by Craig Childs
For centuries the collection remained hidden in a cave, and until its final years, only one person knew of its existence, the one who had first found it. A lone monk, he would sit hunched over these manuscripts. By the wobbling flame of a butter lamp he studied languages unremembered, pages of history, military documents, and the painstaking calligraphy of monks and saints who had died many centuries before. Though mostly illiterate, unable to understand all that he was seeing, the monk turned one soft page after the next, enraptured.
The monk’s name was Wang Yuanlu. A pious young man who around 1899 was living at the edge of civilization, he was the keeper of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, a site of ruined temples he had stumbled upon in a winter-frozen desert. His self-appointed job was to protect this place.
Yuanlu had come to this remote region of northwest China during his service in the Chinese infantry, when he vowed to become an ascetic in the Taoist tradition. After leaving the military, he found these ruins and dilapidated meditation caves, a perfect place for him to live out his years alone with his bowl and his blanket. But the site proved more significant than he had imagined. Hundreds of chambers and spacious halls had been carved into the bedrock with architectural finesse. The site had been built on a major stop along the Silk Road, the once great trade route between China and the farther domains of Rome and the Middle East. Merchants and travelers received blessings here and gave offerings before setting out across the dangerous Taklamakan Desert, and this was where they stopped on their return to give thanks. By the time Yuanlu arrived, the place had been abandoned for well over a thousand years, evacuated by monks fleeing an imminent invasion. They had left behind ruined temples, buildings made of wood and plaster sagging against each other. Most had collapsed upon themselves, their timbers cocked out of the ground. The ruins and caves went on for a mile, with whole sections burned, posts black and weathered.
With his lamp or perhaps the stub of a candle, Yuanlu would have moved like a firefly through catacomb-like passages housing two thousand derelict statues of bodhisattvas and warrior gods. You can imagine him in one of the larger temples—which had been cut back into bedrock to form a deeply shadowed chamber—pausing and lifting his light beneath a seventy-five-foot-tall Buddha, its enormous hands cupped over his head. All around him were murals, what amounted to about 150,000 square feet of wall-to-wall images—one of the largest painted spaces ever created in the ancient world.
The temples were in bad shape. Centuries of neglect had left entryways choked with rubble and sand drifted six feet deep into unattended rooms. Yuanlu vowed to return at least some of the site to its original glory.
A year after his arrival he was sweeping away sand that had drifted against a wall when he exposed a narrow wooden door. He jimmied it open only to find it bricked up. As he pulled out bricks one by one, light spilled onto a hoard of manuscripts, nearly fifty thousand scrolls and paintings, so many lumped one on another that the ones near the bottom were flattened. The library he discovered had been sealed off since the tenth century.
Believing he had made a great find, Yuanlu removed two of the finest manuscripts and rushed them to the local magistrate, ten miles away in Dunhuang. He was hoping that a decree of preservation would be offered, but the magistrate, unimpressed, pushed the stiffened paper aside. Three years later a new magistrate arrived, and Yuanlu, who had been frequenting the library to pore over texts, convinced him to come see the cave for himself. But the new man simply took a few manuscripts and told Yuanlu to keep an eye on the place. Yuanlu felt his find was more important than that. He packaged up two crates of manuscripts and hauled them 250 miles to a larger government center, the prefecture of Jiuquan, where his find was finally recognized as an important piece of Chinese history. In 1904 Yuanlu finally received an official order to protect the cave, to make sure no unscrupulous travelers made off with this remarkable piece of the past. This was now his job.
In June of 1906 Aurel Stein, one of the world’s greatest archaeological explorers, came riding out of a red-sky windstorm into Kashgar, in Chinese Turkistan. Dust poured from tucks in his tightly folded coat, making him look more like a local Taklamakanchi than a scholar. His square, stern face was powerfully weathered, his cheekbones standing out like polished stones. He kept the small crease of his mouth clamped shut against the wind. Standing a staunch five foot four, Stein was at the midpoint of sixteen years spent mostly in the north of Asia, excavating fortresses and shrines to keep the British Museum well supplied. He was following the route of an ancient pilgrim and scholar named Xuanzang, who in the sixth century had traveled across Asia in a quest for knowledge, stopping at temples and cities that are now in ruins. These ruins were Stein’s goldmine, and Xuanzang was his personal saint.
Stein had no wife, no children; his life was the hunt for archaeology. Word had come to him that outside Dunhuang a hidden library had been found among painted caves, and this was his target. He had to hurry to get there. The Germans and French had gotten wind of this, too, and he did not know how close behind they were. After thousands of miles of travel, his caravans floundering through gorges and fifteen-thousand-foot passes, he was not about to surrender this find.
In the cobble-and-adobe town of Kashgar, Stein assembled a caravan of eight fresh camels and a number of horses, and with them set across the Taklamakan, a thousand desolate miles to Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Along the way, he stopped at ancient cities lost in the desert, where he oversaw rapid excavations, a team of hired diggers working under desiccating winds and snow flurries. Spending only a few days at each site, he pushed on toward Dunhuang while sending back trains of camels loaded with crates of artifacts bound for London.
One must wonder if the back of Yuanlu’s neck prickled or if his ears burned as Stein approached from the west. The world was being taken apart and put back together in England, and for a man like Stein, that was simply the way things were done. It was a time of immense archaeological wealth and freedom for colonial powers.
If you could choose the course of history for the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, would you divert Stein with a great Taklamakan dust storm, adding his bones to those of the many who perished along his route, rather than let him at Yuanlu’s library?
Before you decide, consider the other half of the equation. Pith-helmeted nimrods and colonial frolickers were not the only people chipping away at global antiquities. Locals were already in on the action, digging and selling. Chinese manuscripts were all the rage during Stein’s reign, and the market was being flooded with forgeries. A find like the library cave would have drawn burglars and explorers far less reputable and connected than Stein. Rather than being housed in the British Museum, texts would have been divided countless ways, lost to private collections and obscure places.
Here you have your choice. Does Stein reach the library and take all he can, or do the texts stay with Yuanlu, if only for the moment of his life?
On March 12, 1907, Stein came riding into Dunhuang out of an icy spring wind called a buran. It was an auspicious day. The town was nearing a revolt as citizens refused to pay taxes levied by the distant Qing government. The local magistrate was already overwhelmed. When Stein presented his passport, which incorrectly identified him as “Minister of Education for Great Britain,” the magistrate was quickly humbled. A visit from such an important man at this far end of civilization was rare. At the archaeologist’s behest he ushered Stein directly to the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
Stein and Yuanlu missed each other completely that day. The monk was walking the streets of Dunhuang with his bowl seeking alms to help him care for the caves, while Stein was earnestly hunting his destiny.
Approaching the caves ten miles from town, Stein would have crossed a dry riverbed beyond which stood a grove of bare elm and poplar trees. Above them rose a cliff honeycombed with hundreds of hand-hewn grottoes, great temples fallen apart. Ratty silk scarves had been left by pilgrims.
Inside, the site was
spectacular, like a dream. Usually Stein had to dig to find a place like this, but here was this marvel open to the air: lobed and painted entryways cut into rock, leading to catacombs of meditation alcoves and massive interior halls, native bedrock carved to simulate classic architecture, columns, eaves, coffered ceilings. Inside this magnificent subterranean world all but the floors had been decorated with murals—winged thunder demons, musicians on clouds, a nine-headed dragon, all rendered with such detail that the walls would have looked to Stein like Persian rugs.
When he finally met Yuanlu, Stein was taken aback. The young monk who approached him was even shorter than he, his face weathered but somehow soft. Stein’s notes and letters, which had previously focused on artifacts, landscape, and himself, were suddenly busy with descriptions of his new acquaintance. He referred to Yuanlu as sullen, frightened, truculent, and anxious. “A very queer person,” Stein declared in a letter, “extremely shy and nervous with an occasional expression of cunning which was far from encouraging.” Yet in almost the same breath, observing that the monk spent next to nothing on himself but instead put alms directly into the temples, Stein wrote, “I could not help feeling something akin to respect for the queer little figure.”
Stein considered offering his host silver for access to this secret library, but he worried the approach would backfire. He dared not even mention that he had heard of the place, for fear that Yuanlu would shut him down.
Stein knew bits of local dialects and various languages spoken in the area, Chinese, Turki, Uyghur, and Wakhi, enough to hire diggers or send out crates. But when it came to delicate negotiations he was plagued by what he called the “eel-like perplexity of Chinese phonetics and the terrible snares of tonic accents so hard for unmusical ears to distinguish.” Chiang-ssü-yeh, a Chinese secretary who had accompanied him across the Taklamakan, acted as a translator. At one point Chiang turned to Stein and sagely advised him to “feel his way with prudence and studied slowness.” Yuanlu, he felt, was not about to give up an inch of his temples, much less his library.
Yuanlu was hospitable, though. He guided Stein and his translator around without mentioning the library cave. He took them through his restorations, showing off the new gilded woodwork and paint. Stein found Yuanlu’s restorations gaudy and overblown, insulting to the finesse of what was there to begin with. But he said none of this to Yuanlu.
Then Stein mentioned Xuanzang, the ancient scholar who was his own saint. Yuanlu’s eyes lit up. Stein could have felt the key turning.
Xuanzang was a popular mythological figure among monks in China. His sixth-century quest had been to understand the different ways people worshipped throughout Asia, a journey that took him on a sixteen-year trek, two thousand miles of now-legendary travel. When he finally returned to China he brought a horse train loaded with foreign religious texts—not unlike what Stein expected to find in the library.
Indeed, Yuanlu had a place in his heart for the old pilgrim-scholar Xuanzang. Carefully seizing the moment, Stein explained through his interpreter that he, too, was a devoted follower of Xuanzang, which was quite true. Stein imparted that he had been traveling across the very mountains and deserts Xuanzang had crossed, stopping at the same sanctuaries.
Yuanlu quickly took Stein to see murals of Xuanzang’s journeys that he had found within the caves. Painted in the chambers were mythical episodes. In one, a mighty turtle was shown swimming toward Xuanzang and his horse in order to carry them across a raging river. Stein knew the very river. He had crossed it himself, and in its wild waters had nearly lost his own horses and many manuscripts he had already excavated from other sites.
With the seed planted, Stein left his interpreter and Yuanlu to converse without him. That night Chiang returned to his employer’s camp and from his voluminous black cloak pulled several manuscripts. He said that Yuanlu had offered them for Stein to study in secrecy, so as not to arouse the suspicions of locals or the guards sent by the magistrate to protect Stein and also keep an eye on him. (At an archaeological site who could trust a foreigner with a caravan of camels at his disposal?) Stein unrolled one of these manuscripts across a table. The paper felt like thin cloth, and on it were slips and dashes of calligraphy from a language he believed to date back to the third century.
In the morning Chiang brought more, including an Indian sutra translated into Chinese stamped with the inscription of Xuanzang himself. Stein was astonished. These were the old monk’s actual translations, his own hand, his very words. Surely this was some sort of omen. In his notes, Stein had more than once pondered the similarities between himself and Xuanzang. He was starting to believe that he was Xuanzang incarnate, sent here to continue the old pilgrim’s work of unearthing ancient texts, freeing them from what Stein called their “gloomy bin of centuries.”
He went straight to Yuanlu and explained to the young monk that there was no coincidence in their meeting. Xuanzang was calling out across the centuries. It was all happening again, just as it did over a millennium ago. It was again time for the manuscripts to go.
Pale with honor, and probably filled with tickling hesitation, Yuanlu removed the bricks he had used to reseal the door to the library cave. Behind the door Stein found exactly what he had wished for, later writing, “Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest’s little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet.”
After days of sorting through this library to find what he considered the best material, Stein was given leave to take whatever he wished. In gratitude, he paid in silver and quietly loaded his camels with twenty-four crates of manuscripts, and five crates of paintings and embroideries. Roughly a third of the library’s contents was now destined for the British Museum. He left Dunhuang with a full caravan.
Stein’s appropriation opened the floodgates. Soon after him, the French arrived. Then the Japanese. And then a Russian team. A swaggering collector from Harvard would later arrive and strip murals off the walls to send back to the United States. In 1909, the Chinese government found out what was going on and issued a decree stating that any remaining texts had to be taken to Beijing, to be kept there by the Ministry of Education. With that, the library cave was cleared down to its floor. A chamber that had been packed nearly to the ceiling for centuries was now vacant. Did Yuanlu’s heart break, or was his life’s quest fulfilled?
Stein got away with some of the most spectacular literary finds in the world, the Diamond Sutra and thousands more in his crates. Of course, a world power such as China is now wondering why such a detailed and exhaustive account of its own history reposes in London and elsewhere. In China, Stein has come to be called a “foreign devil.” Even Chinese scholars writing dry scientific papers add colorful words like plunderer and thief when describing Stein’s work at Dunhuang. To this day the official Chinese media portrays him as a scoundrel who fooled an impressionable young monk into giving up crucial pieces of national patrimony.
But truth be told, if Stein and his colleagues had not been the first into the library after Yuanlu, there would have been others far less high-minded who would have sold their finds to the highest bidders. The contents of the library cave would have probably been scattered and mostly forgotten. Now they are contained in a handful of well-catalogued museum collections around the world. These incredibly old and otherwise obscure writings are internationally known and studied, their translations readily available online. If the Chinese had taken immediate control of the manuscripts prior to Stein’s arrival, their fate might have been far worse. At that point in history the country could barely conserve its own imperial palace, much less a library outside of a frontier town on the verge of rebellion. Not knowing what else to do with them, the government could have either confiscated the manuscripts and lost them to poor storage, or crated them up and dumped them into an unmarked warehouse, never to be seen in any of our lifetimes. Even the final s
hipment of manuscripts from Dunhuang to Beijing was robbed en route, and portions soon appeared in the private collection of a well-known Chinese bibliophile.
Though Stein is revealed in his notes and journal entries as having been presumptuous and full of hubris, I also see that he was a savior. Sometimes things work out in unexpected ways, a negotiation resulting in what is best for antiquity. Stein and Yuanlu may be called star-crossed partners in crime, but they are also the very reason these ancient manuscripts still exist.
How does one weigh the somewhat necessary emptying of the library cave against the desire for things to remain where they were found? I’ve come to believe that each circumstance is unique and that there is no generic solution. I would leave relics where they are, yet I would also side with Stein in preserving the past by moving it.
Stein’s collection (perhaps more aptly named the Stein and Yuanlu Collection) is now housed in the British Museum. Not on public display, it is held in breathtakingly clean storage. What he boxed up and carried out by camel has since undergone intensive preservation work (including efforts to undo earlier failed attempts at conservation, such as the removal of a damaging backing put on the Diamond Sutra). In Stein’s shadow, the new discipline of Dunhuangology sprang up and one of the largest single collaborations of scholars and archaeologists in the world, the International Dunhuang Project, was eventually assembled. The manuscripts have since been studied in excruciating detail, down to the very chemistry of their ink. Given a choice between piecemealing the archive into nothing or this, I choose this. For now.
