The Man Who Loved China

by Simon Winchester

  An early photograph of the Buddhist caves carved into the Mogao cliffs near Dunhuang. The world’s oldest printed book, the Diamond Sutra, was found in an annex to a lavishly illustrated cave like that pictured.

  There was no doubt that it had migrated there: the White Horse Temple in the eastern Chinese city of Luoyang had been built in the first century after Christ and was an unequivocal celebration of Buddhism. But how had something so very Indian become, in short order, transported, transformed, and transmuted into something so very naturally Chinese? Stein, plodding patiently through the deserts just north of the mountain ranges, was determined to discover the answer.

  His research, and that of other scholars in France and Germany, showed that it was all the work of a number of determined and very peripatetic monks. Some of these monks were Indian, some were Chinese, and in the first decades of the first millennium they had managed, through grim determination and no doubt some memorable heroics, to carry the message of the Buddha—usually by word of mouth—across the dangerous high-altitude passes between the two great empires. They brought their stories down to the main trade route between central Asia and China that would in time become known as the Silk Road—the same road Needham had been so patiently traveling for the last eight weeks.

  Once on the road, the Buddha’s word soon reached the Chinese court. As soon as the senior mandarins at Chang’an, or Xi’an, had been shown images of great golden statues of his calming presence, and told the finer details of his teaching, they officially declared themselves impressed. Over time the religion took firm hold in establishment China. When it was fairly well settled, Chinese pilgrims began to make the long, dangerous journey to its source, to see for themselves the fountainhead of their new faith. Groups of translator monks also began to journey and to forage for the details of Buddhism, and in the process began the collection, translation, and dissemination among the Chinese of the great Buddhist texts, the sutras.

  One of these wandering monks is remembered today in particular, and with reverence. He was Xuan Zang, a scholar’s son from the east of China. Tales of his adventures along the Silk Road in the seventh century, and of his expeditions to Nepal and India and to present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, became well-known in Chang’an and beyond. His stories, all based on diaries written with priestly precision, are full of such fantastic happenings that they have survived into modern times—they find their way even today into the comic-book world of Japanese manga.

  The equally romantic explorer Marco Polo had once been to this same desert, and had also left voluminous writings that Stein studied. But it was Xuan Zang’s adventuring that particularly inspired him. The memory and the accounts of this tough old monk led him, eventually and inevitably, to strike out for Dunhuang himself, to find the caves, and to uncover the astonishing treasure trove of Buddhist documents that would make him world-famous. This find would provide even more of an epiphany for Joseph Needham when he himself arrived in Dunhuang, dog-weary, highway-stained, and stranded, thirty-six years later.

  FOUR

  The Rewards of Restlessness

  On the Invention of Words to Describe Indescribable Chinese Traits

  Nosphimeric was a word which I invented during the war years. While on my perpetual travels I often encountered Bishop Ronald Hall of Hong Kong, visiting one of his outlying Chinese congregations, and one day we had a chance meeting at Annan in Kweichow. Talking about various things at dinner I happened to mention to him that I needed a non-pejorative word for that squeeze, graft and corruption which has always been so characteristic of the bureaucracy in China, and which had loomed so large in the eyes of the modern western businessmen who tried to buy and sell there. Both our trucks were being repaired that night, and his was finished earlier, so he set off first—but not before giving me a piece of paper on which was written: “see Acts 5:1–11.” When I got to the Bible I found it was the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who had promised a sum of money to the church, but then held back a portion of it, and accordingly died, blasted by St. Peter. Now the word used in the Greek New Testament for “to sequestrate” is nosphizein, and since meros means a part, we can form the adjective required.

  —JOSEPH NEEDHAM, 1994

  From Science and Civilisation in China, Volume VII, Part 2

  By now Joseph Needham was about as far from the comforts of the West as it was possible to be, more deeply marooned in the outer fastnesses of China than it was possible to imagine. But though he was stranded, he took a calmly philosophical view: the weeks that he would be obliged to spend in the Turkestan desert—he had no idea just how long—would allow him the luxury of reflection, would give him time to take stock, to consider what he had achieved so far, and to plan for what remained to be accomplished.

  His most immediate task was clear: the Mogao caves were just a few steps beyond his tent, and it would serve him well to get to know as much as he could of their story, since it was unlikely, he supposed, that he would ever have the time or the funds to visit them again.

  He had studied a great deal about Marc Aurel Stein, and regarded him as a hero, and by the time he reached Turkestan was full of admiration for a man so clever, cultured, intrepid, and inquiring, in many ways much like himself. Needham had no way of knowing that at the very moment he was beginning his own unexpectedly lengthy sojourn in Dunhuang, his hero was actually very close by.

  Sir Aurel Stein (he had been given a knighthood for his services to archaeology in 1912) was eighty-one, but he was unstoppably curious, and in 1943 had come to the East again. He was just a few hundred miles away from Needham, across the Hindu Kush mountains, staying with the American legation in Kabul. He was there to realize, or so he thought, a lifelong dream: to mount an expedition to look for the fabled city of Balkh, which followers of Alexander the Great had supposedly founded 2,000 years before in deepest Afghanistan.

  Needham also did not know—and would not know until he returned to Chongqing in midwinter—that Stein had fallen gravely ill in Kabul. On October 27, a day that for Needham happened to be quite diabolical—“packed up first thing, hoping to start…became a nightmare day…couldn’t start the engine…fifteen soldiers pushed…eventually got it going…bearing had been too tight”—Stein’s illness worsened dramatically, and he died. It adds a certain irony to the story: the single greatest discovery Stein made at Dunhuang in 1907 was, in all probability, the single object that most inspired Needham to write his great work in China—and yet Needham’s realization of this came, almost to the day, when Stein’s own life came to a close.

  Sir Aurel Stein in 1906, sitting in front of a tamarisk cone on his second expedition to the Taklamakan Desert in western China. He is pictured with his Chinese secretary, his Muslim assistant, three Sikh helpers, and his beloved Dash the Great.

  The story of the discovery made at Dunhuang is that of legend.

  Stein had left his exploration base in Kashmir the previous year. He had prepared well for a journey to this corner of Turkestan, from which he had heard rumors of fantastic finds—fabulous treasures that he believed the world at large should see. He made certain he was as well-equipped as he could be: his maps and books in tin-lined cases to protect them from ants, surveying instruments, ropes, leather repair kits, bamboo poles for the tents, plenty of guns and ammunition, telescopes, bandages, needles, safety pins, and a morning coat and pin-striped pants so that he might impress any mandarins he encountered. He left behind presents for all the friends whose birthdays he would miss while he was away. And he took plenty of food for his dog, which—like all its predecessors and successors, seven in all—he called Dash. He was a scrupulous man—small, tough, and very attentive to detail.

  It took him half a year to reach the western interior of China, and for most of the winter of 1906–1907 he was navigating the harsh sand deserts of Turkestan. During February and March he had been pushing eastward across the immensity of the Lop desert (where in more recent times China used to test atom bombs), with his m
en on donkeys and camels and with blocks of ice carried in straw baskets in lieu of water. The donkeys had died; the water was almost gone—and one day in late March an icy storm known locally as a buran was blowing a full gale, chilling everyone blue.

  And then, suddenly he reached this oasis. A few miles later on—for he wanted to waste no time—he came to Mogao, and the caves.

  They were quite fantastic. There were enormous sculptures, intricate rock carvings, icons. Most of the cave walls were covered with painted images. Some caves contained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of painted, brilliantly colored images of the Buddha, all identical, each hand-painted or block-printed onto the wall no less than 1,300 years ago, and so fresh they looked as though they had been completed yesterday. And then there was the roof—every square inch of some of the caverns was similarly covered. These illustrations were all scenes—eighty-six of them, and each different—showing the various stages in the Buddha’s life. They were from the Northern Zhou dynasty, which flourished from AD 557 until 588.

  There were enormous white-limed and colored statues of women, horses, and Buddhas—Buddhas galore—and in other caves there were images of men and women who looked distinctly Indian. They had been created long ago by artists who saw Buddhism as a theology coming from below the Himalayas and having little about it that was Chinese. And two of the more enormous caves held stupendous Buddhas 100 feet high, huge and splendid and precious, thought Stein, for all mankind.

  The best was yet to come. Just inside the main doorway of one cave there was an opening in the wall, on the right-hand side. This is the tiny cavern that has since come to be known as Cave 17. The fact that Aurel Stein saw it, and saw into it, has to do with a local Daoist monk whose name—Wang Yuanlu—is both revered and reviled today, for what he subsequently did.

  Needham knew the story well. It started when Wang, who lived in Dunhuang at the end of the nineteenth century, decided to appoint himself guardian of the caves. No one else was looking after them; no one ever visited them; and he feared that they were crumbling away and would soon be inundated by the ever-shifting sands. He thought he would try to do a little restoration of the crumbling statues and the peeling paint, and he started to do so with all the gusto of an enthusiastic amateur. While he was working in what is now known as Cave 16, repairing the statue of a horse, he noticed what appeared to be a hidden doorway to the right of the entrance, covered with stucco and painted over.

  He ordered it broken open—and inside he found an immense trove of scroll documents, tens of thousands of ancient paper volumes, hundreds of silk banners, and yard upon yard of textiles.

  Word of the find quickly leaked out. Officials in the Chinese capital ordered the treasures to be sent to a nearby city for safekeeping, but no transportation could be found; and so Wang was ordered to reseal the little cave and await orders. This he did—for a while. But he made his great mistake in May 1907, thirty-six years before Needham’s visit, when he opened up the cave once again. This time it was to satisfy the wickedly persuasive Stein, who was on his collecting expedition for the British Museum. Stein had heard about the collection of documents, and realized that the answer to the question which had nagged at him for so long—how Buddhism had come to China—probably lay within their texts. The contents of Cave 17 were Stein’s Holy Grail, and he just had to have them.

  “Heaped up in layers,” Stein wrote of the contents that would in time come to be world-famous, “but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the little priest’s lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet. Not in the driest soil could relics of a ruined site have so completely escaped injury as they had here in a carefully selected rock chamber where, hidden behind a brick wall…these masses of manuscripts had lain undisturbed for centuries.”

  He wanted them. He wanted them badly—more than anything else he had ever seen. Scholarship needed them, he argued, so that once and for all the world could know how the Buddha came to China.

  And so, by way of a bargaining minuet of elegance and subtlety, and by eventually shelling out just 220 of the English taxpayers’ pounds—a paltry sum that all Chinese schoolchildren know well to this day, a grisly example of western perfidy—the visitor managed to persuade the poor, grinning, stupid monk Wang Yuanlu to hand them over. To sell to a foreigner, in other words, virtually the entire contents of the cave.

  Stein then began taking the papers away. He took, and he took, and he took. And by the time the orgy of taking was over the monk had handed over to the visiting Briton what would be twenty-four wagonloads of papers: thousands and thousands of ancient objects, comprising, everyone now agrees, one of the richest finds in all of archaeological history.

  Most important of all were the scrolls that had been carried by wandering monks hundreds of years before, written in languages as different as Sanskrit, Manichean Turkish, Runic Turkic, Uighur, Tibetan, Sogdian, Central Asian Brahmi, and classical Chinese. There were also star charts—the oldest in the world, fashioned in the Tang dynasty between the seventh and tenth centuries, and showing the sky in the northern hemisphere, with the Big Dipper and Polaris as easily recognizable as they are in this morning’s newspaper.

  And there, too, was the primus inter pares, a fifteen-foot grayish-yellow scroll, which had a colophon suggesting, incredibly, that it be given away free to anyone who wanted a copy—and which is now known as the Diamond Sutra.

  This was the object that answered the most urgent of Stein’s obsessions, the object that so impressed learned Britons in London when they first saw it, the object that so impressed Joseph Needham when first he heard of it in Cambridge in the early 1940s. This one document, covered with Chinese writings and with pictures of the Buddha and other sacred scenes, was not, as everyone had first supposed, a manuscript. Rather, the Diamond Sutra had been printed. It was the result of wooden-block printing, and in all likelihood hundreds, perhaps thousands, of copies had been made, and this was the only one to survive.

  Until the discovery of this sutra in Cave 17 it was assumed—one might say it was arrogantly assumed—that a westerner had printed the first book. But here was firm evidence to the contrary: here was proof that a dated document—the Chinese translation of a Sanskrit Buddhist text—had been printed from blocks of wood 600 years earlier. Here was immutable proof that a technique long assumed to have been a monopoly of European inventors in fact owed much to far more ancient creators, in China. Here was a clear indication that China was no backward nation but for much of its great age a highly sophisticated civilization, the certain fount of at least this one human invention, and quite possibly the fount of just about everything else important that was known to the outside world.

  Stein was (and still is) widely vilified in China for his trickery and plunder—as were a succession of greedy treasure hunters who came after him.28 Dunhuang was eventually closed, so terrified were later Chinese governments that more foreign pillagers would take away the treasures. But when Joseph Needham arrived in September 1943 he went as a diplomat, and so was able to enjoy nearly unrestricted access to the grottoes, with no hindrance by fussy officials or soldiers. His access became even more complete once the mandarins in the local magistracy realized how sick his old truck was, and that he would have to spend many weeks on-site.

  He made full use of this access, and of his time. Day after day he sketched and photographed the caves in great detail, to the point where he believed he might have enough material to publish a monograph—Dunhuang in those days being generally unknown and highly exotic. He was charmed by the sound of wind chimes at a temple, which he heard while sitting silently in the desert on a brilliant moonlit night. He cursed when robbers stole the razor blades he had bought in New York the year before, when he was with Lu Gwei-djen, to whom he now wrote a letter almost every day. He found and “poked about” in a Han Chinese fort and in any number of previously unvisited stupas. H
e celebrated the “double tenth”—the anniversary of the Chinese revolution, observed on October 10 every year, as it still is to this day—by eating a collation of chocolate cake while standing up outside the cave entrances with a pair of friendly lamas dressed in russet robes and wearing “beads and strange hats.” He was chased by a pair of wolves and from then on had to keep fires going at night to scare others away.

  He found shortly thereafter the jawbone of what he believed to be a monastery abbot, a discovery that triggered more disturbing dreams and robbed him of some nighttime peace; he swapped a carton of sulfa drugs for a box of locally grown quinces; he went donkey-racing on the dunes. He copied maps from various books about the Silk Road by the great American scholar Owen Lattimore. He attended an immense parade for a local city god and ate a very non-Chinese meat pie there. He bought and smoked Russian cigars and had a Gobi craftsman cut him a new set of stone seals. And once, when he spent a night at an inn, he was lying in bed when, thanks to an overheated kang below, there was a sudden explosion that burned all of his roommate’s clothes. Everyone else in the party had to give the victim spare clothing, whether it fit or not. Needham himself was not much given to wearing proper clothes out here in the desert: as the autumn temperature started to drop he wrapped himself simply in sheepskins or in locally woven rugs.

  Before they became marooned for the winter—when the Turkestan deserts become fearfully frigid—Needham decided to send for help. He dispatched his faithful assistant, H. T., into the desert with a pair of donkeys. He told H. T. not to fret about not making it: the animals’ own survival instincts, Needham tried to reassure him, would guarantee the survival of any man riding them.