Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  Fortuitously, he had arrived armed with a special chemical solution for detaching wall-paintings, which had been successfully pioneered in Italy. His original intention had been merely to test the solvent and at the same time remove a few small fragments for laboratory analysis. Even this was something none of his predecessors had dared attempt – inhibited, if not by ethical considerations, then by the policing of the caves by Wang. However, having seen the destruction wrought by the Cossack soldiers, Warner’s scruples vanished. He wrote: ‘As for the morals of such vandalism I would strip the place bare without a flicker. Who knows when Chinese troops may be quartered here as the Russians were? And, worse still, how long before the Mohameddan rebellion that everyone expects? In 20 years this place won’t be worth a visit.…’ He pointed out that every new pilgrim scratched his name on the paintings or removed a bit of ‘trembling plaster’.

  But even if Warner had now overcome his own moral scruples, he still had the Abbot Wang to contend with. In the event the priest was surprisingly unperturbed at the prospect of surrendering some of his frescoes – once a ‘handsome present’ had paved the way. He proved more obdurate though when Warner raised the question of the sculptures. However, when it dawned on him that the ‘mad foreigner’ had no designs on his own new and brightly painted statues, he agreed to part with one old one – a three-foot T’ang figure of a kneeling saint, today one of the most prized items in the Fogg Museum collection.

  Warner now prepared to attempt what he had previously regarded as unthinkable – the removal of some of Tun-huang’s priceless frescoes. Although the priest had raised no objection to this (perhaps because he failed to realise their value as nobody had ever expressed an interest in removing any before), resistance arose from a totally unexpected source – the elements. It was now mid-winter at Tun-huang and temperatures had dropped to well below zero. Whenever, brush in hand, Warner ascended his ladder to apply his fixative to a painting, he found to his dismay that the liquid froze solid before it had time to penetrate and consolidate the fragile plaster. Similarly, the glue-soaked strips of gauze (with which Warner intended to ‘peel off’ the frescoes rather like transfers) set hard before they could adhere properly to the paint surface. Nonetheless, after five days Warner managed to remove twelve modest-sized paintings. He was careful to leave in situ the earliest and finest frescoes and take only parts of those masterpieces which were already damaged. Even these, Warner claimed, ‘… would prove treasures the like of which we had never seen in America, and which Berlin, with its wealth of frescoes sawn in squares from the stucco walls of Turkestan, might envy’. All the same, those five days were uncomfortable ones for Warner, fully aware of the enormity of what he was doing, and haunted by the fear of causing further destruction if his techniques failed.

  Finally the job was done. Still attached to its glue-soaked cloth, each of the precious, eighth-century frescoes was wrapped tenderly in felt and sandwiched between boards to cushion it against the shocks of the two-month journey to Peking by springless mappa. In his letters home Warner asked that no mention be made of the paintings to his sponsors, for he was far from confident that the laboratory would be able to disentangle the gluey cloths from their delicate paint surfaces. (In the event, they rescued eleven of the twelve pictures.) Meanwhile, the equally frail clay sculpture, dating from T’ang times, also had to be protected during its long, slow, bumpy ride eastwards through the badlands of Central China. There was only one answer. ‘The little saint itself was wound with the oddest collection of garments that ever a Buddhist figure wore,’ Warner wrote. It was first wrapped in Warner’s underclothes and socks and finally in his sheepskin trousers and blankets. Warner adds: ‘If I lacked for underwear and socks on the return journey, my heart was kept warm by the thought of the service which my things were performing when they kept that fresh smooth skin and those crumbling pigments from harm.’

  Warner reached Peking safely with his treasures some nine months after he had set out with Jayne the previous autumn. Despite the difficulties, and the disappointment of Karakhoto, his expedition had turned out to be a success. He had acquired works of art which no other museum possessed and which would put Harvard’s small Fogg collection permanently on the map of oriental scholarship. He was determined to return to Tun-huang as soon as possible with a larger team and for a longer stay. ‘On those walls’, he declared, ‘we should find the very genesis of the Chinese manner of painting, the beginnings of the landscape school in which she has perhaps surpassed us all.…’ Six months’ close study of the originals would answer many of the questions posed by the master painters of Tun-huang. With luck, moreover, the expedition might add to the Fogg’s small, if choice, collection of Central Asian treasures. However, as things turned out, the second Fogg expedition was to prove a fiasco.

  16. The Chinese Slam the Door

  * * *

  Although the Americans were slow to realise it, the archaeological free-for-all in Central Asia was almost over. During the thirty years since Sven Hedin’s first daring journey into the Taklamakan desert, access to the lost cities and ruined monasteries of the Silk Road had been virtually unrestricted. Masterpieces of Buddhist art had been acquired for next to nothing. To men like Stein and von Le Coq it had been one long field day. But now time was fast running out for foreign archaeologists. From the intense xenophobia he had encountered when trying to get his sick colleague to safety in the winter of 1924, Langdon Warner should perhaps have sensed that the door was beginning to close, and thought twice before deciding to return.

  But on May 30, 1925, something happened which no one could have foreseen. A British police officer in the treaty port of Shanghai, faced by rioting Chinese students who refused to disperse, ordered his men to open fire. Eleven students died – most of them, it was said, shot in the back. A wave of anger against foreigners swept across China. Warner, who had recently arrived in Peking at the head of a larger expedition, reported: ‘News of the Shanghai shooting on that day travelled like wild-fire through the interior.’ Missionaries and other foreigners in remote stations had to be evacuated to the coastal cities. When Warner’s party reached Tun-huang, where they had planned to work for eight months, they were met by a menacing mob of peasant farmers – the same people who had welcomed Warner the previous year.

  The man from the Fogg had clearly been hoping this time to relieve Tun-huang of more of its frescoes, as well as to conduct art-historical studies in the painted caves. Apart from bringing with him what Jeannette Mirsky refers to a little unkindly as ‘barrels of glue’, he had included in his seven-man expedition Daniel Thompson, the young fresco expert who had supplied him with the recipe for his fixative the previous year. To avoid any risk of Thompson’s concoction freezing again, Warner had timed this visit for the spring.

  Although in Peking no objections had been raised to the expedition, the Americans now suddenly found themselves harassed at every step by the local authorities, as well as by a hostile populace. Forced to abandon any hope of working at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, let alone removing anything, they had no choice but to retreat to another site of far less importance. But even here they met with a hostile reception. ‘The situation’, Warner wrote, ‘was one of extreme delicacy on account of the presence of a dozen villagers who had left their ordinary employments, some fifteen miles off, to watch our movements and to try by a thousand expedients to tempt us into a breach which would warrant an attack or forcible expulsion from the region.’ It took great self-restraint on the part of the Americans to avoid violence, such was the intensity of feeling directed against them. ‘A single slip, even an angry look,’ Warner adds, ‘would probably have brought the whole hive about our ears and might well have cost us our lives.’ Friends in Peking had by now begun to send telegrams imploring them to abandon the expedition. Hostile and inflammatory rumours, moreover, were being circulated about their intentions. A whole year later the Russian-born artist Nicholas Roerich, passing through Urumchi, noted i
n his diary: ‘Strange information reached us about the pillage of the frescoes at Tun-huang.’ The rumour claimed that some American art dealers had visited the caves and carried away ‘many cases’ of frescoes.

  But long before this wild version of events reached Roerich in Urumchi, Warner had been forced to call off the second Fogg Museum expedition, and to concede that it had been little more than a fiasco. All that he had to show for it were photographs of other cave temples, of minor importance compared to those at Tun-huang. Warner’s anger was directed less towards the hostile local peasantry than against Dr Ch’en, a medical man and scholar who had travelled with the expedition from Peking ostensibly to aid them in deciphering inscriptions at Tun-huang and to handle any problems which might arise on the journey. Two days after their arrival he had suddenly insisted on returning at all speed to Peking where, he said, his mother was ill. Ch’en later published a slanderous book about the expedition in which he claimed that he had accompanied the Americans for the sole purpose of keeping an eye on them and preventing them from pillaging. Warner had good reason to suspect that it was Ch’en who had incited the local villagers to anger against them, then left for home knowing that his work was completed.

  But despite this major set-back, the Fogg Museum had not yet abandoned hope of adding to its collection of Chinese Central Asian treasures. The trustees were perhaps encouraged by the unexpected success, some two years after Langdon Warner’s return, of a German geological expedition in removing some objects (today in Bremen) from the remote and unguarded sites of Rawak and Dandan-uilik. They had only managed to get away with this because, it seems, anti-foreign feeling had still not penetrated as far west as this farthest-flung corner of the Republic. It did, however, while the Germans were still there, and they had to leave hurriedly, although the Fogg trustees may have been unaware of this.

  Clearly there was little point in sending their own man Warner back to China, for he was now to all intents and purposes persona non grata. But then someone had a bright idea. Why not approach Sir Aurel Stein, the Grand Old Man of Central Asian archaeology, now aged sixty-seven and retired, and see whether he could be persuaded to go on behalf of the Fogg? If he, with all his friends and contacts in Chinese Turkestan, could not pull it off then no one could. Stein agreed to try. Some £20,000 was raised (despite the Wall Street crash) and in April 1930 the Englishman arrived in Nanking, the Republican capital, to try to talk the authorities into allowing him to take one final expedition into Chinese Central Asia. Despite fierce resistance from the self-appointed ‘National Council for the Preservation of Chinese Antiquities’ in Peking – a pressure group determined to keep all archaeological exploration out of foreign hands – Stein managed to extract from the Nanking authorities permission to visit and excavate in Turkestan. Considering the indignation that his and Pelliot’s removal of the Tun-huang manuscripts had engendered among Chinese scholars, this was perhaps surprising. However, encouraged by his apparently easy victory, Stein hurried back to India, from where he set out for Kashgar in the summer of 1930.

  But meanwhile, unknown to him, a vigorous campaign had been launched in China among the intelligentsia to try to put a stop to his expedition by getting his visa cancelled. The Chinese press, too, was demanding his expulsion and scurrilous stories about him were being circulated. Although Stein was a far tougher nut to crack than Warner, with long-standing and well-placed friends in the local Chinese administration, his adversaries eventually won the day. But not before he had travelled some two thousand miles around the Taklamakan oases, mapping and gathering for his sponsors what meagre archaeological material he could, in the face of continual obstruction. But the price of his entry to Turkestan had been a last-minute condition that everything he found must be submitted to the authorities for inspection before agreement could be given to its removal from China. Thus his few acquisitions, which included third-century manuscripts from his favourite site of Niya, had to be left behind in Kashgar when after seven months he was finally forced to abandon his expedition and return to India. It was the last that Stein would ever see of them – or, for that matter, of Chinese Central Asia. The Chinese had closed the door on him at last. His swan song had ended in failure. However, he could hardly complain when he looked back at his years of unbroken success during which he had made his name and more than satisfied all his sponsors save for the Fogg.

  In retrospect, before hiring Stein the Fogg trustees should perhaps have heeded not only Warner’s experience but also that of another distinguished explorer, Sven Hedin. In the winter of 1926 the Swedish traveller had returned to China at the invitation of the Government and at the expense of Lufthansa, the German airline. While his principal task was to reconnoitre a route for a new Berlin–Urumchi–Peking air link, he took with him, in addition to aviation experts, a small scientific team equipped for meteorological, geological and other work, including archaeology and palaeontology. On reaching Peking, Hedin and his men were astonished to find themselves the target of extreme hostility from Chinese scholars and press. The Chinese, they were told, did not need any help from foreigners to explore their own country. Hedin’s plans to use aircraft had to be abandoned entirely after reports began to appear in local newspapers claiming that these would be used to airlift secretly out of China large quantities of art treasures. In all, it took Hedin nearly six months to renegotiate terms before the expedition could proceed. Less determined men would have packed up and gone home. In the end the Chinese had insisted that he take with him ten of their scholars in addition to his own, that the expedition be renamed the Sino-Swedish Expedition, and finally that any archaeological material he found would remain the property of the Chinese Government. By now the political turmoil in China had become so dangerous that each member of the expedition had to take with him a rifle, a revolver and eight hundred rounds of ammunition (they were to need them). Even so, Hedin’s long-drawn-out expedition was to suffer a total of eight deaths from various causes. Despite their many difficulties, though, his archaeologists did make a number of finds – mainly manuscripts and textiles. But these, of course, they were not allowed to keep. The day of the freebooter was over. From now on, if one dug at all one dug for China. There were few, if any, takers.

  One of the strangest episodes in Central Asian history was now at an end, but the story is not quite finished. Two questions have still to be answered. Where, today, are the vast quantities of wall-paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and other antiquities which Stein, Pelliot, von Le Coq, Tachibana, Warner and others removed en masse from the ancient cities of the Silk Road so many years ago? And what befell that handful of archaeological heroes (or villains, depending on your viewpoint) who devoted so much enterprise and effort and, not infrequently, sheer courage to removing it all?

  The treasures and manuscripts of Serindia – to borrow Stein’s term – are today divided among the museums and institutions of a dozen countries. Within those countries the material is further spread through a total of more than thirty institutions. The collections range from the very large ones – like those in London, Berlin and Delhi – to those, like the Cernuschi Museum in Paris and the Nelson Gallery in Kansas, with only the odd painting or sculpture to show. And yet, despite this incredible wealth of material from the Silk Road in the West and elsewhere, how many people have ever heard of Serindian art, of Tun-huang or even of Sir Aurel Stein? How many of us have ever seen the great Buddhist murals from Miran or Kyzil, the delicate polychrome silks from which the world’s oldest trade route takes its name, or the magnificent T’ang sculptures, banners and scrolls from its temples, monasteries and shrines?

  The answer, sadly, is extraordinarily few. The reason is that, with one notable exception, the few museums which possess important Silk Road collections lie beyond reach of most people. For they include the National Museum in Delhi, the Museum of Indian Art in West Berlin, the Tokyo National Museum and the Hermitage in Leningrad. And yet the one institution within reach of almost everybody at so
me time or other – the British Museum – with its huge Serindian collection, has the most meagre display of all. The great bulk of Britain’s share of Stein’s discoveries lies, unseen by the public, in boxes in the basement, and not a single fragment of figured silk from the Silk Road can be seen in the small Central Asian section.

  All this is not so much a scandal as a sad fact of museum life. For the bigger the museum and the more comprehensive its contents, the smaller the space it can devote to any particular collection or culture. Had Stein been working for the small but ambitious young Fogg Museum, one can imagine the spectacular display his treasures would enjoy today. As it is, one cannot help feeling that he merely dug them up in China only to see them buried again in Bloomsbury. There is a strong case, it could be argued, for a museum returning to the country of origin all antiquities – like these – which it has no prospect of putting on display. For a national museum (as against an international one) can always devote more space to collections of its own culture, and often more resources to their conservation.

  The Germans, on the other hand, can hardly be accused of concealing von Le Coq’s treasures. Indeed, he himself was able to dictate the arrangement of his finds in the old Ethnological Museum when he became its director. Eventually he added a total of thirteen extra rooms to house what has become known as the Turfan Collection. The biggest wall-paintings, some of which stood over ten feet high, were, alas, cemented to the walls in iron frames. At that time nobody could have foreseen that this would be the direct cause of their destruction some fifteen years later during World War II. When hostilities broke out, all the movable objects, including the smaller murals and sculptures, were packed away in crates. Some were deposited for safety in the huge bunker in the Berlin zoo, others at the bottom of coal mines in western Germany, while others still were stored in the museum’s basement which had been specially reinforced for the purpose.