Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  Mrs. Macartney soon got to grips with local customs, at times to her own embarrassment. She quickly learned that the Hindu guard of honor who greeted her arrival with rupees in the palms of their hands were offering respect. She was expected to touch the money, not pocket it. She created a shady garden and an orchard of peaches, apricots, figs, and mulberries. She took charge of the staff, including three Indian servants in red and gold uniforms topped with white turbans. And she oversaw the gardener, a man who appeared to have direct communication with his vegetables. When she once asked him when the peas would sprout, he replied: “They tell me they will be coming out tomorrow.”

  Although she lacked female compatriots—she was visited by only three English women in all her years there—she observed, and at times entertained, local women, including Chinese women with bound feet. Barbaric as the practice seemed, she wondered if it was any worse than the tight corseting in vogue among their European counterparts. She also observed the rituals under way at a shrine just opposite Chini Bagh, where young Muslim women came to pray for husbands. “I sometimes suspected that their prayers were answered pretty quickly, for I often saw youths wandering about near the shrine, furtively inspecting the supplicants.”

  As the nights warmed during his two weeks at Kashgar in June 1906, Stein pitched his tent under the trees in Chini Bagh’s garden. Although the walls of the residence were two feet thick, to insulate against the winter cold and summer heat, Stein preferred to sleep under canvas. He liked the relative cool—and perhaps the solitude. Some nights the sounds of the Cossacks singing Russian airs carried to Chini Bagh, where they mingled with the call to prayer from the nearby Id Kah mosque and Kashgar families returning from their orchards singing melodies that reminded Stein of Hungarian songs he knew from his childhood.

  The capricious Petrovsky had been replaced since Stein’s previous visit by a more amiable Russian consul, Colonel Kolokoloff. Father Hendricks still paid his regular visits, although he was a less robust figure than before. Elsewhere in Kashgar, little had changed. Thursday was market day in the old city of about 40,000 people. Women in their finery paraded in loose red gowns, matrons wore pork pie hats atop their long plaits and young women tucked a marigold or pomegranate flower behind their ears. Stalls in the market square were piled with the summer fruits that had ripened just as Stein arrived. The narrow side streets were filled with specialist bazaars. Cotton merchants filled one section, grain merchants another. The sounds of blacksmiths and silversmiths rang out. Hatmakers stitched velvet caps with fur for winter or embroidered them for summer. In the tea shops, people rested from the heat as musicians plucked instruments and storytellers spun their yarns.

  But the leisurely life in the fertile oasis frustrated Stein, who grumbled to Allen about its “easy-going slackness” and the difficulty in hiring artisans during summer when picnics and garden parties were the main occupation. For a man in a hurry, he had arrived in Kashgar at the worst time. “It cost great efforts to catch the carpenter, smither, [and] leather-worker I needed and still greater ones to keep them at work.” Saddles needed repairing, clothes needed sewing and, most importantly, animals needed purchasing—camels especially, as these would be the core of his desert caravan. Stein was alarmed to discover how much prices had increased in the thriving oasis. He bought eight well-seasoned camels within a week of arriving. They were double-humped Bactrian camels whose thick seasonal coats can withstand the region’s extreme temperatures. It pained Stein to shell out triple the amount for each beast that he paid on his first expedition. At least ponies were still a bargain, about a tenth of the cost of his camels. In Kashgar’s weekly animal market he snapped up a dozen of them to convey his team and some of the lighter baggage. Although never reckless with money, Stein had to administer his meager government budget carefully.

  He also had formal visits to pay. His first call on a well-heeled Chinese official turned into an impromptu feast of eighteen courses. It was accompanied by knives and forks rather than chopsticks, but the food itself was so mystifying that even Macartney struggled to identify some of the dishes. Such prolonged banquets could be wearing to the dyspeptic Stein, not least because he preferred a simple diet, but they helped forge useful friendships.

  Stein needed more men, too, so he was overjoyed when his former camel man, Hassan Akhun, signed on. Stein admired the camel man’s inquisitiveness. Hassan Akhun knew his own mind and took great care of his camels. Stein sensed in him a kindred spirit, a man who welcomed adventure. In Stein’s view these traits outweighed an explosive temper. On their first trip together, Hassan Akhun had become so embroiled in a fight with another man that the explorer had been forced to separate the combatants with his antique walking stick.

  Stein was less thrilled to see his former interpreter, Niaz Akhun. Stein knew more than he cared to of this worker’s shortcomings, which included an “inordinate addiction to opium and gambling, and his strong inclination to qualified looting.” Not to mention womanizing. Niaz Akhun’s amorous encounters during the first expedition had so outraged locals and Stein’s Muslim workers that he had to be isolated for his own safety. The philanderer had become so enamored with a “captivating Khotan damsel of easy virtue,” as Stein coyly described her, that he abandoned his family and divorced his wife. Inevitably the romance soured and Niaz Akhun had gambled and drifted his way back to Kashgar. Stein did not offer him his old job, but gave him some silver, which was soon sacrificed to the “God of the Dice.” Stein also needed to replace his troublesome cook, whose abilities had “shrivelled up with the cold” as they had crossed the mountains. He settled for a rough Kashmiri named Ramzan, “a hardy plant though not sweet to look at.”

  Chiang, the man Macartney had recommended as Stein’s secretary, arrived. Like many of the Chinese who filled the civil offices in Turkestan, Chiang hailed from Hunan, nearly 3,000 miles to the southeast. He had left behind his home, wife and son seventeen years earlier and had been engaged in the yamen in the oasis of Yarkand, 120 miles from Kashgar. Clearly, Chiang was a man able to cope with long separation from family.

  But he also knew his own worth. His terms were high—120 rupees a month and his own servant—but made in the knowledge that Chinese gentleman clerks in the remote province were well rewarded. And unlike most of Stein’s other men, he had no fear of the “Great Gobi” (the blanket term was used to cover the Taklamakan Desert as well). The only problem was that Chiang’s grasp of Turki, the language intended as their shared tongue, was shaky. He spoke little of it despite his many years in Turkestan, and his accent was almost impenetrable. But Chiang impressed Stein with his engaging manner and his “lively ways, frank and kindly look, and an unmistakable air of genial reasonability . . . Something in his round jovial face and in the alert gait of his slight but wiry body gave me hope that he would know how to shift for himself even on rough marches and among the discomforts of desert camps,” Stein wrote. Hiring Chiang would prove one of the wisest decisions Stein ever made.

  As the days were filled amassing his caravan, Stein had little time to unwind in the evening with his friends on Chini Bagh’s flat roof. He was juggling another deadline. He needed to finish proofreading his account of his first expedition, Ancient Khotan, and get the corrections in the mail. From Kashgar he could get the proofs back to England relatively quickly, within about twenty days, using the overland Russian mail route. He also wrote many letters to friends in Europe. It was his last chance to avail himself of this postal system. Once he left Kashgar, his mail would have to be relayed by “dak runners.” These formed a network of hardy native postmen who carried their mailbags across the desert and over the mountains to India. Three times a month, dak runners crossed between Kashgar and Hunza. When camped in the desert, Stein allowed up to three months for his mail to reach Europe. A telegraph line existed between Kashgar and Beijing, but the poles were sometimes knocked over by fierce storms and even bears. The animals mistook the humming
of the wires for bees.

  Meanwhile, Macartney had an update on the Germans. They had crossed to Kucha, far away on the northern Silk Road, and were still undecided about where to go next, India or China. Stein feared the latter and that they might head for Lop Nor and Dunhuang. Of Pelliot’s team, there was no news, only vague rumors among the Russians. “They may turn up any day—or a month hence,” he speculated to Allen.

  He believed he could still keep ahead of the Frenchman, who would need most of a month to put his caravan together in Kashgar while Stein’s was nearly ready. But if Pelliot did arrive, Stein would have to consider crossing the desert in the baking summer heat, an extremely risky prospect. He hated having to work in such haste, constantly looking over his shoulder, fearful he might find a rival behind every sand dune. “The rush past places which might still yield something to me is by no means an attractive idea for me, and the heat will be trying . . . You will understand, with your infinite sympathy, how weary work it is to have to watch for others’ moves, instead of being free to follow one’s own plans straight,” he wrote.

  At last Stein’s caravan was ready. Ahead of an early morning departure, he bid farewell to his Kashgar friends, except one. Stein had not seen Father Hendricks in those final busy days. But Mrs. Macartney had and thought he looked particularly frail, although he still managed a cheerful word for her baby daughter. She had previously offered to take the old priest in and nurse him. Typically, he had refused and was determined to remain alone. So as Stein was occupied with last-minute preparations on his final day in Kashgar, Macartney decided to visit Hendricks’ hovel within the old city walls. There he discovered that his friend, the purveyor of gossip and good spirits, lay dead. The priest had been ailing for months, but his lonely death, apparently of throat cancer, had come more quickly than anyone expected.

  The funeral was set for the next day, the day of Stein’s departure. Stein delayed his start so he could attend. But in Kashgar, even the rituals of death assumed a leisurely air. The local carpenter was in no hurry to finish making the coffin when Macartney and Stein arrived at his shop on the morning of the funeral. There they found the Russian consul, who had taken charge of the burial arrangements, waiting impatiently for the coffin that should have been finished the previous evening. As the hours passed with little progress, the coffin was eventually completed with the aid of the consul’s Cossacks. Around noon, Stein, together with Kashgar’s few European residents, followed the empty coffin as it was carried through the dusty lanes to Father Hendricks’ shabby home where the Chinese shoemaker convert had kept vigil. The tiny place was crammed with books, maps and the priest’s altar, beside which was a trapdoor leading to his wine cellar. It resembled, Stein said, “a cave by the seashore where the play of the waves had deposited strange debris from distant coasts.”

  The Cossacks eased the priest’s body into the coffin and, bareheaded in the midday heat, carried it to the Christian graveyard about a mile away, between the river and Chini Bagh. The Russian consulate guard marched in front of the coffin and the rest of Kashgar’s Europeans behind, though they were not the only people to mourn the much-loved priest. For months after Hendricks’ death, Chinese friends kept a light burning nightly on his grave.

  4

  The Moon and the Mail

  Stein passed beyond Chini Bagh’s avenue of poplars late in the hot afternoon a few hours after Father Hendricks was laid to rest. The heat in late June was so intense—with temperatures of 105 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade—he and his caravan traveled mostly by night. They would set off well before dawn, usually around 2 a.m., and cover up to twenty-five miles before the sun forced them to seek refuge. Sleeping in a tent during the day was impossible, so Stein reluctantly slept under more solid shelter. It wasn’t just the dirt that bothered him in the Chinese rest houses, but the inquisitive caretakers and other travelers who gave him little peace as he attempted to rest, attend to his caravan and read the remaining proofs of his book—a task unfinished in Kashgar. The buildings were also almost as hot as his tent since they faced the midday sun.

  He soon availed himself of the local rules of hospitality among the oases which allowed him to lodge pretty much wherever he liked. “One may invade the house of any one, high or low, sure to find a courteous reception, whether the visit is expected or otherwise.” He stayed with well-to-do villagers, enjoying their orchards where the trees, heavy with apricots and mulberries, splattered the ground with their ripe fruit.

  These were the first days of their long journey together, but Chiang was already proving a worthy companion. As the caravan moved along in the pre-dawn light, Chiang began to teach Stein some Mandarin. The explorer, with his ear for languages, picked it up quickly. He also picked up Chiang’s strong Hunan accent. But at least they could talk together in a language other than Chiang’s impenetrable Turki. Stein found Chiang a ready source of gossip and amusing anecdotes, a keen observer of human foibles. “He has told me many little secrets of the official machinery of the chequered careers of proud Ambans & their unholy profits. ‘The New Dominions’ are a sort of India for Chinese officials, where everybody knows everybody else,” Stein wrote.

  Chiang’s dress was as colorful as his stories. He wore either a dark blue or maroon silk jacket, which he teamed with bright yellow overalls when he rode on horseback. On his pigtailed head he added a light blue silk cloth under his traveling cap to shield him from the heat, and he shaded his eyes with a detachable peak of rainbow-colored paper. Even his black horse had colorful flourishes. Atop its saddle Chiang placed a vivid scarlet cushion, and the saddle itself had leather flaps decorated with yellow and green embroidery. But Chiang’s preference for heavy old-fashioned stirrups worried Stein. “I never could look at this heavy horse millinery and the terribly massive stirrups, each weighing some three pounds and of truly archaic type, without feeling sorrow for his mount,” Stein noted. Consequently, Stein gave Chiang the hardiest of the horses.

  Chiang had planned to set out with an alarming amount of baggage, including most of his library, but was convinced to leave much behind. As he became accustomed to desert travel, he willingly began to shed more. He took to rough travel with gusto, showing an indifference to its hardships. He even shared Stein’s curiosity about the past. Certainly Chiang was a far cry from the pugnacious, womanizing interpreter who had accompanied Stein’s first Turkestan expedition. “It was a piece of real good fortune which gave me in Chiang, not merely an excellent teacher and secretary, but a devoted helpmate ever ready to face hardships for the sake of scientific interests,” he wrote. “With all his scholarly interests in matters of a dead past, he proved to have a keen eye also for things and people of this world, and his ever-ready flow of humorous observations lightened many a weary hour for us both.”

  After some hard bargaining in the oasis of Yarkand, where Chiang had long worked, Stein secured for himself a fine young horse he named Badakhshi after what he believed were its bloodlines from Badakhshan. Clearly Stein spent no more time naming his horse than he did his dynasty of dogs. Badakhshi was to prove a perfect mount for Stein and for Dash II, who taught himself to leap to the stirrup and then up to the saddle, where he would sit on the pommel. Badakhshi was hardy and unsociable, not unlike his master.

  Stein was at last doing exactly what he loved. He was on the move in Turkestan, where he felt more at home than almost anywhere; certainly more so than in India—despite living almost twenty years there—with its caste rules and stultifying bureaucracy. As his camels, his ponies and his men moved steadily along, in the same way travelers had done for centuries, he could forget for a while the modern world with its bustle of speeding trains and alienating cities. “To peep into every house & hut along the road is better than to see towns in electric illumination flit past like fireflies,” he wrote.

  He loved the sense of being transported to an earlier era. And that feeling recurred when he encountered
a caravan of traders heading over the mountains to Ladakh. He entrusted their jovial leader with a letter to a friend there and felt cheered to be reminded that long-distance communication was possible well before the existence of a postal service. The traders’ cargo was likely to transport in an altogether different way; it consisted of “that precious but mischievous” drug charas, or hashish.

  Only his relationship with the elder Ram Singh intruded on the joy of returning to his Turkestan. The surveyor had become unaccountably sullen. This reached a peak when, as the caravan was readying to depart one morning before dawn, the surveyor sent a message to say he was not prepared to move unless he was given a couple of assistants of his own. When Stein went to see him, the surveyor had other complaints. Among them, he did not want to start at such an early hour, even though it was when Stein often broke camp. Stein did not know what precipitated the surveyor’s demands and was not about to acquiesce to them. Instead, he criticized Ram Singh for setting a bad example.

  Stein was impatient with delays. When a rare late start was made, he grumbled about his men’s reluctance to tear themselves away from the “fleshpots” of a local oasis. For Stein it was the desert, not the oases, that attracted him. One night during his first expedition, he became entranced watching the full moon ascend over the desert.

  She looked as if rising from the sea when first emerging from the haze of dust that hid the plains, and her light shimmered on the surface. But when she climbed high up in the sky it was no longer a meek reflection that lit up the plain below. It seemed as if I were looking at the lights of a vast city lying below me in the endless plains. Could it really be that terrible desert where there was no life and no hope of human existence? I knew that I should never see it again in this alluring splendour.