Foreign Devils on the Silk Road

by Peter Hopkirk

  The very largest of the wall-paintings could not, however, be moved to safety. Not only were they cemented firmly into place, but removing them would have meant first cutting them into pieces once again. Instead, the museum staff placed iron covers and sandbags over them to shield them from the effects of blast. ‘Apart from that,’ a senior West Berlin museum official told me, ‘there was nothing they could do but pray that no harm would befall them.’ Their prayers were not heeded, however. The museum, which lay close to today’s Berlin Wall, was hit no fewer than seven times by Allied bombs between November 23, 1943, and January 15, 1945. Twenty-eight of the largest wall-paintings – almost all of them from Bezeklik – were totally destroyed after surviving wars, earthquakes and iconoclasts for well over a millennium. All that remains of them today are the plates in von Le Coq’s great portfolio of the paintings from his first expedition – and the gaping holes in the walls of the rock-hewn monastery overlooking the Sangim gorge.

  The horrifying loss of these huge Buddhist masterpieces from Bezeklik has led to the widely held belief that all von Le Coq’s treasures were destroyed during the Allied bombing of Berlin. The Chinese themselves appear to believe it, and cite the loss bitterly to refute any suggestion that men like von Le Coq and Stein were really rescuing the antiquities they removed from the Silk Road. Just how much then of the Berlin collection was lost? The German art historian Dr Herbert Härtel, today director of West Berlin’s splendid new Museum of Indian Art where the surviving part of the collection is housed, estimates that about sixty per cent escaped destruction. Anyone who doubts this figure should visit West Berlin, drive out to the leafy suburb of Dahlem where Härtel’s museum stands, and see for himself just how much survived. Of all the collections I have seen of Chinese Central Asian art – and that includes almost all of them – the one in West Berlin is by far the largest and most imaginatively displayed. Even the secondary pieces are well displayed in the basement, where they can be seen by arrangement.

  Dr Härtel, a distinguished Indologist and former Luftwaffe pilot, estimates the wartime losses as follows. Of the six hundred and twenty complete frescoes or fragments brought back by von Le Coq and Grünwedel, some three hundred have survived in varying states (much of the damage has since been put right). Of the two hundred and ninety clay sculptures in the pre-war collection, some one hundred and seventy-five have survived. Of the remaining objects such as terracotta figures, bronzes, wooden sculptures, coins, and paintings on silk, paper and wood, Härtel estimates that some eighty per cent have survived. Very few of the manuscripts brought back by von Le Coq and Grünwedel were kept in the old Ethnological Museum, the great bulk having been deposited in the Prussian Academy for study. These were removed to safety during the war and are today in East Berlin.

  However, not all the losses to the collection during World War II were due to American bombing (Dr Härtel, incidentally, spares the RAF from blame). When the bunker at the zoo, where some of the treasures were stored, fell into the hands of the Russians in 1945, its secrets were quickly discovered. It is now known that at least eight or nine packing cases of clay sculptures – only the Russians know the exact number – were removed and driven away on lorries. They also looted many important Indian sculptures, again from the Ethnological Museum, which had been deposited there for safety. Like the gold from Troy, neither the sculptures from Turkestan nor those from India have been seen or heard of since, despite West German requests that they be returned. Yet the great bulk of other art treasures looted by the Russians – particularly the European paintings – were sent back long ago. Who knows, perhaps the Russians are holding them in exchange for something they might one day want from Germany or – more appropriately – from China.

  The third largest collection of antiquities to be removed from Chinese Central Asia was that amassed by the three Otani expeditions. Whatever else the Japanese may or may not have been up to, they certainly dug feverishly – usually with more energy than knowledge. Even Japanese scholars have had difficulty in piecing together what happened to the collection after its arrival at Count Otani’s villa in Kyoto. Indeed, the whereabouts of part of it is still something of a mystery today (although some items, as we shall see, could well be in Soviet hands). The man who knows more about the fate of the Otani treasures than anyone is Dr Jiro Sugiyama, Curator of Oriental Art at the Tokyo National Museum. It was he who first hinted to me that Otani’s men might have been carrying out other tasks besides archaeology – a suggestion which caused me to search the political and secret files in the India Office Library and thus come upon Captain Shuttle-worth’s curious reports.

  No one knows for sure, Dr Sugiyama points out, just how large the original collection was. Otani’s men – none of them trained archaeologists – kept no proper records of their discoveries and the collection was never catalogued in its entirety. Although Count Otani himself published a two-volume work on it (a sort of Japanese coffee-table book containing pictures of many of the items) there was no accompanying text, and it is therefore of little value to modern scholars. Possibly as a result of the excitement caused in Japan by Stein’s discoveries at Tun-huang, part of the Otani collection – mostly frescoes and sculptures – was exhibited in the Kyoto Museum as early as 1910, although by then only two of the Count’s three expeditions had been to Central Asia. As no copies of the exhibition catalogue have survived, scholars have had to rely upon the memories of those who saw or heard about it at the time to work out what was shown.

  Before very long the collection began to be broken up (already Tachibana had kept back some of the finds for himself). The main reason for this was the sale by Count Otani of his villa, where the bulk of the treasures were stored, owing to sudden financial pressures. Although he personally kept some hundred pieces and gave a further two hundred and forty-nine to the Kyoto Museum, the larger part of the collection became the property of the villa’s new owner, a former Japanese finance minister and a wealthy man. In exchange, it is said, for mining rights there, he in his turn gave it to the then Japanese Governor-General of Korea for the new museum in Seoul. Presumably because he had nowhere to store or display it himself, Count Otani next presented much – but not all – of what was still in his possession to the Governor-General of Lushun (Port Arthur) in Manchuria for exhibition in the museum there. As a result of these two transactions, more of the original collection was now outside Japan than remained at home. Dr Sugiyama estimates that roughly one-third went to Korea, another third to Manchuria and the rest stayed in Japan, although even the latter portion was gradually dispersed, some finding its way into private collections.

  What has happened to it all now? The Seoul treasures today lie in packing cases in the storeroom of the National Museum after surviving the Korean War, during which the museum twice changed hands. They consist of some four to five hundred objects, the most important of which are sixty or so frescoes or fresco fragments. Dr Kim Che-won, who was director of the museum from 1945 to 1970, believes that the Seoul murals are the third most important collection in the world after the Berlin and Delhi (Stein) ones. There are long-term plans to build new galleries in the museum. Eventually, it is hoped, the Otani material will be displayed there. But the Koreans, less confident than von Le Coq of man’s peaceable nature, have decided that the wall-paintings must remain movable and not, as in the old Berlin museum, be fixed irrevocably to the walls.

  Little is known (among western scholars, anyway) of the fate of the Port Arthur treasures, or even what they consisted of. Dr Sugiyama told me that he believes they may all have been removed by the Russians when in May 1955 they finally handed Manchuria back to the Chinese. His enquiries in Moscow and Leningrad, however, have met with silence. But not all the painstaking digging done by Otani’s mysterious young monks was completely wasted. If one goes to the Tokyo National Museum and visits the fine new air-conditioned Toyokan, or Gallery of Eastern Antiquities, one can see, beautifully displayed there, the remaining third of the Otani collect
ion. It comprises those objects which stayed in the Count’s personal possession as well as those deposited by him at the old Kyoto Museum. These were purchased over several years by the Japanese Government on behalf of the Tokyo National Museum after being tracked down to those private collections and institutions which in the meantime had acquired them. Finally, in 1968, they were all reunited in a special exhibition to celebrate the opening of the museum’s new oriental gallery. Since then they have been augmented by a number of silk banners and clay figures brought back from Tun-huang by Pelliot and obtained from the Musée Guimet by exchange. Thus, some twenty years after Count Otani’s death, he and his energetic young acolytes acquired (somewhat undeservedly, in view of their combined incompetence) a fine memorial to their archaeological zeal.

  In the Hermitage, where Russia’s Silk Road treasures are displayed in eight rooms, the work of Koslov, Oldenburg and the two Beresovsky brothers is similarly commemorated. In the Guimet, where a gallery is named permanently after him, Paul Pelliot too has his memorial. At the Fogg Art Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Langdon Warner’s enterprise is handsomely acknowledged and his Tun-huang frescoes proudly displayed. In Stockholm, Hedin’s treasures are to be given a permanent home in the city’s fine new Ethnographical Museum. Only in Britain is there a complete failure to recognise the remarkable achievements of her man, Sir Marc Aurel Stein. Even the Indians have taken the trouble to hang a portrait of him in the dingy galleries in Delhi where his great Central Asian murals are to be found, while in the Indian National Museum nearby, where his smaller finds are displayed, he is generously acknowledged. Perhaps Britain – his adopted country – will one day do justice, not only to him, but also to the many unnamed Buddhist artists and sculptors whose work he rediscovered.

  But it was not only paintings, sculptures and other works of art that he and the others carried off from the temples and monasteries of Turkestan and Kansu. What has happened then to the vast archive of Central Asian manuscripts and ancient block-printed books which were also removed before the Chinese finally put a stop to it? The man responsible for removing the largest quantity of these was Stein. Today the manuscripts and books from his three expeditions are divided between the British Library and that of the India Office in London. The Chinese, Sogdian, Uighur and Tangut works are in the former, while those in Tibetan, Sanskrit and Khotanese – to name just some – are in the latter. Understandably, apart from the British Library’s celebrated Diamond Sutra, these are not on view to the public, for to the layman one oriental manuscript looks much like another. Moreover prolonged exposure to ultra-violet light and to the pollution of Bloomsbury (or Blackfriars) would only hasten their deterioration.

  The highly prized (and still contentious) Chinese-language manuscripts and books from Tun-huang, after being stored in cardboard boxes in the British Museum for many years, have now been transferred to the British Library. There, some thirteen thousand of them live in a row of specially built cabinets amid a benign atmosphere of filtered air and in a carefully controlled temperature. Some seven thousand of them – all those that are complete – have been catalogued. The remainder, most of them little more than scraps, have still, in many cases, to be identified. Although no further work is being done on them at present by the British Museum, many Japanese scholars come to London to pore over these ancient texts, including one man who has devoted a lifetime just to the study of the Lotus Sutra. In order to protect the manuscripts from further deterioration, the British Library has embarked on a programme of conservation. In the past, the condition of many of them has been a sore point with the Chinese who undoubtedly regard the Tun-huang manuscripts – particularly those in Chinese – as their rightful property. However, relations have improved to the point where advice has been sought and obtained from Peking on what methods and materials should be used for conserving Chinese manuscripts. Experiments with ovens specially designed to accelerate ageing by as much as one hundred years in twenty-four hours have shown that man-made fibres are short-lived and generally inferior to the natural materials used by the ancient Chinese.

  So much then for what one major institution is doing with its collection, or rather with just part of it. Today the thousands of manuscripts brought back from Chinese Central Asia, written in a multitude of tongues and scripts, are divided among the institutions of at least eight different countries. Very many have still to be translated. The deciphering of one script, or the translation of one collection, can take a man’s entire working life. One Indologist explained to me: ‘Perhaps only twice in a century does a man emerge capable of such a task. Until then the manuscripts have to wait.’ Such a man is Sir Harold Bailey, the British scholar, who has spent a lifetime unravelling the mysteries of ancient Khotanese. Anyone who wishes to understand the contribution these manuscripts have made to the study of Central Asian and Buddhist history can turn to the host of translations, catalogues, monographs and other specialist studies produced by scholars such as Bailey, Giles, Waley, Maspero, Levi, Konow, Müller, Henning, Hoernle, Pelliot and Chavannes, to name just a few.

  Before leaving the subject of the manuscripts, there was one particular collection that scholars (Hoernle in particular) were only too anxious to forget. These ‘old books’ had to be withdrawn hastily from the British Museum when Islam Akhun, the semi-literate treasure-seeker from Khotan, confessed to forging them. After being rediscovered in the British Museum basement in 1979 in two wooden chests labelled ‘Central Asian Forgeries,’ all ninety of them have now been catalogued and transferred to the British Library. Examining these long-forgotten relics today, one is astonished by their sophisticated appearance and the neatness and persuasiveness of their ‘unknown scripts’. To the layman – and presumably to most scholars – they look all too convincing, with their well-thumbed appearance, ancient-looking paper, and faded but erudite-looking texts. It is surely not an exaggeration to describe this wily forger who so completely fooled the giants of his chosen field as something of a genius. He too has his modest memorial – that small corner of the British Library’s oriental department, near the Tun-huang manuscripts, where his once-venerated ‘old books’ are preserved for posterity.

  We have now considered the fate of the main collections carried off from Chinese Central Asia – those ‘caravan-loads of priceless treasures … for ever lost to China’, to quote the words of Sir Eric Teichman. But the principal characters in this story have still to make their exits. Sir Aurel Stein, perhaps the dominant figure, today lies in the mud-walled Christian cemetery at Kabul, in the shadow of the Hindu Kush, surrounded by the graves of hippies for whom also Afghanistan was the end of the trail. This doyen of Central Asian archaeologists died in Kabul in 1943 at the age of eighty-two. It is a fitting resting place for him. For forty years he had repeatedly sought permission from the Afghans to explore their country – the missing link in his Silk Road travels. Finally, as he sat working in his tent on his beloved Kashmir ‘marg’, that permission arrived. But within a week of his arrival in Kabul he was dead – struck down by a chill which turned suddenly to pneumonia. ‘Seldom’, wrote Sir Denison Ross, the orientalist, ‘has there been combined in one man such qualifications for exploration.’ He added: ‘This great Hungarian is the pride of two nations and the wonder of all.’ Although a British citizen, Stein never entirely forgot the country of his birth. His frugal lifestyle had enabled him to save some £57,000, and most of this he left to set up a fund to further Central Asiatic studies. His one stipulation was that, wherever possible, the work should be carried out by British or Hungarian scholars.

  Stein’s greatest rival (in terms of quantity, anyway) was von Le Coq, who had predeceased him by thirteen years. The German died in April 1930, just as Stein was arriving in Nanking to negotiate his ill-fated fourth, and last, expedition. During World War I, von Le Coq had been deeply affected by the death of his only son, killed on a battlefield in France. In addition he had to endure the sadness of suddenly discovering himself, a lifelong Anglo
phile, on the ‘other side’ from pre-war friends like Macartney and Stein. On top of that, as a result of the economic collapse of Germany, he had found himself financially ruined. His solace became the arrangement of his beloved treasures in the Ethnological Museum, and even after being struck down by a painful and incurable illness he would cheerfully struggle from his bed to show off the collection to a special visitor or friend. When he knew that death was very close, he managed, unknown to his wife, to obtain some black-edged stationery and address envelopes to his many friends. In an obituary of his German colleague, Pelliot refers to the moment when he opened one of these only to discover that it contained the news of von Le Coq’s own death.

  Grünwedel died some five years later, a sad and broken man. His distinguished career had begun to crumble when he became involved in quarrels with colleagues, including one with his subordinate Müller over which of them had been the first to recognise some of the Turfan manuscripts as Manichaean. Other German scholars took Müller’s side and consequently Grünwedel suffered a loss of reputation. He became increasingly isolated from his colleagues and soon his professional judgement began to be questioned. In the words of one obituarist, he sought refuge in obscure theories ‘where the experts were not able to follow him’. It was a kind way of saying that he was approaching insanity. A less kindly reviewer described one of his later works on Buddhist Central Asian iconography as ‘a religious historical novel of wild fantasy’. Grünwedel ended his days in a mental hospital, a deeply embittered, lonely and disappointed man. However, as his obituarist wrote: ‘the confusion of his last few works should not be allowed to detract from his brilliant and reliable earlier works …’ But at least he and von Le Coq – and even Engineer Bartus, who lived on until 1941 – were spared the anguish of seeing the destruction of their museum.