After looting Guangzhou, the rebels arrived in Chang’an early in 881, burned down the Western Market, seized the palace, and sacked the city. Government armies succeeded in driving the rebels out of the city, which they then proceeded to loot themselves. The emperor was reduced to a mere figurehead. The poet Wei Zhuang described the city after the rebels had left:
Chang’an lies in mournful stillness: what does it now contain?
—Ruined markets and desolate streets, in which ears of wheat are sprouting.
Fuel-gatherers have hacked down every flowering plant in the Apricot Gardens,
Builders of barricades have destroyed the willows along the Imperial Canal.
All the gaily-colored chariots with their ornamented wheels are scattered and gone.
Of the stately mansions with their vermilion gates less than half remain.
The Hanyuan Hall is the haunt of foxes and hares.
The approach to the Flower-calyx Belvedere is a mass of brambles and thorns.
All the pomp and magnificence of the older days are buried and passed away;
Only a dreary waste meets the eye; the old familiar objects are no more.
The Inner Treasury is burnt down, its tapestries and embroideries a heap of ashes;
All along the Street of Heaven one treads on the bones of State officials.67
Chang’an remained the capital for twenty more years, but then in 904 the general who ruled behind the fiction of the Tang dynasty ordered the emperor’s servants killed and the imperial palace dismantled and floated down the Wei River to Luoyang. In 907 he killed the last Tang emperor, seized power outright, and founded a new dynasty. The once-glorious Tang capital lay in ruins, never to recover. The severing of the trade routes to the capital isolated the oases of the northwest, and the Silk Road trade entered a new, quieter era.
CHAPTER 6
The Time Capsule of Silk Road History
The Dunhuang Caves
If you are going to visit only one Silk Road site, make it Dunhuang. The physical setting is spectacular. Deep-green poplar and willow trees line the lush oasis. Framed by rocky cliffs, some five hundred caves contain strikingly beautiful Buddhist wall paintings blending motifs from India, Iran, China, and Central Asia. The more than forty thousand scrolls found in the library cave, shown on the next page, form the largest deposit of documents and artifacts discovered anywhere along the Silk Road.1 The texts of different religions placed in the library cave—Buddhism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and the Christian Church of the East—show just how cosmopolitan this community was. Throughout the first millennium, Dunhuang was an important garrison town, Buddhist pilgrimage center, and trade depot. After the year 1000, though, the city gradually declined into a backwater. In 1907, when Aurel Stein made it the destination of his Second Central Asian Expedition, only a handful of Europeans had visited. His discoveries there secured him both a knighthood in Britain and lasting infamy in China.
On his Second Expedition, Stein drew on his earlier experiences of leading a team through the Taklamakan Desert, excavating documents and artifacts, and publishing them responsibly and promptly. In the six years since the First Expedition to Khotan and Niya, Britain’s rivalry with other nations had intensified; the Russians, Germans, Japanese, and French all had teams exploring and removing antiquities from Xinjiang.2 Stein applied for funds so that he could be away for two full years. His goal was to retrace his route from Kashmir to Khotan and then travel through the desert all the way to Dunhuang, on the western edge of Gansu Province, which lay 800 miles (1,325 km) away as the crow flies, 950 miles (1,523 km) by road.
Stein first learned about the Dunhuang caves in 1902, when the Hungarian geologist Lajos Lóczy gave a paper at a congress of Orientalists in Hamburg, Germany. Lóczy had been one of the first Europeans to visit the site in 1879; at the time only two monks lived year-round at the near-deserted site. Although an expert in soil and rocks, Lóczy identified the importance of the Buddhist murals in the caves, which Chinese scholars tended to ignore in favor of scroll paintings.3 The earliest wall paintings at Dunhuang dated to the fifth century CE, much earlier than any surviving painting on silk.
STEIN’S DOCTORED PHOTOGRAPH OF THE LIBRARY CAVE AT DUNHUANG
This photograph shows cave 16, with an image of the Buddha on the central platform, and, on the far right, a small, high doorway to the secret library cave that was sealed sometime after 1000 CE. Discovered around 1900, the library cave held some forty thousand documents in Chinese, Tibetan, and other lesser-known Silk Road languages, the largest single cache of original documents ever found on the Silk Road. By overlaying two different negatives, Stein later added the two piles of manuscripts to the original photograph of the cave.
The staff of the Second Expedition, like the First, included men to tend the camels and horses, surveyors who could also take photographs, personal servants, and cooks. Also joining the group was a messenger capable of traversing hundreds of miles through the desert without getting lost; his task was to visit nearby towns so that he could retrieve and deliver Stein’s mail and his funding, which the Government of India paid in silver ingots.
Stein’s command of spoken Uighur (the language he called Turki) was useful for work in Xinjiang, but not in Gansu, where Chinese was the dominant language. Dunhuang first came under Chinese rule in 111 BCE, when the Han dynasty established a garrison at Dunhuang after a successful military campaign. (The Xuanquan post station was part of Dunhuang.) The Chinese controlled the region off and on until 589 CE, when the Sui dynasty reunified China. From that point on Dunhuang was continuously under Chinese rule.4 At this regional center of learning, the local people studied Chinese characters in school and wrote in Chinese.5 On the recommendation of the British consul at Kashgar, Stein hired a Chinese secretary, Jiang Xiaowan. Jiang could not speak Uighur, and communication was initially difficult. Stein never learned to read Chinese, but, after the two men had traveled together for a few weeks, Stein picked up enough spoken Chinese to make himself understood.
As Stein made his way toward Dunhuang in the spring of 1907 he heard a rumor, first from a Muslim trader on the run from creditors, that the caves held much more than wall paintings. The trader told him about the discoveries of a former soldier named Wang Yuanlu, who had come to Dunhuang in 1899 or 1900 after leaving the Qing army. Like many soldiers, he had been converted to Daoism by a wandering teacher, and so Stein called him “Daoist Wang.” He was barely literate. Soon after Daoist Wang’s arrival at the site, he knocked on a cave wall, heard that it was hollow, and discovered the library cave (cave 17) behind it.6 After dismantling the wall, Daoist Wang presented a few individual scrolls to local and provincial officials, and at least one of these officials, a scholar of ancient Chinese script named Ye Changchi, grasped their importance. Yet, severely pressed for funds in the years after the Boxer Rebellion, the authorities decided not to remove the documents, ordering that they remain in the cave under Daoist Wang’s care.
When Stein and his secretary Jiang first visited the site in March, 1907, Daoist Wang was away “on a begging tour with his acolytes.” They took the opportunity to wander around the cliffside caves, which were open to the elements and entirely unguarded. Stein noted the accuracy of a tenth-century description:
In this valley there is a vast number of old Buddhist temples and priests’ quarters; there are also some huge bells. At both ends of the valley north and south, stand temples to the Rulers of the Heavens, and a number of shrines to other gods; the walls are painted with pictures of the Tibetan kings and their retinues. The whole of the western face of the cliff for a distance of two li [two-thirds of a mile, or one km], north and south, has been hewn and chiselled out into a number of lofty and spacious sand caves containing images and paintings of Buddha. Reckoning cave by cave, the amount of money lavished on them must have been enormous. In front of them pavilions have been erected in several tiers, one above another. Some of the temples contain colossal images risi
ng to a height of 160 feet [49 m], and the number of smaller shrines is past counting. All are connected with one another by galleries, convenient for the purpose of ceremonial rounds as well as casual sightseeing.7
THE DUNHUANG CAVES AS STEIN FIRST SAW THEM
In 1907, when Aurel Stein first arrived at Dunhuang, the caves had no doors and were completely exposed to the elements. Visitors had to climb up the walls and through holes connecting the caves. Now under the management of the Dunhuang Research Institute, the caves all have walls and locked entrances, and a system of concrete walkways and stairways connects the 492 caves at the site. Courtesy of the Board of the British Library.
Although most of the pavilions in front of the caves had since collapsed, Stein noted, many images and paintings remained intact.8
According to an inscription in one of the caves, a monk had visited the site in 366 CE, the date that the first cave was dug. Of the 492 caves at the Thousand Buddha (Qianfodong) site, the Dunhuang Research Institute dates the site’s earliest caves to the Northern Liang dynasty (422–39) and the latest to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.9 The earlier caves, like those at Niya or Kucha, show individual buddhas or scenes from the historic Buddha’s earlier lives; those built after 600 often depict narrative scenes from Buddhist texts. The caves were dug from extremely friable and soft gravel conglomerate, and several collapses occurred in the sixth and seventh centuries. The constant streams of visitors in recent years have damaged the caves further still, and the Dunhuang Institute has built facsimile caves in the hope of reducing the tourist traffic and the resulting damage to the paintings. They grant access to only a few, often charging high fees to enter the most famous of the caves (several hundred dollars per head is not unusual).
In 1907, after Stein and Jiang had finished their initial exploration of the site, they encountered a young Tibetan monk. When Jiang later met with him one on one, the monk showed him a single manuscript written in Chinese characters. While Jiang realized that the Chinese term for “bodhisattva” appeared multiple times, Stein’s secretary could not make sense of the text because he had no experience reading Buddhist materials. Stein wanted to reward the monk for showing them the scroll, but Jiang “advised moderation. A present too generous might arouse speculations about possible ulterior motives.” Stein and Jiang compromised on a price, and Stein gave a “piece of hacked silver, equal to about three rupees or four shillings.” As Stein explained in his first publication about the discovery, Ruins of Desert Cathay, “In secret council Jiang and myself had discussed long before how best to get access to the find, and how to break down if necessary any priestly obstruction.”
Understanding the sensitivity of the task, Stein and Jiang kept their discussions secret. Unlike the other sites that Stein had excavated, Dunhuang was a place of “actual worship,” and Stein wondered what “difficulties” he would meet. “Would the resident priests be sufficiently good-natured—and mindful of material interests—to close their eyes to the removal of any sacred objects? And, if so, could we rely on their spiritual influence to allay the scruples which might arise among the still more superstitious laity patronizing their pilgrimage place?” Even before meeting Daoist Wang, Stein resolved to restrict his activities to photographing and sketching, since devotees were bound to object to the removal of any statues or paintings.
Since Daoist Wang was away, Stein decided to investigate a line of watch-towers extending west from Dunhuang, and he found the Sogdian Ancient Letters at this time. When he returned to the caves on May 15, 1907, he witnessed an annual religious festival attended by “fully ten thousand” people. While Stein kept his distance, Jiang persuaded Daoist Wang to meet with Stein. Apprehensive, Daoist Wang walled up the only opening to the library cave. When the two men finally met, Stein recorded his initial impressions of Daoist Wang: “He looked a very queer person, extremely shy and nervous, with an occasional expression of cunning which was far from encouraging. It was clear from the first that he would be a difficult person to handle.”
In narrating his experience at Dunhuang, Stein continuously alludes to the difficulties he and Georg Bühler, his advisor at University of Vienna, had in obtaining Sanskrit manuscripts in India. At one point, in 1875, Bühler actually glimpsed the manuscript that he had come to India to study, but then the owner hid it away, and Bühler died without ever seeing it again. One of Stein’s greatest scholarly triumphs while in India was purchasing that very manuscript fourteen years later.10
Stein understood that the Dunhuang library cave posed challenges far different from getting lost in the desert or excavating abandoned ruins as at Niya: he had to draw on his ability, acquired in India, to wrest manuscripts from their human guardians. After meeting Daoist Wang for the first time, Stein prepared himself “for a long and arduous siege.”
On Jiang’s advice, Stein made a conscious decision not to discuss scholarship or archeology with Daoist Wang. Instead he invoked the memory of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, his “Chinese patron saint.” Stein recounted what he had told Daoist Wang in his halting Chinese: “my devotion to Xuanzang: how I had followed his footsteps from India across inhospitable mountains and deserts; how I had traced the ruined sites of many sanctuaries he had visited and described; and so on.” Stein sustained the pretense that he was a devotee of Xuanzang’s; before his departure on June 13, he even paid for a new “clay image” of Xuanzang. Telling Daoist Wang that the scrolls were intended for a “temple of learning” in India, Jiang and Stein misled Daoist Wang so that he would think that Stein, like Xuanzang centuries earlier, was collecting Buddhist manuscripts for a distant monastic library.
After their first meeting, Stein left Jiang to negotiate alone with Daoist Wang. That night, under the cover of darkness, the Daoist brought a single roll to the secretary. When this turned out to be a Buddhist text translated by Xuanzang, Jiang immediately reported this auspicious sign to the Daoist. Daoist Wang removed the temporary wall blocking access to the cave that he had put up.
Negotiations then proceeded more smoothly. The three men agreed on the need for absolute secrecy. In Stein’s telling, Daoist Wang stipulated: “that nobody but us three was to learn what was being transacted, and that as long as I [Stein] was on Chinese soil the origin of these ‘finds’ was to be kept entirely secret.” For the next three weeks Daoist Wang brought Jiang different scrolls, and he and Stein set aside the most important. Near the end of their stay, Daoist Wang panicked and returned everything to the cave, but again Jiang intervened. After Jiang and Stein had made their final selection, two of Stein’s most trusted men sewed the scrolls in sacks so that no one could tell what they were.
Each step of the way, Stein reports the different conversations over price. After he and Jiang set a target, Jiang negotiated directly with Daoist Wang. Here Stein followed a practice common at the time: foreign residents all over Asia frequently entrusted their employees and servants to purchase groceries and other goods on their behalf. When Jiang and Wang reached a price of 130 British pounds for seven packing cases of manuscripts and five of paintings and other objects, Stein rejoiced in a letter to his close friend Percy Stafford Allen: “The single Sanskrit Ms. [manuscript] on palm leaf with a few other ‘old things’ are worth this.”11
After Stein’s departure in the summer of 1907, Daoist Wang continued to sell off the documents in the library cave to finance repairs to the cave complex. Jiang returned to Dunhuang in the fall of that year and bought another 230 bundles of material, which he sent on to Stein. Stein’s haul totaled some eleven thousand documents. In 1908 Paul Pelliot, the gifted French Sinologist, bought seven thousand documents and shipped them to Paris.12 In 1910 the Chinese government ordered that the remaining ten thousand documents in Chinese (not those in Tibetan) be transferred to Beijing, but Daoist Wang kept some, and others were stolen en route to Beijing.13 In 1912 the Russian S. F. Ol’denburg purchased roughly ten thousand documents, and in 1914 Stein returned to Dunhuang one final time and bought six hun
dred more scrolls.14
Stein triumphantly recounted his experiences at Dunhuang to a live audience in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1929. When Stein returned to the site in 1914, Daoist Wang greeted him warmly and showed him the detailed accounts of how he had spent the money to refurbish the caves. “In view of the official treatment his cherished store of Chinese rolls had suffered, he expressed bitter regret at not having previously had the courage and the wisdom to accept the big offer I had made through Jiang Siye [Jiang Xiaowan] for the whole collection en bloc.”15 Since he had paid Daoist Wang more money than anyone else (the Chinese government had paid nothing), Stein reasoned that he should have been able to buy the whole collection and ship it out of China. Even in 1929, when so many European and Chinese scholars concurred that Chinese antiquities should remain in China, Stein saw nothing wrong with taking documents and objects from China.
The Silk Road: A New History Page 21