by Joyce Morgan
Stein found a city filled with Moghul-era splendors when he reached Lahore at the beginning of 1888. The fort of its old walled city was a forty-nine acre citadel; the Badshahi Mosque dwarfed even the Taj Mahal; and the Shalimar Gardens featured more than 400 marble fountains. But it was inside the old Lahore Museum where Stein’s eyes were opened to much earlier treasures. The curator was John Lockwood Kipling, whose son Rudyard Kipling described the museum in his novel Kim and gave the building its moniker—the Wonder House. And the museum soon worked its wonders on Stein. Never before had he seen such an extraordinary collection of ancient Buddhist statues. Some had features more European than Asian, indeed many resembled Greek gods. Here were Buddhas with round eyes and wavy hair and moustaches, wearing what looked more like Roman togas than the patched robes of monks.
The figures were from Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist kingdom that flourished for centuries around the Peshawar Valley in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its boundaries moved over the centuries, but it produced a rich vein of art, especially from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. Gandhara was where Eastern ideas met Western art, where Buddhism, migrating west from its Himalayan birthplace, encountered the legacy of Alexander the Great. His armies marched east and conquered the region. The soldiers departed, but the influence of classical art remained. Gandhara also produced some of the oldest surviving images of the Buddha as a human figure. Because of this unique meeting of cultures, the Gandharan depictions of the Buddha have decidedly Western features.
For Stein, fascinated by the journey and the changing face of Buddhism and liminal places where cultures merged, these strange Buddhas were intriguing. He was as enchanted as the Tibetan lama in Kim’s opening pages who stands awestruck on entering the Wonder House. Stein saw the figures when few Westerners were aware of Gandharan art. Lockwood Kipling, the model for Kim’s white-bearded curator of the Wonder House, was an expert on Gandharan art and no doubt shared his knowledge with Stein in the many evenings they spent at Kipling’s home. They also appeared to share a familiarity with the man who inspired English literature’s first Buddhist character, for after Kim’s publication, Lockwood Kipling wrote to Stein: “I wonder whether you have seen my son’s Kim & recognized the old Lama whom you saw at the old Museum.”
Through Lockwood Kipling, Stein met Fred Andrews, the first of his lifelong Lahore friends who would provide intellectual sustenance and logistical support throughout his travels. Andrews was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and was Lockwood Kipling’s deputy at Lahore’s Mayo School of Art. Andrews was an artistic young man, whose brother George Arliss became a filmmaker and an Academy Award–winning actor who helped launch Bette Davis’s career. Andrews would never achieve the fame of his brother—or that of his friend Rudyard—but he would become Stein’s right-hand man.
Stein moved into Mayo Lodge, a large bungalow where Andrews lived with his wife and young daughter. In 1890 the two young men took a short trip to the Salt Range hills of Punjab, where Andrews introduced Stein to the new-fangled art of photography, which, like his mapmaking skills, Stein would put to good use in Central Asia.
The Mayo Lodge circle was widened to include Percy Stafford Allen, a young history professor, and Thomas Arnold, a philosophy professor. For a reticent man such as Stein, it was a sociable life with picnics, costume parties, and tennis games, although Stein avoided the latter. The four men soon developed chummy nicknames for each other. The names stuck and they addressed each other by them in letters throughout their lives. Andrews was the Baron, Arnold the Saint, and Allen, who would become Stein’s closest friend and confidant, was Publius for sharing the three initials of Publius Scipio Africanus, the Roman tactician who defeated Hannibal and his elephants. Stein himself became the General, a hint that the more commanding of his traits were already evident. Also apparent was Stein’s appetite for work, especially pursuing his own scholarly interests in the hours before and after his official day job. He rose before 6 a.m. and worked until dinner time. It was a prelude to his years as an explorer which invariably saw him up before dawn, traveling or exploring all day, and writing copious notes, diaries, and long letters to officials and friends for hours after his men were asleep around their campfires. His focus on his work was such that when a house in which he was a guest threatened to burn down one night, Stein’s first response was not to save himself but to pile his books and papers into a blanket ready to toss them out the window.
As Stein was settling into his Lahore life, a gruesome murder in the mountains that separate Turkestan from Ladakh would inadvertently set the trajectory for his future. Andrew Dalgleish, a young Scottish adventurer and trader, was hacked to death with a scimitar—along with his little dog—while crossing the Karakoram Pass in 1888. News of the Scotsman’s murder was reported widely. Why Dalgleish was slain was not known, but the identity of his attacker was. The killer was a bankrupt Afghan named Daud Mohammed. A British army officer, Lieutenant Hamilton Bower, was sent to arrest the culprit. The Afghan was eventually tracked by the Russians to a bazaar in distant Samarkand, where he was arrested and died (suicide, allegedly) before he could be brought to justice.
As a murder hunt it was a failure. But it sparked a different kind of chase—for buried treasures. During the pursuit for Dalgleish’s killer, Lieutenant Bower arrived in the Turkestan oasis of Kucha, where he bought an ancient manuscript on birch-bark leaves that local treasure hunters had found in a ruined tower. He sent the fifty-one leaves to Calcutta, where they were eventually deciphered by Oriental scholar Dr. Rudolf Hoernle. The Bower Manuscript, as it came to be known, dealt with oddities such as therapeutic uses of garlic, necromancy—communing with the dead—and care of the mouth and teeth. But it wasn’t the ancient tips on dental hygiene that set the scholarly world alight. Experts were intrigued by its Indian script, ancient Brahmi from around the fifth century. It was older than any other known Indian document, but it had been found in far-off Chinese Turkestan, across the Taklamakan Desert on the old northern Silk Road. Its isolation, far from humid, monsoonal India, was the very reason the document had survived. But how had it got there and what else was buried under the desert sands? Other fragments and artifacts soon began appearing in the oases that fringe the Taklamakan, making their way from the hands of locals to collectors in European capitals. It prompted some in Europe to wonder about the influence of India on this then little-known region in Central Asia. The more adventurous packed their bags, hired camels and went to find out.
Stein started planning his first expedition to Turkestan when, after more than a decade in Lahore, he moved to Calcutta to become principal of a Muslim boys college in May 1899. He loathed the city’s steamy climate but made the most of its proximity to Buddhism’s birthplace and sacred sites. One of his first journeys out of Calcutta was to the ruins of Bodhgaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Although Stein wandered from early morning until dusk, the day was too short. Within months of arriving in India’s northeast he embarked on a longer tour of ancient Buddhist sites, traveling partly on an elephant.
The trips equipped him with first-hand knowledge of Buddhism’s roots when he left India for Turkestan in May 1900. He was then thirty-seven and planned to travel for a year. His sights were set on an area around Khotan on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The oasis, known today as both Hotan and Hetian, had for centuries been famed for its exquisite jade and its carpets. But these were not what interested Stein. He knew local treasure seekers had recently found fragments of ancient Indian manuscripts in the region.
He had read the works of ancient Chinese pilgrims who told of a flourishing Buddhist kingdom centered around Khotan. Stein had also read Swedish explorer Sven Hedin’s accounts of his travels through the desert near Khotan and gleaned practical information about surviving the brutal desert climate. From the Swede’s descriptions of ruined wall paintings encountered on his hasty trip, Stein was in no doubt that these were ancient
Buddhist images. A thorough search, he believed, could reveal how far Indian culture had spread into Turkestan.
Stein was the first archaeologist to dig methodically into Turkestan’s pre-Muslim past. Nearly a hundred miles northeast of Khotan was Dandan-Uiliq, or the Place of Houses of Ivory, where the bleached wooden posts of ruined houses stuck out of the sand dunes like ghostly fingers—fingers that beckoned to Stein on his first desert foray. This dig would be the training ground for the years ahead. He arrived amid the dunes in December 1900 with a team of camels, donkeys, laborers, and enough supplies to last a month. It meant he could stay longer and dig more thoroughly than any of the poorly equipped locals. He could see where they had worked, but much remained untouched. From murals on the walls, he quickly realized this had been a Buddhist settlement. In one temple, he found a pedestal where a colossal Buddha statue once stood. But all that remained were the feet. He found painted wooden panels that reflected the range of influences, including Gandhara, and even a black-bearded Persian-style Buddhist image. Never before had he seen such a feature on any Buddhist figure. It pointed to the influence of distant Persia across the Taklamakan Desert. In the ruins of a monastic library he found fragments of ancient Indian scripts.
In early January 1901, Stein resupplied his caravan in an oasis and moved to other sites. At one he found remarkable proof of the links with the classical world. Amid ruins in the Turkestan desert, he found clay seals with images of the gods of ancient Greece: Eros, Heracles, and Athena. Stein was so taken with the image of the goddess of wisdom and strategy that he adapted her image from the seal and used it in the front of his published works. At another site, he uncovered what were then the oldest known Tibetan documents. And at a solitary sacred mound, or stupa, named Rawak he found the remains of nearly a hundred large Buddhist statues, some with traces of gold leaf and their once-vivid color. The stucco figures were depicted wearing embroidered coats and large boots into which were tucked baggy trousers. Stein excavated and photographed the figures, some more than nine feet tall, but they were too fragile to remove and so he returned them to the sand. “It was a melancholy duty to perform, strangely reminding me of a true burial,” he wrote. He hoped this would keep them safe until one day Khotan had its own museum.
His final task before leaving Turkestan on his first expedition involved uncovering material of a different sort. For several years Stein had been suspicious about some woodblock-printed books that had supposedly been found in the desert near Khotan. George Macartney had bought them in Kashgar and sent them to Calcutta to Hoernle, the eminent scholar who had deciphered the Bower Manuscript. The Orientalist labored long over these strange Khotanese books, but their printed script baffled him. Hoernle raised the possibility that they were fakes before he cast scholarly caution to the wind and dismissed the idea.
Stein was more skeptical. As he dug his way around the Taklamakan Desert, his suspicions grew. He had uncovered fragments of ancient documents in the desert sands—in Chinese, Tibetan, and ancient Indian scripts. But not the tiniest fragment was in an unknown script. He knew the common link between Hoernle’s mysterious old books and others that had turned up in London and Moscow was a Turkestan man. Stein resolved to confront him.
Islam Akhun had a checkered past. For years, he had survived by collecting coins, seals, and other antiques from around Khotan. But by the time Stein arrived in Turkestan, Islam Akhun had reinvented himself as a hakim, or medicine man. His therapeutic skills somehow involved the use of several pages of a French novel. Whether these were read aloud or administered internally, Stein quipped, he could not say.
Islam Akhun strenuously denied forging the documents when he was first brought before Stein in Khotan. He was simply a middleman for others who had since died or disappeared. He had never even seen the sites where these finds were made, he protested. But then Stein confronted him with the account Islam Akhun had previously given Macartney of exactly how and where he had found the old books. Islam Akhun was outfoxed and oddly flattered that his fanciful tales had been recorded—and he confessed.
He said he knew Europeans were prepared to pay for old manuscripts, but he had no wish to engage in back-breaking digging in the desert to uncover them. The enterprising scoundrel had a better idea. His first “old books” were handwritten imitations of genuine fragments. However, as his European buyers couldn’t read them anyway, the effort in copying real script seemed needless. Documents in “unknown scripts” began appearing. Business was brisk and soon supply of the handwritten documents couldn’t keep up with demand. By 1896 he turned to mass production using woodblock printing. Sheets of paper were dyed yellow and hung over a fireplace to “age” them. At times this was done too enthusiastically and Stein noted some of the old books sent to Calcutta were scorched. They had been bound so as to imitate European volumes—which should have rung alarm bells—and their pages sprinkled with sand.
Stein had solved a mystery which had fooled a brilliant scholar. Even so, he had no wish to see Islam Akhun punished. The man was no stranger to harsh local justice. For past misdeeds, including fraud, he had been imprisoned, flogged, and forced to wear a wooden collar or cangue, similar to a portable pillory, which renders the offender unable to feed himself or lie down. Stein even developed a grudging respect for the “versatile rogue,” whom he found witty and highly intelligent. Too intelligent to waste his not inconsiderable talents in Khotan, Stein told him in jest. And in this throwaway line, Islam Akhun was quick to sniff fresh opportunity. He begged Stein to take him to Europe where he could, no doubt, find a bigger market for his unique skills. Stein declined the rogue’s entreaty.
A year after he arrived in Turkestan, Stein departed Kashgar with his treasures destined for the British Museum and his baggage loaded onto eight ponies. Flushed with success, Stein accompanied his cargo west across the border to the Russian railhead and on to London. He had learned how to work in the desert, uncovered a forgery and gathered a wealth of antiquities from a forgotten civilization.
Stein was never going to be content as a cog in the civil service. Soon after he returned to India from his first expedition into Turkestan, he began lobbying for another trip that would again take him away from the confines of desk work. Initially, it wasn’t a return to Turkestan that called him but new ground, Tibet. He was keen to join a mission being led by British army officer Francis Younghusband, a man destined to become known as much for his eccentric, free-loving beliefs and a mystical vision in Tibet as for his daring military leadership.
Stein’s bid to go to Tibet was rejected because he lacked the language skills required. Undeterred, he switched his attention back to Turkestan, where there remained much more he could do. His first expedition had barely scratched the surface. Just think what he might achieve with more time and money. He set about getting both. He wanted to travel beyond Turkestan to the edge of China proper—as the neighboring province of Gansu was thought of—to explore the ancient route between China and the West.
He presented his masters with his grand plan in September 1904. He began by reminding them of what he had achieved in his first endeavor. The artifacts he had already unearthed in the desert showed how far Indian culture had spread. He also revealed that the area around Khotan had been a previously unknown meeting place between the great ancient civilizations of China, Persia, India, and the classical West. And for those not impressed with scholarship, he drew attention to practical realities: he had done it within the time and budget allotted.
He wanted to return to Khotan, where he expected the ever-shifting dunes would have surrendered more ruins in the years since his first visit. Then he would strike out across the desert to the Lop Nor region in the Taklamakan’s far east, where Sven Hedin had discovered an ancient settlement called Loulan. Just beyond the desert in Gansu was the oasis of Dunhuang, or Shazhou—the City of Sands. This was the ancient gateway between China and Central Asia through which all Silk Road t
ravelers once passed. Nearby were caves filled with murals and sculptures he wanted to explore. “A great many of the grottos are now filled more or less with drift sand and hence likely to have preserved also other interesting remains,” he wrote with greater prescience than he could have imagined.
The urgency was obvious. The Bower Manuscript had drawn attention to the riches of the desert’s sands. Local treasure seekers were destroying archaeological evidence, and rival European expeditions were likely. Stein’s successes had already prompted a German team to head to Turkestan and return with forty-four crates of antiquities. And, he noted pointedly, they had three times his budget. The Russians, too, were considering mounting an expedition. The implications would not be lost on the British government. Stein was working against a backdrop of the Great Game, a phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Cold War.
Political uncertainties within China were also a factor, he argued. Local Chinese authorities had been helpful so far, but that could change. “It seems scarcely possible to foresee whether . . . political changes may not arise which would close that field to researches from the British side.” Nor could he foresee that when the political winds did change, he would be at their center. Having already applied for British citizenship, he appealed to national and imperial pride. “The wide-spread interest thus awakened makes it doubly desirable that the leading part so far taken in these explorations by British enterprise and from the side of India should be worthily maintained.”
To add further muscle to his application, he lobbied influential scholars and associates—Stein was a great networker—for their support. He had characteristically argued his case from all directions: scholarship, patriotism, politics, and economics. He knew he needed to if he was to avoid a refusal by the bureaucracy, that “centre of intellectual sunshine,” as he dubbed it.
