Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  The Diamond Sutra is one of the most revered texts in Buddhism. It was among the most popular sutras in China during the Tang dynasty, the era when Wang Jie commissioned his scroll. Its enduring popularity is in part because of its brevity—it can be recited in forty minutes. It is shorter than the Lotus Sutra but longer than the Heart Sutra, two other popular and influential texts. Some sutras can take hours, or even days, to recite. The Diamond Sutra has a special place among Zen Buddhists (known as Chan Buddhists in China) whose founding father, Huineng, is said to have achieved enlightenment when as a poor, illiterate youth he overheard a man reciting it.

  In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha acknowledges that those who study the text can expect to be disparaged and held in contempt. The Buddha encourages forbearance and persistence with the promise that such persecution will be beneficial. Perhaps devotees took heart in such words; the oldest known printed book was created against a backdrop of suppression of Buddhism in China. Just two decades before Wang Jie commissioned his sutra, attempts to eradicate Buddhism saw monasteries destroyed, bronze statues melted down for coins, land confiscated, monks and nuns defrocked, and foreign monks sent packing. Not until the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s would Buddhism experience a crackdown so extensive. The persecution reached its peak in 845 under the Emperor Wuzong, a Daoist who issued an imperial decree attacking the Buddhist faith. He condemned it as foreign and idolatrous. It had seduced people’s hearts, corrupted their morals and robbed them of their gold and their strength to work. When men stopped farming and women stopped weaving, people went hungry and cold, yet the lavishly endowed monasteries rivaled palaces in their grandeur, according to the decree. In short, Buddhism was an evil that needed to be eradicated. Buddhists were not the only ones who felt the imperial wrath. Nestorians, Manicheans and Zoroastrians were also targeted as pernicious foreign imports, unlike home-grown Daoists and Confucians.

  The emperor’s actions were driven as much by economics as ideology. The monasteries were wealthy but paid no taxes. And the emperor needed money, especially after a war against the Uyghurs two years earlier had further emptied already depleted imperial coffers. The suppression of Buddhism was short. The emperor died in 846, possibly—and ironically—because of the long-life potions he consumed. But during his six-year rule many of China’s estimated 4,600 temples and 40,000 shrines were destroyed, and more than a quarter of a million monks and nuns returned to lay and taxpaying life. Gold, silver, and jade were confiscated, and sacred images made of iron were turned into agricultural tools. Only images made of less valuable materials—clay, wood, and stone—were left alone.

  Von Le Coq suspected he had found evidence of the suppression when he made a grisly find near Turfan in the winter of 1904–05. In a ruined Buddhist temple he uncovered the piled corpses of more than a hundred murdered monks. The dry desert air had preserved their robes, desiccated skin, hair, and signs of the fatal wounds. One skull had been slashed with a saber that split the victim’s head down to the teeth.

  Although the next emperor was more favorably disposed to the faith, Buddhism never fully recovered in China. Its golden age was over and its long decline began. Dunhuang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas escaped the extensive destruction. This was largely because the oasis was effectively cut off from China, having fallen under Tibetan control. Tibet, which had conquered a number of Silk Road towns, seized Dunhuang around 781. The caves thrived under Tibetan control. The Tibetans had only recently become Buddhist and brought the zeal of the newly converted and their own art forms, creating nearly fifty caves. Tibet continued to control the oasis for the next seventy years—providentially this coincided with the worst of the persecution. The locals resisted the Tibetans, but the invaders were not ousted from Dunhuang until 848, three years after the persecution ended. As a result, much of the Buddhist art destroyed throughout China survived intact at the caves. No one knows when the printed Diamond Sutra arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, but it found refuge in a place that escaped the religious crackdown elsewhere.

  10

  The Thieves’ Road

  Storing his precious cargo was Stein’s prime concern as the caravan of heavily laden camels left the caves. He intended further travels east and surveying over summer, but to do that he needed to leave behind all surplus baggage. The easiest option was to deposit his treasures at the yamen in Dunhuang. There the goods would be under the watchful eye of his learned friend and supporter, the magistrate Wang Ta-lao-ye.

  But Stein changed his mind and decided to store everything at Anxi instead, seventy miles east of Dunhuang. Although a forlorn hamlet, it was a convenient crossroads. Anxi was little more than one rundown main street and had such an air of neglect that Dunhuang appeared a thriving city in comparison. Nonetheless, storing his haul in Anxi would prove a fortuitous decision.

  The cases of manuscripts and textiles were hauled into the yamen of the Anxi magistrate, who gave Stein the use of a storeroom off his private courtyard. The room was well ventilated and could be easily watched. The cases were raised off the ground on timber beams laid over brick pillars. Although rain was rare, it fell while Stein was in Anxi—the first downpour he had seen in nearly a year. Ibrahim Beg remained behind to keep watch and ensure the cases were carried into the sun for a weekly airing. Ostensibly to prevent damp, the regular removal allowed him to discreetly check that the sealed cases remained intact.

  Confident his cargo was secure, Stein again escaped the desert’s summer heat and headed southeast to survey in the Nan Shan Mountains. As he did, civil unrest over taxation that had been simmering in Dunhuang finally boiled over. The town was gripped by riots during which more than a dozen people were killed. Amid the violence, the Dunhuang yamen of magistrate Wang Ta-lao-ye was looted and burned. The manuscripts that had been so perfectly preserved for a millennium narrowly escaped being reduced to ash within weeks of being released from the safety of the sealed cave.

  Stein learned of the unrest during a week-long halt in Suzhou, where he was entertained by Chinese officials. On the eve of his departure, he wanted to repay their hospitality. But his Ladakhi servant, Aziz, whose enthusiasm outweighed his experience in such matters, insisted on serving the meal Chinese-style. In the resulting culinary confusion, the guests were expected to eat their custard with chopsticks. Many times Stein must have regretted that the expedition’s sole capable cook, Jasvant Singh, could prepare food only for Stein’s two Indian assistants, the handyman and the surveyor. For caste reasons, he could not cook for Stein.

  The mountain trip was notable for one other bizarre event. At the eastern edge of Gansu province, the furthest they traveled, handyman Naik Ram Singh searched for a quiet camping area just outside a town. He ushered the party into the grounds of what he believed was an old temple. Although a local official tried to dissuade him from using the site, the Naik was insistent. These were just the kind of peaceful quarters his leader favored, he explained through an interpreter. Perhaps something got lost in translation.

  The site was certainly as quiet as the grave. In daylight, Stein learned why. His tent had been pitched with a coffin tucked under the fly. The ramshackle building was not a temple but a mortuary, and it was filled with coffins, all occupied. The morgue was used by traders from distant provinces to store their deceased comrades until they could be returned to ancestral homes for burial.

  Little wonder Stein was relieved to return to Anxi and his antiquities as autumn set in. He wrote a confidential report to his masters about the Library Cave. He told of his difficulty in getting access to the cave, the wealth of material it contained and how he had overcome the reservations of its guardian priest to obtain scrolls, silks, and other material. What he had acquired so far was potentially more significant than the murals in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas themselves, he told them. As he had with his friends, Stein impressed on them the need to keep quiet about his finds.

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bsp; Some weeks after he left the caves, Stein sent a message to see if Abbot Wang would sell more manuscripts. Emboldened by the knowledge that his previous transaction had remained a secret, the priest tentatively agreed. To avoid arousing local suspicions, Stein remained in Anxi, instead dispatching Chiang on a secret mission with Ibrahim Beg, Hassan Akhun, and four camels.

  The trio duly arrived at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas in late September, but the inopportune appearance of half a dozen Tibetan monks at the same time reignited Wang’s nervousness. Chiang dodged the red-robed visitors and, once again, Wang relented. The manuscripts were hurriedly packed into sacks throughout the night and loaded onto the camels.

  A week after setting out, traveling under cover of darkness and avoiding the high road, they returned to Stein. Chiang “trotted up gaily overflowing with glee at [the] success of his mission.” He had secured a further 230 bundles, containing about 3,000 scrolls. Most were Chinese Buddhist sutras, but there were also twenty bundles of Tibetan Buddhist works and they filled twelve more boxes. The size of the second haul had exceeded Stein’s hopes.

  Just a few weeks after Chiang passed through Dunhuang, where he saw the results of the riots, another European, Baron Carl Gustav Mannerheim, also arrived. He was gathering intelligence for the Russians, as well as manuscripts and other artifacts for his Finnish homeland. He had traveled part of the way from Tashkent to Kashgar with Paul Pelliot and planned to visit the Mogao Caves. But when the time came, the aristocratic Mannerheim, who later became Finland’s president, went off to shoot pheasant instead.

  Stein and Chiang had no more time to look closely at the scrolls and other documents while camped at Anxi than they had at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. The sheer volume of material made detailed documenting impossible. As a result, the printed Diamond Sutra wasn’t properly numbered until it arrived in London, so it is not certain whether it was in the rolls Stein originally purchased from Abbott Wang or among the later bundles which Chiang secured. What is certain is that the acquisition of the world’s oldest printed book was for Stein the happiest of accidents.

  Of the material Stein did examine, it was not the Chinese sutras that most excited him but Indian manuscripts written on palm leaves. And he was delighted to have obtained so much material for so little money. The entire haul from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas had cost just £130. “The single ancient Sanskrit MS [manuscript] on palm leaf might with a few other ‘old things’ be worth this,” he told Allen. It was certainly a pittance compared with other book sales of the era. When the fifth Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s great-grandfather, sold his library at Althorp in 1891 the 40,000 volumes realized almost £250,000. Just a few years later, a Gutenberg Bible sold in London for a record-breaking £4,000.

  Stein had little time to reflect on the many pearls he had extracted. More mundane matters needed attention. He had a report to write and his Christmas mail to pen. Even in the desert Stein never forgot to send seasonal greetings or mark the birthdays of friends. He also had to replace his surveyor, Ram Singh, whom Stein had found increasingly problematic. Publicly, Stein acknowledged the work of his surveyor. But to Allen he was more candid: “Ram Singh’s rheumatism has disappeared for the time being, but not his bad temper etc & I could not have expected from him effective assistance next winter. It has cost much firmness & constant care to get all needful work done by him so far & you can imagine that this means much additional strain,” he wrote. With the arrival of a replacement surveyor, Lal Singh, Ram Singh was dispatched from Anxi on the long trip home to India, where he arrived safely three months later.

  Stein was relieved to put sedentary work behind him and pull out of Anxi. Chiang had even greater reason to see the back of the dreary settlement. Until his gleeful recent arrival with the manuscripts, his only connection with the hamlet was a sorrowful one. About a decade earlier, he had set out with a friend on a rare journey home to Hunan when his companion suddenly fell ill and died. Chiang wrapped the corpse in felts and wrote and ceremoniously burned a prayer for his dead companion’s soul, “asking him to keep his own body from becoming objectionable & to prevent a breakdown of the cart.” For a week, Chiang traveled with the corpse on his cart. At Anxi he bought a coffin and accompanied the body, delivering it to his friend’s relatives five months later. In his diary, Stein reflects on Chiang’s loyal deed: “Not with a word he alluded to all the trouble arising from this pious performance. How many Europeans would be prepared for such sacrifices?”

  Stein and his own cargo had much farther to travel. Anxi was a turning point. The summer excursion in the mountains, where he surveyed 24,000 square miles, took him as far east into China as he intended to go. When he came down from the mountains, he knew his journey back to India and Europe had begun. In early October 1907, he turned his caravan northwest and headed along the northern Silk Road, bound for the oases of Hami and Turfan.

  The caravan skirted along the Turfan Depression, a region 500 feet below the level of the far-distant sea. Stein was happy to return to Turkestan, where he felt so at home. Although he had not traveled along the northern route before, with each step he felt he was on familiar terrain. He was again among Muslim people whose customs and culture he understood. Soon, there was milk to drink. He had been without it since arriving in Dunhuang seven months earlier. Despite the fine grazing land he had traversed in that time, the terrain had been devoid of cattle.

  He noticed the women shared a fondness for the bright clothes of their Turkestan sisters farther west. Best of all, he no longer had to use silver weighed on scales—Stein considered them “instruments of torture”—to pay for everything. There were familiar sights from farther afield. The Turfan bazaars were so full of Russian goods—kerosene lamps, plate glass, and chintz—that he dubbed the area “Demi-Europe.” And he saw signs of more ancient cultural exchange around the oasis. He realized a Christian minority had once lived peacefully alongside Turfan’s Buddhists.

  If Stein and his team were happy to return to Turkestan, perhaps only Chiang felt otherwise. For him it was a continuation of the long exile from the land of his birth. He did not expect to return to Hunan—and his wife and son—until his working life was over.

  Ancient sites were plentiful along the more populated northern Silk Road. Stein and his caravan passed through areas where farmers used temple ruins as manure for crops and manuscript fragments to paper over windows. It was evidence to Stein that antiquities could not safely remain where history had deposited them. Unlike the southern route, which Stein regarded as his own terrain, the more accessible northern route had attracted other foreign archaeological treasure hunters, from Japan, Russia, and Germany. Stein had little interest in digging where others had already been. With a certain one-upmanship he noted how less arduous it was for his rivals to excavate around Turfan, where laborers could return home each night. There was no need for complicated plans to transport water and food in preparation for weeks in the desert. It was “like excavating in one’s own garden,” he sniffed.

  However, he was curious to see what the Germans had been up to. So in late November 1907, he stopped at the abandoned Buddhist grottoes of Bezeklik where Albert von Le Coq had cut out whole murals and sent them to Berlin’s Ethnographic Museum. The German was convinced they would otherwise be destroyed by iconoclasts or by farmers for their fields. Nonetheless, above the door of the room where he’d stayed while removing Bezeklik’s murals, von Le Coq had contributed a painting of his own, a message that said: “Robbers’ Den.”

  It was while exploring in nearby Hami in mid-1905 that von Le Coq first heard the rumor of the manuscripts discovered at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas—news that Stein would not learn for another year and a half. A merchant from Tashkent who had traveled through Dunhuang told von Le Coq about a walled-up cave that had been found nearby. The cave was full of manuscripts nobody could read. The temple guardian would surely be willing to part with
them, the merchant told him. Von Le Coq was intrigued but wary. He had already been led on one excursion prompted by a rumor and returned empty-handed. Nonetheless, von Le Coq resolved to make the seventeen-day trip to Dunhuang—until a telegram arrived from Berlin. His boss, Professor Grünwedel, was headed to Turkestan and von Le Coq was to meet him in Kashgar in October. It was now late August. There was no way von Le Coq could get to Dunhuang and back in time to meet Grünwedel. Kashgar was 1,100 miles west and six weeks away, Dunhuang 250 miles southeast. Von Le Coq was in a quandary.

  “Somewhat in despair, I left the decision to Fate by tossing a Chinese dollar,” he wrote in an account of his travels. Heads he would go to Dunhuang, tails to Kashgar. He flipped the coin. It landed tails. Von Le Coq saddled his horse and left for Kashgar. And so, on the toss of a coin, he lost the chance to claim the Library Cave’s treasures for Germany. Little wonder von Le Coq was not in the best of tempers when he reached Chini Bagh on October 17, 1905 and found no sign of Grünwedel, who did not arrive for another seven weeks. Stuck in Kashgar, von Le Coq knew he could easily have reached Dunhuang and investigated the merchant’s rumor.

  Stein, who long harbored fears about his competitors, had little idea just how close he came to being beaten to his greatest prize. By the time he learned of the Library Cave, von Le Coq was back in Berlin. As Stein stood in the abandoned Bezeklik caves and stared at the denuded walls, he was aware only that the grottoes there, unlike those at Dunhuang, were no longer places of worship. “How much greater would be the chance for the survival of these art remains in situ if only Turfan still held such a pious image-loving population as Tun-huang?” he wrote.