Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  Whatever the truth, Wang sensed his discovery was significant and tried hard to interest authorities in the cave’s contents. He informed officials in Dunhuang of the find, taking two yellowed scrolls with him, but the local magistrate dismissed the documents as useless scraps of old paper. About three years later, when a new, more learned magistrate arrived, Wang again presented evidence of the great find. This magistrate came to the caves and departed with a few manuscripts, but did nothing. Yet still Wang persisted. He took a donkey with two boxes of manuscripts to Suzhou, yet even there a scholar who inspected them was unimpressed. Finally, in 1904, the provincial government in Lanzhou ordered Dunhuang officials to protect the scrolls. But there was no money to transport up to seven pony loads of manuscripts to another location. Resigned by the years of inaction, a dismayed Wang did what he was told to do: he resealed the cave and consigned the cache of documents back to their dark, dry tomb.

  In a place where there is something that can be distinguished by signs, in that place there is deception.

  VERSE 5, THE DIAMOND SUTRA

  7

  Tricks and Trust

  For years, Stein dreamed of seeing the sacred caves. He had learned about them from a friend, geographer Lajos Lóczy, who was with the first party of Europeans to reach the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, in May 1879. Lóczy, a fellow Hungarian, had spoken in glowing terms of their magnificent art. To stand inside the caves was one reason why Stein had pressed to travel so far into China. But the rumor of a hidden cache of manuscripts made him even more eager. So his first days in Dunhuang must have seemed like torture. The caves were a mere fifteen miles away, but he was stuck at his desk tending to the necessary but most wearying part of his expedition. He brought his accounts and official correspondence up to date; he farewelled his donkey men with a generous tip; and he sent his camels off to graze.

  He could barely contain his excitement when on a cold, bright March morning, four days after he had reached Dunhuang, he rode to the caves with Chiang and the Naik. He soon left behind the ploughed fields of the oasis and crossed a stretch of barren gravel. After nine dusty miles, he turned into a river valley where a cliff rose perpendicular on his right. At the gateway to the valley was a large ceremonial bell. Rusty and cracked, it was covered in Chinese characters from a Buddhist text. But what interested Stein most was that it contained a date, even if not a terribly old one. “It gave me the first assurance that the chronological precision so characteristic of Chinese ways was not ignored by Buddhist piety in these parts,” he wrote. Indeed the Chinese inclination to date everything was a gift for an archaeologist. It removed the guess work—and would ultimately provide certainty about the expedition’s greatest treasure, the Diamond Sutra.

  From a distance, the honeycombed grottoes reminded him of troglodyte dwellings. Some of the dark cavities, layered in irregular tiers up the cliff face, seemed accessible only by rope. Others were connected by disintegrating steps or rickety ladders. As he drew closer and crossed the Daquan River in front of the cliff, he could see the painted walls inside the crumbling caves. “‘The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ were indeed tenanted, not by Buddhist recluses, however holy, but by images of the Enlightened One himself.”

  No one was around to guide or distract him as he wandered in awe from cave to cave. He marveled at Buddhas that looked Indian, Gandharan, Tibetan, Chinese. The changing face of the Buddha, as Buddhism wound its way from India along the Silk Road into China, evolving along the way, was literally on the walls. Many of the beautiful chapels appeared to date from the Tang dynasty, a time of peace and prosperity in Dunhuang and a high point of Chinese civilization from the seventh to the tenth century. The passageways that opened onto the temples were covered in processions of bodhisattvas. Many of the sculptures within the grottoes were damaged, either through decay, by iconoclasts or ham-fisted restorations. The fragile sculptures weren’t made of stone—there was none to be quarried in the surrounding conglomerate cliffs—but of clay stucco over a skeleton of wood or bunches of tamarisk twigs. Some had modern heads and arms, but the original bodies survived and revealed exquisite color and drapery. Stein was relieved to find no many-headed, many-armed “monstrosities,” as he disapprovingly described some Indian and Tibetan depictions. On his first visit he presumably did not see the examples that exist, including a pair of many-armed Tibetan Tantric deities wrapped in an intimate embrace, nor the thousand-eyed bodhisattva, Avalokitesvara.

  As Stein walked from cave to cave, absorbed by the beauty of the murals and statues (and no doubt pondering how he might remove them), a young Buddhist monk approached. He appeared to have been left in charge of the small houses and chapels nearby. Stein seized the chance to sound him out about a concealed cave rumored to be full of manuscripts. Under Chiang’s questioning, the young monk proved most forthcoming. Yes, a cave had been discovered. Yes, it was full of manuscripts. Enough to fill several carts. The cave had since been fitted with a locked door and only the temple guardian, Abbot Wang, had the key. But he was off on a begging tour and wouldn’t be back for weeks.

  Here was confirmation that the remarkable rumor Stein had heard when he first arrived in Dunhuang was true. But that was not all Stein gleaned from the monk. The young man’s spiritual mentor, a Tibetan monk who lived among a small Buddhist community at the caves, had borrowed one of the manuscripts for his own use. He kept the document at a nearby chapel. The young monk agreed to fetch it. Stein waited anxiously near the locked door of the Library Cave for his first hint of what might be inside. The monk returned carrying a large paper roll. Stein and Chiang carefully unwound the forty-five-foot scroll. It was beautifully preserved, its paper smooth and strong, but there was no way to determine its age. It was written in Chinese and appeared to be Buddhist. But Chiang, unfamiliar with Buddhism, could make no sense of it. The intriguing scroll only increased Stein’s determination to get into the Library Cave.

  Stein quietly discussed with Chiang how best to get access to the cave and overcome any priestly objections. “I had told my devoted secretary what Indian experience had taught me of the diplomacy most likely to succeed with local priests usually as ignorant as they were greedy, and his ready comprehension had assured me that the methods suggested might be tried with advantage on Chinese soil too.”

  But Stein could see obstacles to his ambitions. Clearly, many caves were still used for worship, despite the neglect of centuries. This was not a problem he had confronted elsewhere in the desert, where he explored long-abandoned sites. Chipping off murals and statues from chapels that continued to attract pilgrims would hardly go unnoticed. “Systematic quarrying,” as he put it to Allen, might even provoke outrage. Could the priest be persuaded to turn a blind eye to the removal of sacred objects? What about the locals? Stein didn’t know.

  But he did know the value of a well-placed offering. He was keen to reward the helpful young monk who had not only confirmed the cave’s existence, but also shown a sample of its contents. “I always like to be liberal with those whom I may hope to secure as ‘my own’ local priests,” he commented blithely. Chiang advised caution—too generous a tip would arouse suspicion about ulterior motives. So Stein offered a small piece of silver. “The gleam of satisfaction on the young Ho-shang’s [monk’s] face showed that the people of Tun-huang, whatever else their weaknesses, were not much given to spoiling poor monks,” Stein wrote.

  Having at last seen the painted grottoes and evidence the rumored cache of manuscripts did indeed exist, only the gathering dusk compelled him to leave the caves. He rode back to Dunhuang in darkness, his head swimming with the images he had seen and the prospect of realizing a scholar’s dream—uncovering an ancient secret library. But he must wait until Abbot Wang returned.

  Stein was not about to sit idle. He was eager to revisit the ruined walls and watchtowers he had glimpsed on his long, cold march to Dunhuang. However, he would need to start immediately if h
e hoped to complete his investigations before the arrival of summer’s blistering heat made such work impossible. Before he could set out, though, he needed local laborers. Finding them would not be easy. Dunhuang’s population, decimated by a Muslim rebellion forty years earlier, had still not recovered. The few laborers for hire did not relish swapping oasis life for hard, cold work in the feared Gobi. And another debilitating force held the town in its grip, which is why the team he eventually assembled seemed less than promising. They were “the craziest crew I ever led to digging—so torpid and enfeebled by opium were they; but I was glad to have even them.”

  Despite his drug-addled team, what he uncovered during a month in the desert while awaiting Wang’s return would reveal as much about ancient secular and military life as the caves would about spiritual life. He returned to the ruined fort where he had halted en route to Dunhuang, on whose ramparts he had walked alone, pondering the rise and fall of empires. He soon realized this ruined fort was one of the very sites he had set out to find, and among the most important of the ancient world. It was the famed Jade Gate, the fort named after the precious stone from Khotan carried by caravans traveling east. Stein had uncovered what he described as the western extension of the Great Wall, built to keep out invaders, extend China’s influence and safeguard the Silk Road trade. He marveled at the strength of the wall, built with bundled layers of tamarisk twigs, reeds, and stamped clay. “Across an extensive desert area, bare of all resources, and of water in particular, it must have been a difficult task to construct a wall so solid as this,” he remarked.

  At a watchtower near the Jade Gate he found a post bag lost in transit between China and Samarkand around 313. Within it was a unique collection of letters, written in Sogdian, a Persian language that was once the Silk Road’s lingua franca. The Sogdians are remembered today as the Silk Road’s great merchants—although in one of these letters a trader is recalled in far less flattering terms. The merchant’s wife, abandoned with their daughter in Dunhuang, penned a letter cursing her fate. Her fury is evident 1,700 years on. Destitute and far from home she writes to him, “I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!”

  From the desert sand, Stein also pulled relics of China’s ancient military might. There were mundane reminders, such as a “sorry we missed you” note, carved on a stick by three men and intended for their friend stationed at a garrison. Stein excavated a dungeon, like a deep well, whose grim horrors he preferred not to dwell on—horrors that seemed to be confirmed when he not only found a note about a man who had died after a beating but uncovered a stick used to inflict such punishment. He also unearthed shreds of the fabric intricately connected with the area: silk. Past and present seemed to merge as he found objects so well preserved they looked as if they had been abandoned the previous day. He was in his element. In a letter that seemed to reflect the Buddhist beliefs that surrounded him, he told Allen:

  I feel at times as I ride along the wall to examine new towers, etc, as if I were going to inspect posts still held by the living. With the experience daily repeated of perishable things wonderfully preserved one risks gradually losing the true sense of time. Two thousand years seem so brief a span when the sweepings from the soldiers’ huts still lie practically on the surface in front of the doors or when I see the huge stacks of reed bundles as used for repairing the wall still in situ near the posts, just like stacks of spare sleepers near a railway station. I love my prospecting rides in the evenings especially when the winds have cleared the sky . . . I feel strangely at home here along this desolate frontier—as if I had known it in a previous birth.

  The ruined wall prompted a rare reflection on his “beloved father,” who had followed the paths of old Roman walls in southern Hungary. “He had spent many a hot day in tracing their lines; but, alas, the day never came when he could show me what had puzzled & fascinated him.” Perhaps Stein felt a twinge of sorrow that, as he too stood before an ancient wall, he was unable to share his own fascination with his late father, by then dead nearly two decades.

  In a sheltered spot, he found evidence of a more recent visit: his footprints made a month earlier remained undisturbed by the desert winds. (He would be even more surprised when he returned seven years later to find an echo of 1907: not just his own footprints but also those of Dash the Great.) Amid the ruins of a recently abandoned homestead he left something for a future archaeologist who might visit in another two thousand years—a piece of dated newspaper.

  Thrilled as he was by his discoveries, the weeks of marching from site to site were not without difficulties. Stein knew his opium-addled laborers, good-natured though they were, would far rather be elsewhere. “If they are people hard to keep at work, especially in the desert, they are yet jovial & wonderfully well-mannered. You ought to have seen the polite bearing, the pleasant smile of my laborers, though they were ever at the point of deserting,” he wrote to Allen. Some of them did.

  There were ructions too among his core crew. His camel man Hassan Akhun picked a fight with one of the Chinese laborers. This prompted retaliation from the entire group of laborers, who set aside their good manners and attacked the camel man. The rheumatic surveyor Ram Singh was full of complaints. There was too little rest and not enough comfort for his liking. He was dissatisfied with his pony and wanted a better one. He was unhappy about sharing a cook with the Naik and irritated by the latter’s snoring. Stein’s Kashmiri cook, Ramzan, went on strike before taking a pony and disappearing. Stein figured he would not get far. He knew the cook would go to Dunhuang, where his presence would soon be noticed. Sure enough, his arrival alone in the oasis aroused such suspicion he was arrested and locked up. And there he would have stayed until Stein returned from the desert had not the trader Zahid Beg, who had told Stein the rumors of the manuscripts, bailed him out and agreed to keep an eye on him. The cook, realizing he had no chance of escaping his contract, decided instead on a sulky apology. He pleaded “mental distemper brought on by the air of the desert.” Even Stein’s dog disappeared for a time. Dash took off in the desert with shepherd dogs only to return badly mauled.

  The change of seasons was swift and dramatic. Clouds of mosquitoes filled the air and Stein, who suffered from repeated bouts of malaria, attempted in vain to shield himself with a protective net. “So I have learned at last how the world looks through a veil. But I am glad that ladies always wearing it have something more pleasant to look at!” Soon desert digging would be impossible, and not just because of the baking heat. For spring, which elsewhere brings renewal and hope, in this desert unleashes its most destructive might: sandstorms, or burans.

  Even witnessed from the safety of an oasis, a buran could terrify. Catherine Macartney described “a great black pillar advancing towards us through the clean air, with the sun shining on either side of the black mass. It grew bigger and bigger, while the sun became a ball of red before it disappeared entirely.” The sky grew darker, and the distant wind shrieked before the storm burst upon Kashgar with a roar. “The trees bent as though they must break and it grew dark as night, while the dust in the air penetrated through the cracks and crevices covering everything, making it difficult even to breathe.”

  For those exposed in the desert, a buran could strike with deadly force. It obliterated all tracks and sense of direction, its fury impossible to withstand. The only defense for caravan men was to shield behind their kneeling camels or take cover under heavy felt blankets—no matter how hot the day—as rocks pelted down for hours. But that was no guarantee of survival. Many have perished in such sandstorms, including a sixty-man caravan en route to Turfan in 1905. “Like hell let loose” is how von Le Coq described a buran. Stein, less dramatic than von Le Coq, made a brief note in his diary shortly before concluding his desert dig: “Overtaken by violent sand storm driving before it even small pebbles.”

  Spring showed its more benign face when Stein returned to the Dunhuang oasis in mid-May. Fields of
young green corn had sprung up in the weeks he had been away, and the wild blue irises growing beside the roadside reminded him of Kashmir. Elm trees that had looked like skeletons on his first arrival were now green, and peach and pear blossoms sprinkled his tent in the widow’s garden. After so long in the desert, the sight soothed his “parched, dust-filled eyes.” Although his thoughts had never been far from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, he soon learned he would have to contain his ever-growing impatience for a few more days. The good news was that Wang had returned from his begging tour. The bad was that the caves were swarming with visitors. An annual pilgrimage was under way and thousands of locals dressed in their bright holiday clothes were bumping their way in carts to worship at the shrines. Eager as he was to move his caravan to the site that drew him “with the strength of a hidden magnet,” this was not the time to do so. What he had in mind could best be accomplished away from prying eyes. With the oasis in its spring dress, for once Stein welcomed a brief, peaceful interlude. He rarely seemed more contented or reflective as on the day spent beside Crescent Lake, Dunhuang’s other magnificent sight.

  “The skill of man made the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but the Hand of God fashioned the Lake of the Crescent Moon.” So said the Dunhuang locals, according to two hardy British missionaries, Mildred Cable and Francesca French, who stopped beside it in the early 1900s. Even today the perfect crescent in a hollow amid the towering dunes bewitches, reflecting clear blue sky amid golden sands.