Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  There was no sign of Paul Pelliot. Long before the exhibition opened, disquiet had been brewing over what came to be dubbed the “Affaire Pelliot.” Pelliot was a dazzling scholar, but the dawdling pace at which he was working on the cataloguing ignited fears the task might never be completed. Lionel Barnett, the British Museum’s keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, wrote a pointed letter to Pelliot. What progress was he making? When did he expect to finish? Barnett alluded to the possibility of appointing a replacement.

  Stein was quick to defend the Frenchman. “He is better qualified than any scholar living to deal with the hundreds of local documents comprised in the collection. His readiness to prepare the inventory therefore represents an advantage such as is not likely ever to be offer [sic] again,” Stein wrote to the British Museum’s director, Sir Frederic Kenyon.

  Pelliot insisted he would complete the work, yet soon a replacement was being discussed despite the Frenchman’s assurances. Lionel Giles, then assistant keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, could take on the role, Barnett suggested to the museum’s director:

  If you should prefer to break off the bargain [with Pelliot], I should think that Giles might do the work sandwiched in with his other cataloguing. He is not by any means a specialist in this subject; but he has a really good knowledge of the literary language, and could make a useful hand list. The work would probably not proceed very rapidly, but it would go on regularly.

  The director concurred, and the huge task fell to Giles, among others. And it took years. Giles’s catalogue of Chinese manuscripts—the largest category—was not published until 1957. Stein did not live to see it.

  How to divide Stein’s huge haul of manuscripts, murals, and other antiquities was a thorny question. With two backers, the British Museum and the government of India, the intention was the larger share of the treasures would return to India. Under the agreement reached before Stein left for Turkestan, India would get three-fifths of the treasures, having contributed £3,000 of the £5,000 allocated to the expedition, the British Museum two-fifths. The deal was agreed to long before anyone knew the nature of what Stein would uncover.

  Most of the antiquities Stein brought back were fragile, and the contents of the Library Cave especially so, consisting mainly of paper scrolls and silk banners. A damp, unstable atmosphere could quickly destroy what had been preserved for a thousand years in the dry desert. Stein wrote to Kenyon setting out his views:

  It is from every point of view desirable to keep those objects which are specially liable to injury through atmospheric and other influences in a place where every care can be given to their preservation. In the second place there can be no doubt that among such objects must be reckoned all paintings on silk and other fabrics; the tempera paintings on friable mud plaster; the wood carvings; the embroideries and figured textiles; and all written records on wood and paper. All these have during long centuries of burial become impregnated with fine disintegrated particles of salt from the desert and thus particularly liable to attract atmospheric moisture, etc.

  Stein feared that even if the objects survived a return journey to India, no museum there would be able to care for them adequately. The tropical hothouse environment of Calcutta’s Imperial Museum—“a vast marshy delta”—was particularly unsuitable. The delicate material should remain in Britain, he argued. This effectively meant most of the finds—as well as the most valuable—should stay. There was another reason too: imperial pride. It would be difficult to compete with the great collections of Eastern art being built up by institutions in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and elsewhere unless most of the collection was retained by Britain.

  But when the India Office learned of Stein’s views on the inadequacy of their museums, its officials were furious:

  The museums in this country have the first claim to such articles of archaeological interest as may be collected at the expense of Indian revenues . . . To the view that our Indian museums are, for climatic reasons, unsuitable for the preservation of articles of a perishable nature, we are unable to assent. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that, with proper precautions, antiquities can be quite as well preserved in Calcutta, Lahore or Delhi as in London.

  Anyway, the intention was not to house the Indian share in Calcutta but in a new museum proposed for Delhi. In the meantime, India’s share of the manuscripts and documents still needed for study could remain for up to five years at the British Museum.

  The tussle between Britain and India over the antiquities continued behind the scenes during the early years of World War I. There was agreement on one matter: it was too risky to remove anything until after the war ended. Barnett protested vehemently at what he called the proposal to assign “rotting lumps” to the British Museum. The acrimony escalated when Fred Andrews, then in Srinagar, weighed in on the Indian side. Andrews objected to some of the swaps suggested by Laurence Binyon, the museum’s deputy keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawing.

  Binyon was also a poet and is best remembered for penning For the Fallen, with its lines still repeated at annual commemorations for the war dead in Britain and Australia: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn . . .” But over Andrews’s proposed division of some silk paintings, Binyon penned fighting words: “Mr Andrews’s disadvantages in the matter are apparent from the inaccuracies in his report, and from his own admissions.”

  Eventually an agreement was reached, and today the manuscripts are in the British Library; silk paintings, sculptures, and coins in the British Museum; textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and murals and silk paintings in the National Museum in New Delhi.

  When he had heard this much and penetrated deeply into its significance, the Venerable Subhuti was moved to tears.

  VERSE 14, THE DIAMOND SUTRA

  15

  Treasure Hunters

  Stein was the first, but by no means the last, foreigner to arrive on Abbot Wang’s doorstep eager to relieve him of treasures. As Stein’s caravan desperately searched for the end of the Keriya River in the Taklamakan Desert and he counted cartridges ready to relieve the suffering of his ponies, his arch rival, Frenchman Paul Pelliot, arrived at Dunhuang on February 12, 1908. Pelliot was unaware that Stein had seized the Silk Road’s greatest prize.

  Pelliot, too, had heard the rumor of a hidden cache of manuscripts, when passing through the Turkestan capital Urumqi, 600 miles from Dunhuang. Clearly word had spread along the northern Silk Road, which is where Albert von Le Coq heard the tale.

  Pelliot, on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, was joined on his first and, as it turned out, only Turkestan expedition by a photographer, Charles Nouette, and a doctor, Louis Vaillant. Like Stein, Pelliot found no sign of Wang on his initial visit to the site and discovered the Library Cave was locked. The Frenchman found Wang in Dunhuang and the pair agreed to meet at the caves. But when they did, a frustrated Pelliot learned that the key had been left behind in Dunhuang. He also learned that Stein had preceded him. But, Wang assured Pelliot, Stein had spent only three days at the caves. In fact, Stein stayed twenty-four days.

  It was March 3 before the cave was unlocked and Pelliot was allowed inside. When he entered the holy of holies, as he called it, he was dumbfounded. The cave was still crammed with between 15,000 and 20,000 scrolls. Pelliot spent three feverish weeks going through them. He estimated it would take six months to examine every scroll properly. But he was determined to look briefly at each and raced through a thousand a day. Dust in the cramped cave caught in Pelliot’s throat and the fragrance of ancient incense still lingered in some of the scrolls. A photograph from the time shows him in a heavy dark coat, hunched over a scroll just inside the Library Cave. The mural of the two trees, before which Hong Bian’s statue once stood, is just visible on the rear wall. Pelliot is surrounded by tightly packed bundles. In front of him, the naked flame of his candle is perched alarming
ly close to the priceless paper scrolls.

  Although beaten to the cave by Stein, Pelliot had one clear advantage. He knew exactly what he was looking at, for he spoke and read Chinese. The Professor of Chinese at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi had no need to rely on an assistant’s scant knowledge of Buddhism. He could cherry-pick the best—and did. He set aside two piles of scrolls: those that he wanted at any cost, and a second pile that he would take if he could. As well as the Chinese scrolls, he picked his way through a range of other documents in Tibetan, Uyghur, Khotanese, Sogdian, even Hebrew, and a Nestorian Gospel of St. John. He also examined the silk banners. Among the best were a silk depicting an ancient pilgrim carrying scrolls on his back—an image that evokes Xuanzang—and the painting of demons attempting to distract the Buddha with a fire-lance.

  Pelliot learned Stein had paid Wang for manuscripts and resolved to do likewise, and his negotiations with the abbot appear to have been less fraught than Stein’s. By the time Pelliot arrived, Wang had already successfully sold scrolls and other material to a foreigner and was reassured to realize that no one had discovered his secret deal. Stein had laid the groundwork, and Wang had begun spending the money on restorations to his caves. But emboldened as he was to enter into a deal with Pelliot, Wang was not prepared to sell all the cave’s remaining contents. Pelliot paid Wang about £90 for his haul, which included more than 4,000 scrolls in Tibetan, 3,000 in Chinese, thousands of fragments in Sanskrit, and about 230 paintings on silk, cotton, and hemp. The scrolls and manuscripts are now in Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale de France and the textiles, including the silk banner of the ancient pilgrim, are in the Musée Guimet.

  As the antiquities safely steamed to France, Pelliot headed to Beijing. There he showed Chinese scholars some of what he had purchased. The reaction was immediate. Word went back to Dunhuang: everything left in the cave was to be sent to Beijing. Compensation would be paid to Wang.

  Wang had seen the last of Pelliot, but not the last of the foreign devils. A Japanese aristocrat, Count Otani Kozui, head of the Pure Land School of Buddhism, was behind an expedition that arrived late in 1911. He was a mysterious figure—Britain suspected he was a spy—who sent two assistants to Dunhuang. Over eight weeks, the pair bought manuscripts from Wang and left behind their names in two of the caves.

  Seven years after Stein first arrived at Dunhuang—and just as the Diamond Sutra was being readied for its first exhibition in London—he returned. Zahid Beg, the trader who first told Stein about the manuscripts, rode out to meet the explorer as he arrived at the oasis on March 24, 1914. His caravan included his new fox terrier—Dash III—and some of his old retainers, although not Chiang, who was still ensconced as Macartney’s secretary in Kashgar. Chiang’s hearing had improved, but he was no longer fit for harsh desert travel. Stein was less than impressed with the “listless” replacement and dearly missed Chiang’s companionship.

  Much had changed at Dunhuang in the intervening years. Gone was the magistrate Wang Ta-lao-ye in whose yamen Stein had nearly frozen while wearing his thin European clothes, and the influential military chief Lin Ta-jen had died. But Wang was still the guardian of the caves, and the priest welcomed back his former patron. Wang was “as jovial & benign as ever,” Stein told Allen. “He had suffered in no way from the indulgence he showed me in a certain transaction and only regrets now that fear prevented him from letting me have the whole hoard in 1907.”

  It was an opinion shared by Wang’s Dunhuang patrons, Stein claimed—with more than a touch of self-interest—so impressed were they on seeing how the money from Stein and Pelliot had been spent. Outside the caves Wang had planted an orchard, built stables and a large guesthouse. He had also been busy within the caves. Drift sand had been removed and gaudy new statues installed. But Stein’s heart must have sunk when he saw the fate of the murals. Fresh plaster had been applied over some, others Wang had demolished to allow access through the rock walls to about fifty hard-to-reach grottoes. Stein could see for himself how the money had been used. Nonetheless Wang insisted Stein inspect a big red book that accounted for each horseshoe of silver.

  Wang complained bitterly that money promised as compensation for the removal of the manuscripts to Beijing never arrived. It had been skimmed off at the various yamens along the way. Some of the manuscripts bound for Beijing also disappeared. Wang described how the scrolls had been carelessly bundled onto six carts. The carts were delayed in Dunhuang, during which time some of the manuscripts were filched by locals. The pilfering continued during the journey, Stein later wrote. He was convinced many of the manuscripts he bought in Gansu and in neighboring Turkestan during this third expedition came from the Library Cave. Although Beijing had ordered the cave be emptied, Wang, the former soldier, had not exactly followed orders. “Honest Wang, the priest, has been acute enough to keep back abundant souvenirs of the great hoard,” Stein confided to Allen.

  Wang’s former quarters were now a storeroom, and from them he produced boxes crammed with manuscripts. Stein knew Pelliot had since selected the best of the scrolls and so did not realistically hope for important finds among Wang’s secret cache. Nonetheless, he filled four cases with nearly 600 rolls. The manuscripts Wang apparently squirreled away after the cave was emptied raise questions for scholars today. Were they really from the Library Cave? If not, where have they come from? Could some be forgeries? The jury is still out.

  Four months after Stein’s caravan pulled out of Dunhuang in April 1914, a Russian expedition arrived. Its leader, Sergei Oldenburg, also bought manuscripts. Then, for a decade, the foreign explorers vanished from Dunhuang. Even so, Stein’s thoughts at least were never far from the City of Sands. He worked on a five-volume scholarly account of his second expedition, Serindia. On the evening he finished it on Mohand Marg in 1918, he celebrated by lighting a bonfire, signaling the event to the Kashmiri mountains and to Andrews, who could see it fifteen miles down the valley in Srinagar. It was a fitting way to signpost a work that included his discovery of the beacon watchtowers from which ancient Chinese soldiers lit fires to signal to their comrades far across the desert.

  The last of the foreign explorers to arrive in Dunhuang was American Langdon Warner in 1924. Warner knew the cave had been emptied, but his interest was in murals not manuscripts, in the visual image rather than the written word. In spite of that, he too claimed to have bought manuscripts that had “strayed,” as he put it, from the Library Cave to nearby oases. Warner—purportedly a model for Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones—was an art historian with Boston’s Fogg Museum. Like those who preceded him, Warner was overwhelmed by what he saw: “There was nothing to do but gasp,” he wrote.

  But he did far more than gasp. Warner stripped murals from the walls with the conviction that, like Stein before him, he was “rescuing” the artworks. In the years between Stein’s departure and Warner’s arrival, other foreigners had reached the caves. In the early 1920s, about 400 Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution across the border were interned at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Camped there for six months, the White Russians left their marks. Magnificent murals were blackened by soot from their fires. Others were deliberately defaced. Warner was appalled: “Across some of these lovely faces are scribbled the numbers of a Russian regiment, and from the mouth of the Buddha where he sits to deliver the Lotus Law flows some Slav obscenity.”

  Damage by other visitors was accidental and thoughtless, but no less destructive. Warner recorded how worshippers put greasy palms on delicate murals or leaned against them. And he saw how sheepskin-clad visitors had brushed so often against a row of saintly figures in a narrow entrance that part of the painting had rubbed away. “My job 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.” He had no reservations about his actions. “As for the morals of such vandalism I would strip the p
lace 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 twenty years this place won’t be worth a visit.”

  By the time of Warner’s arrival, Wang’s secret stash of manuscripts had been depleted. What Stein, Pelliot, and others failed to take had been souvenired by visiting magistrates, Warner believed. “Each one visits the caves at the end of his term and carries off as many of the precious rolls as the priest admits are remaining. These rolls avert fire and flood and bring luck. They make splendid gifts to higher officials and sell for several hundreds of taels each.”

  Warner’s determination to strip the wall paintings was no snap decision. He arrived at the caves equipped to remove murals. Despite the January cold that froze the chemical fixative, he nonetheless removed about a dozen murals as well as a three-foot-tall kneeling Tang dynasty figure which he broke from its pedestal, wrapped in his woolen underwear and sent back to Harvard. “No vandal hand but mine had disturbed it for eleven hundred years,” he wrote.

  Within a year, Warner returned for more. But by then the mood had changed. His party arrived just as news swept China that a British police officer had shot dead a dozen protesting Chinese students in Shanghai in May 1925, sparking antiforeigner campaigns across the country. Anger at events in Shanghai was not all that turned the tide against Warner. Foreign explorers who were once welcomed were now shunned. The backlash focused on Stein and Pelliot, “neither of whom could ever come back and live,” Warner wrote.

  Warner’s men were forbidden to camp at the caves and were threatened by angry locals who gathered nightly outside their Dunhuang inn. Warner had been so demonized that he was accused of blasting entire hillsides to remove chapels. He had even been blamed for causing a local drought and famine, he told Stein in a letter. Nor did Abbot Wang escape the shift in local public opinion. The modest amount of money Warner had paid Wang on his first visit had ballooned to a vast sum around the oasis rumor mill. There were demands that Wang share his nonexistent fortune. When he failed to produce it, he was threatened with death. He saved himself by feigning madness.