Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  At the lake, about three miles south of Dunhuang, Stein and Chiang spent a rare relaxing day. The pagoda and temples on the southern fringe of the lake, a quarter of a mile long, were filled with a mix of Buddhist and Daoist statues and murals. The offerings within were recent, but the annual pilgrimage to the caves meant the pious were elsewhere. No one was around to disturb their tranquil respite. The lake so enchanted Stein as he sat beside it writing to Allen that he volunteered he might choose it as the site of his own grave. “There could be no more appropriate place of rest for a desert wanderer than this charming little Tirtha [pilgrimage place] enclosed all round by sand ridges up to 300 ft in height.”

  If the sight prompted reflections on mortality in Stein, it prompted acts of levity in his assistant. Stein watched in amusement as Chiang slid down one of the dunes. It was, he told Stein, to test the local lore that the dunes could be made to produce miraculous music. In his dainty velvet boots, Chiang slowly ascended his chosen dune. With each step, the powdery sand gave way, but finally Chiang reached the summit, turned around and began his descent. As he skittered down the dune, both men heard a “sound like that of distant carts rumbling,” satisfying them that the legend was based on fact. The Ming Sha dunes had earned their name: the Singing Sands. Chiang shared with Stein a local folk tale he had gleaned, that after the annual pilgrimage, the gods would send a violent dust storm to cleanse the sacred caves. Given that buran season was approaching, Stein felt the prediction of a “divine sweeping” was almost certain to come true.

  After nearly a year in each other’s company, a strong friendship had developed between the two men. Not only had Chiang adapted to the wandering life, he had developed a keen interest in the finds being uncovered, and he kept his ear to the ground for folk tales and far more besides. “My brave [Chiang] is an excellent diplomat and why I am even more grateful for an indefatigable worker,” Stein told Allen. “It is great comfort to have a gentleman by one’s side & one ever cheerful.” As Stein sat by Crescent Lake on that idyllic spring day, penning lines to his dear friend in England, thanking good fortune for his Chinese comrade—and amused by his moment of sand-sliding whimsy—Stein could not know just how crucial a role Chiang was about to play.

  The predicted sandstorm swept through the oasis the night before Stein moved his caravan out to the caves. He was up by 5:30 a.m. but delays conspired to keep him from getting underway until almost midday. The trip was slow in the storm’s hazy aftermath, and a camel stumbled into a canal, soaking the Naik’s baggage. But after five hours the men, camels, and baggage reached the silent valley in the late afternoon of May 21, 1907. The annual pilgrimage was over, and the caves had resumed their sleepy, decayed air and were deserted except for a fat jolly red-robed Tibetan lama.

  Word had been sent ahead to Wang that Stein was arriving, and the abbot had been convinced to delay another begging tour planned for after the festival. But as Stein pitched his tent in the shade of some fruit trees away from the rest of his party, Wang was nowhere to be seen. Chiang found a room near the feet of a three-story Buddha, and the others took shelter in some tumbledown buildings. Soldiers from Dunhuang, sent to keep an eye on Stein, also found quarters nearby. The Naik set up a makeshift darkroom. Stein had abandoned any prospect of removing murals or statues. He quite simply could not get away with it. Photographing the artworks was the most he could hope for. But his real goal was to get access to the hidden manuscripts. He would need time and stealth to succeed. As he moved toward that goal like a hunter pursuing his quarry, photography and study provided the cover he needed to spend time at the caves.

  When Wang eventually arrived to welcome his foreign visitor, Stein’s first impression of the man on which everything depended was not reassuring: “He looked a very queer person, extremely shy and nervous, with an occasional expression of cunning which was far from encouraging. It was clear from the first that he would be a difficult person to handle,” Stein wrote.

  And so began a game of chess between the two, but one in which we know the strategy of only one player. Stein began work the next morning, conveniently photographing near the cave where the manuscripts were hidden. His spirits sank as he glanced in its direction. The cave niche, which had been locked with a rough wooden door when he first saw it in March, was now completely bricked up. Why? Was it to prevent his inquisitive eyes getting even a glimpse of the treasures inside? He didn’t know, but feared the worst.

  Stein’s first objective was to see inside the cave. Only then could he assess what it contained and the possible age of the documents. He sent Chiang to the abbot’s quarters in one of the restored cave temples to smooth a path. The ever-patient Chiang spent hours in delicate negotiations while inhaling the stifling air of the priest’s smoke-filled cave-kitchen. Initially Chiang seemed to make progress. As he dropped hints about making a generous donation to the shrine, Wang in turn acknowledged why the cave had been bricked up. It was a precaution against the curiosity of the thousands of pilgrims who attended the festival. Clearly Wang took seriously his role of guardian. Chiang also learned that although authorities in the provincial capital of Lanzhou were aware of the cave’s scrolls, no detailed inventory had been made.

  But Wang was not about to let Stein into the cave. At best, he might allow Stein to see a few of its manuscripts, but only those he could easily lay his hands on. Chiang was encouraged by this glimmer of hope. So much so he then overstepped his mark and his mission. For Chiang cautiously suggested that Stein might want to acquire one or two manuscripts “for further study.” It was a wrong move. Wang was so unsettled by the idea—overcome by religious scruples and a terror of being found out—that Chiang promptly dropped the topic. When Chiang left the smoky cave it was without the promise Stein so keenly wanted. Stein listened as Chiang recounted what had transpired and realized that achieving his goal would be even more difficult than anticipated. Clearly Wang would not easily be persuaded by a few pieces of silver. “To rely on the temptation of money alone as a means of overcoming his scruples was manifestly useless,” Stein wrote.

  He needed a different approach. He decided to pay Wang a visit that afternoon, taking Chiang along to interpret. Stein knew Wang’s great joy was the large restored temple, so he asked if Wang might show him through it. Naturally, the abbot was delighted. Wang took him past the newly gilded and painted woodwork at the entrance and along a twenty-four-foot passage. On the right of the painted passageway was the antechamber where Wang had uncovered the hidden library. Stein shot a longing glance at the newly bricked-up wall that barred the way to the niche he longed to enter. “[But] this was not the time to ask questions of my pious guide as to what was being guarded in that mysterious recess,” he acknowledged.

  The passageway opened onto a large decorated chapel, fifty-four feet by forty-six feet, with a raised altar. Stein was appalled at the gaudy sight before him. “There rose on a horseshoe-shaped dais, ancient but replastered, a collection of brand-new clay images of colossal size, more hideous, I thought, than any I had seen in these caves.” The workmanship looked all the more clumsy beside the original murals that covered the chapel’s walls and ceiling. Repelled as Stein was by the new statues, he could not deny the abbot’s sincerity and tenacity. Wang had overseen the removal of a ten-foot-high mound of drift sand and rubble from the cave’s entrance, and he had commissioned new artworks as money from his endless begging tours permitted. “I could not help feeling something akin to respect for the queer little figure by my side,” Stein wrote. “It was clear from the way in which he lived with his two humble acolytes, and from all that Chiang had heard about him at Tun-huang, that he spent next to nothing on his person or private interests.”

  Perhaps Stein sensed a kindred spirit, despite their vast differences in culture and learning. They were solitary wanderers, single-minded and determined about what they saw as their life’s work. Both were indifferent to material comfort but struggled constantly
for the money to undertake their work: Wang to restore and protect his caves, Stein to mount his expeditions in a quest to understand the past.

  Stein wondered how to further gain Wang’s confidence. The abbot was poorly educated. There was no point rattling on about lofty antiquarian interests or arguing about the value of first-hand study of ancient objects. Such topics might appeal to the erudite Chinese officials he met, but they would do little to persuade Wang. Maybe he should drop the name of his patron saint, Xuanzang, a much-loved figure among the Chinese he had met? As he stood before the gaudy Buddhist images, Stein told Wang of his devotion to the Chinese pilgrim. And he drew some not terribly subtle parallels. Like the saintly Buddhist pilgrim, Stein had made a difficult journey from India to China across rugged mountains and waterless deserts. He had followed in Xuanzang’s footsteps, stopping at many of the very shrines and ruined places the pilgrim visited so long ago.

  Stein could see from the glint in the shy abbot’s eyes that his words made an instant impression. Although the Daoist abbot was poorly versed in Buddhism, he too was devoted to Xuanzang. So much so that he took Stein from the cave to look more closely at the loggia, or terrace, he had built just outside. On its walls were paintings Wang had commissioned of mythical scenes from Xuanzang’s life. Wang proudly showed him the saintly pilgrim being snatched to the clouds by a demon, then restored to earth by the prayers of his animal-headed companions. In another painting, the pilgrim forced a dragon to surrender a horse it had swallowed. They were apocryphal images that in popular imagination had transformed the intrepid and scholarly pilgrim into a “saintly Munchausen,” as Stein called him. Through Chiang, Wang excitedly related the stories behind the pictures as Stein listened attentively, knowing none of them had any basis in fact.

  Before one scene in particular Stein displayed great interest—and not just because it was one that did have a basis in truth. It was an image Stein realized might help advance his own case. The painting showed Xuanzang on the bank of a raging river, his horse loaded with bundles of manuscripts. A large turtle swam toward the pilgrim to help carry the precious load across. It was a reference to the twenty pony-loads of books and relics Xuanzang brought back from India to China. “Would the pious guardian read this obvious lesson aright, and be willing to acquire spiritual merit by letting me take back to the old home of Buddhism some of the ancient manuscripts which chance had placed in his keeping?” Stein decided not to press the point just yet. Rather, he was content that a bond had been established between himself and the abbot.

  He left Chiang behind with Wang to raise again the tricky question of borrowing some of the manuscripts the abbot had promised earlier in the day. But Wang would not commit to producing them. “There was nothing for me but to wait,” Stein wrote.

  8

  Key to the Cave

  Under cover of darkness, a figure quietly crept from the caves to Stein’s tent beneath the fruit trees later that night. It was Chiang, and he was carrying a bundle of manuscripts. Wang, he whispered gleefully to Stein, had just paid him a secret visit. Hidden under the priest’s flowing black robe had been the first of the promised scrolls. What they were, Chiang wasn’t sure. But Stein could see that the paper they were made of was old, at least as old as the roll the helpful young monk had shown him on his first visit to the caves weeks earlier. The writing was Chinese and Chiang thought the documents might be Buddhist scriptures, but he needed time to study them. He returned to his quarters at the feet of the big Buddha and spent the night poring over them.

  At daybreak, he was back at Stein’s tent, barely able to contain his excitement. Colophons, or inscriptions, on the rolls showed they were Chinese versions of Buddhist texts brought from India. Moreover, they were copies from translations by the great Xuanzang himself. It was an astonishing coincidence. Even the usually skeptical Chiang suggested that this was a most auspicious omen. Auspicious and convenient. Chiang hastened to Wang to plant the seeds of this “quasi-divine” event. Had not the spirit of Xuanzang revealed the manuscript hoard to Wang ahead of the arrival from distant India of the pilgrim’s devoted “disciple”—Stein? The untutored Wang could not possibly have known the connection these manuscripts had with Xuanzang when he selected them from among the thousands of scrolls and delivered them to Chiang the previous night. Surely this was proof that opening the cave would have Xuanzang’s blessing.

  All morning, Stein kept away from Wang and the Library Cave, busying himself with photographing elsewhere. But when Chiang returned a few hours later with news that Wang had unbricked the cave’s door, Stein could wait no longer. No one was about on that hot cloudless day. Even the soldiers who had tailed him all morning had disappeared for an opium-induced siesta as Stein made his way to the cave. There he found a nervous Wang. With Stein beside him, Wang opened the rough door that lay behind the dismantled wall. Stein looked on in wonder: “The sight of the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open wide. 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 nearly ten feet.”

  He was looking at one of the great archaeological finds of all time.

  There was barely room for two people to stand in the tiny room, about nine feet by nine feet, and certainly no space to unroll or examine the stacked bundles. Much as Stein wanted to remove every scroll from the cramped niche to a large painted temple where he could readily study them, he knew Wang would not agree. Wang feared the consequences if a foreigner was spied examining the contents of the cave he had been ordered to keep sealed. He could lose his position and patrons if rumors spread around the oasis. He was not going to jeopardize all he had worked for. Even in the quietest times, pilgrims occasionally visited the caves to light incense, ring a bell, and pay homage before the Buddha. But the abbot did agree to remove one or two bundles at a time and allow Stein a quick look. He also agreed to let Stein use a small restored cave chapel nearby that had been fitted with a door and paper windows. Screened from prying eyes, Stein set up what he called his “reading room.”

  As Wang busied himself inside the Library Cave, Stein looked for any hint of when it had been sealed and a clue therefore to the age of the manuscripts hidden within. Two features drew his attention: a slab of black marble and a mural of bodhisattvas. The three-foot-wide block was originally inside the cave, but Wang had moved it to the passageway outside. It was inscribed to the memory of a monk named Hong Bian with a date corresponding to the middle of the ninth century. This suggested the cave could not have been sealed before then. On the passageway wall were the remains of the mural—a row of saintly bodhisattvas carrying offerings of divine food—that helped conceal the entrance to the Library Cave. Fortunately Wang’s restorations had not extended to these figures. To Stein, hungry for clues, they provided more earthly nourishment. Their style suggested they were painted no later than the thirteenth century. So somewhere between the ninth century and the thirteenth, the cave had been filled, then sealed. If his deduction was right, whatever was inside the cave would be very old indeed.

  Stein at first believed the cave had been filled in great confusion, and from this he formed a theory about why it was concealed. “There can be little doubt that the fear of some destructive invasion had prompted the act,” he wrote. But he also found evidence for a conflicting theory: that the cave was no more than a storehouse for sacred material. He noted bags carefully packed with fragments of sacred writings and paintings. “Such insignificant relics would certainly not have been collected and sewn up systematically in the commotion of a sudden emergency.”

  Scholars agree the cave was plastered shut around the beginning of the eleventh century, but the reasons why remain unclear. The cave’s guardians may have feared Islamic invaders from the west. The sword of Islam had already conquered Dunhuang’s ally, Khotan, in 1006. Invaders did come from the north, but these were Tanguts w
ho, as Buddhists themselves, seem an unlikely threat to Buddhist scriptures.

  But there is also support for Stein’s other thesis, that the cave was a storeroom or tomb for material no longer needed by local monasteries. The printed Diamond Sutra, for example, showed signs of damage and repeated repair and may simply have been judged to have reached the end of its useful life. Buddhists did not simply throw away sacred material. They buried it reverentially. Even today Buddhism has rites surrounding the disposal of spiritual writings.

  The cave does not appear to have been sealed ahead of an unrecorded exodus from the sacred complex. Nearby Dunhuang was still a bustling oasis when the cave was hidden. The area had a population of about 20,000, including about 1,000 monks and nuns in more than a dozen monasteries. The caves too were thriving, with some of their most beautiful chapels still to be created. Indeed the caves continued to thrive after the arrival of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. Although the Mongol chief ransacked Dunhuang, he not only left the caves undamaged, his rule saw new ones commissioned. The caves were still flourishing 300 years after the Library Cave was sealed. The last cave is believed to have been painted in 1357, just before the start of the Ming dynasty. Soon after, the Silk Road was abandoned, and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas sank into a long decline.

  Whatever the reason for its sealing, the Library Cave—or Cave 17 as it is prosaically known today—wasn’t always used to house manuscripts. It was initially a memorial chapel for the monk whose name was on the marble slab, Hong Bian, who died around the time the Diamond Sutra was being printed. He was an important monk—so important he had the right to wear the highly prestigious color purple. A statue of him, seated in meditation posture, was initially installed in the cave. It was placed against a wall behind which was painted a decorative scene including two attendants—one holding a staff, the other holding a fan—and a pair of trees from which hang his pilgrim’s bag and water bottle. The statue was removed when the cave was filled with scrolls and has since been found to contain traces of purple silk. When and why the cave changed from being a memorial chapel to housing the scrolls remains a mystery.