchanged their mules for camels before setting out north-eastwards into the Gobi for Karakhoto, the Etzina of Marco Polo. By the time they reached their goal on November 13, some four months after leaving Peking, winter had begun to close in. But despite the harshness of the weather and the howling of the wolves at night, Warner was able to write home: ‘The place itself is lovely beyond all my imagination of it …’ In his book he describes arriving at the great eastern gateway through which, some six centuries earlier, Marco Polo had passed into the then thriving city: ‘No city guard turned out to scan my credentials now, no bowman leaned from a balcony above the big gate in idle curiosity, and no inn welcomed me with tea.… It was high afternoon, when no ghosts walk.’ Yet, during their ten days among the silent and deserted ruins the uneasy feeling that they were not entirely alone never quite left Warner.

  Almost at once they came upon ominous evidence of Karakhoto’s two earlier visitors, Koslov and Stein. Their predecessors, the Americans discovered to their disappointment, had dug into all the most obvious ruins (‘hacked away at’ is the expression used by Warner) and removed everything of interest or value, including all the frescoes. Indeed, while in St Petersburg in 1913, Warner had seen and admired Koslov’s superb finds from here. Considering he knew that the site had twice been excavated and large quantities of antiquities removed each time, it is perhaps surprising that he made it his first objective. Possibly he had not fully appreciated how much of the city lay buried beneath centuries of sand which his own small party could not even begin to clear. Although they recovered a number of minor objects, including several fresco fragments, the results were singularly disappointing. As Warner himself admitted: ‘The Etzina expedition had proved that no more could be expected from the place unless we came with a large force of diggers and prepared to make a long stay. Koslov and Stein had reaped too well to make it worth gleaning behind them.’ But if Karakhoto proved a disappointment to Warner, it was very nearly a disaster for Jayne.

  The Americans’ next objective was Tun-huang, whose artistic splendours they were so familiar with from the photographs taken by Pelliot’s companion Nouette. In view of their disappointment over Karakhoto, this may also seem a puzzling choice, for they were only too aware that Stein, Pelliot, Oldenburg and Tachibana had already been there and removed everything they could lay their hands on. On the other hand Warner was an art historian rather than a philologist and therefore not particularly interested in manuscripts. Anyway, sixteen years after Stein’s great coup, who knew what else might not be obtainable at Tun-huang? But there were other reasons, too, for Warner wishing to visit this remote site. As an art historian he wanted to see the great desert art gallery which so few orientalists had set eyes on. Moreover, the laboratories at Harvard were hoping that he would be able to acquire, if not entire frescoes, at least fragments on which to conduct their tests. The purpose of this expedition was to pave the way for more ambitious ventures later. There was no hurry, or so it seemed then.

  To reach Tun-huang from Karakhoto meant first returning across the now frozen Gobi to Suchou and from there continuing westwards towards the great monastery complex. When they struck camp the ‘Black City’ was already under snow, a magical sight but the end to any further digging. The return journey across the desert proved to be infinitely more gruelling than the outward one. Snow blanketed the ground and icy winds cut through them as they plodded along beside the ice-covered Etsin-gol river. Soon the men were suffering from exhaustion and Jayne decided to ride one of the camels. It was a near fatal error. When he dismounted from his kneeling camel at the next halt, he fell flat on his face, unable to stand. Warner wrote: ‘I stretched him on the snow with his back to a blaze and took off his fur boots to find both feet frozen stiff.’ For the next three hours he and Wang, their interpreter, rubbed Jayne’s feet with snow (the classic emergency treatment for frostbite, which had nonetheless failed to save Stein’s toes). When the sensation returned, the pain was so severe that Jayne passed out. ‘Still we scrubbed feverishly, hardening our hearts,’ Warner recounts. Occasionally they gave their patient a drink of raw Chinese spirit which they carried as fuel for the small emergency cooker. Finally they rubbed the frozen skin with grease, in the hope that this would save some at least of the blistered skin. ‘We put his soles against the bare skin inside our shirts to give them natural heat,’ wrote Warner. ‘All this time he had uttered no word of complaint, mustering up a feeble grin when I asked him the banal question of how he felt.’

  For the rest of that night Warner lay awake trying to work out how he could get Jayne to safety from this blizzard-swept hell in the middle of nowhere. They had little fuel left, so there was no question of staying put and attempting to nurse Jayne back to health themselves. Nor was he in any fit state to endure the rocking of a camel. They had to get a cart from somewhere. Wang was dispatched to the nearest oasis, some two days away, to try to procure one at all costs. In the meantime, Jayne had developed a high fever and Warner was haunted by the fear of his feet turning gangrenous. After an absence of three days, Wang returned in the middle of the night with a ramshackle cart and its reluctant owner. The next day they set out with Jayne in the cart and the anxious Warner trudging behind, cursing himself for letting the misfortune happen and wondering how one amputated the human foot ‘with a hunting knife and no anaesthetics’. Their objective was Kanchou, about ten days distant across the desert, where they knew there was a Chinese missionary doctor.

  It was a nightmarish journey made even worse by the unexpectedly hostile attitude of the local population who, in one village, greeted the foreigners with jeers and catcalls, and in others tried to extort money from them or even rob them. It was their first encounter with such behaviour, and was not to be their last. Finally, on the eighteenth day, they reached the walled town of Kanchou. To their relief, the Chinese doctor was there – ‘full of Christianity and antiseptics’, wrote the grateful Warner. After cleaning Jayne’s blistered and swollen limbs he pronounced that they had already begun to heal and that gangrene was no longer a serious risk. After a further sixteen days spent convalescing Jayne felt sufficiently better to leave for Tun-huang. However, by the time they reached Suchou it was clear that he had not the strength to go any further. ‘Jayne, for all his determination, could not even now walk more than a hundred yards,’ Warner wrote. He already had a heavy cold and in his weakened state would be vulne
rable to any infection lurking in the filthy inns along the road. Moreover, the worst of the Chinese Central Asian winter was still to come. Deeply disappointed, Jayne agreed to make his way slowly back to Peking with the meagre material they had excavated at Karakhoto. After bidding a sad farewell to Jayne, Warner and the long-suffering Wang, accompanied by four Turkestani ponies and one large cart, continued westwards along the snow-covered trail towards Tun-huang. At the small oasis town of Anhsi they left the modern caravan route and took the once-busy but now little used trail to where, some seventy miles across the desert, lay Tun-huang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.

  Wang, the little priest, was absent (as ever), but this did not deter Warner. He made straight for the painted caves, and during the next ten days rarely left them except to eat or to sleep. In The Long Old Road in China he recounts: ‘… there was nothing to do but to gasp … for the first time I understood why I had crossed an ocean and two continents, plodding beside my cart these weary months.’ Warner, the most visually educated of the archaeologists to visit Tun-huang, found himself stupefied by the tens of thousands of painted figures in the caves. He confessed: ‘I, who had come to attribute dates and glibly to refute the professors and to discover artistic influences, stood in the centre of a chapel with my hands dug deep in my pockets and tried to think.’

  But soon, as he visited cave after cave, another emotion seized him – blind fury. Two years earlier, four hundred White Russian soldiers who had escaped across the frontier into China had been interned for six months at Tun-huang by the authorities. Evidence of their frustration and boredom was to be seen everywhere. Warner wrote angrily to his wife: ‘… across some of these lovely faces are scribbled the numbers of a Russian regiment, and from the mouth of a Buddha where he sits to deliver the Lotus Law flows some Slav obscenity.’ The Russians had done so much damage that the photographs taken by Stein and Nouette were now the sole record of many of the wall-paintings. ‘My job’, he told his wife, ‘is to break my neck to rescue and preserve anything and everything I can from this quick ruin. It has been stable enough for centuries, but the end is in sight now.’

 

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