Journeys on the Silk Road

by Joyce Morgan

  These moves come as other countries are increasingly seeking the return of iconic objects, reigniting debate about restitution and the repatriation of cultural treasures. Greece has long demanded that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles and has built a museum in sight of the Parthenon to house them. Not that this has altered Britain’s resolve to retain the statues. The British Museum argues the sculptures are part of everyone’s heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. More recently Egypt has demanded Nefertiti’s bust from Berlin’s Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.

  The argument that only the West can adequately care for cultural items is less tenable than it was even a few decades ago. Yet so is the argument that the Dunhuang documents are not available for study. Some argue that objects belong to the cultures that produced them. But even that is not clear-cut with the Dunhuang manuscripts. Most of them are in Chinese, including the Diamond Sutra, but others are in a range of languages. Where, then, should the Manichean hymns go? Or the Sogdian letters?

  Most countries today are more protective of their heritage with laws preventing the removal of their cultural objects. The ancient pilgrim Xuanzang could not openly venture from China to India now, intent on removing religious scrolls. Nor could he readily give objects to a major gallery or museum. Aware that acquiring antiquities can encourage looting, many museums no longer buy them without proof they left their country of origin legally. Yet despite international laws and museum ethical codes, the black market trade in looted antiquities has mushroomed. As ancient treasures are reefed from the soil or chipped off monuments without study or documentation, their history and context are lost. The illegal trade has been fuelled in part by buyers’ ignorance. Others have deliberately turned a blind eye to the most basic question: where did this come from and how did it get here?

  One area especially vulnerable to looting is the Gandharan art Stein so admired. The war in Afghanistan has taken a tragic human toll, but the continued conflict has meant the region’s ancient culture is at risk of systematic destruction, according to the International Council of Museums, which has issued a “red list” of items at risk. Among the targets of the illicit trade are ancient manuscripts on palm leaf, birch bark, and vellum, as well as fragments of Buddhist wall paintings and figures.

  Even as its art is at risk, knowledge of the Silk Road’s 2,000-year history grows. Since the turn of the millennium, exhibitions in cities as far apart as London, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and St. Petersburg attest to the burgeoning interest. The romance of the Silk Road may have gone, but its imaginative power endures. Tourism has stimulated curiosity about an area off-limits to foreigners for much of the twentieth century. So has politics. As rival powers again compete for influence in Central Asia, and oil, not silk, becomes the coveted commodity, some speak of a new Great Game.

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  Traveling the Silk Road today no longer means facing the hazards the ancient caravans endured—not least hunger, thirst, and attack by bandits—nor even the privations faced by Stein just a century ago. The old walls of Kashgar, along which Stein groped his way in a dust storm, have gone. They have fallen victim to the wrecker’s ball that has reduced much of the old city to rubble in the past decade. But tucked away behind two high-rise hotel buildings bearing its name, Chini Bagh still stands. The former British consulate is a Chinese restaurant today. Diners fill the tables on a shady veranda beside the main entrance, through whose welcoming doorway over the years have passed Stein and Dash, Chiang, Father Hendricks, the formidable Russian consul Petrovsky, Australian journalist and correspondent for The Times G.E. Morrison, and writers Peter Fleming and William Dalrymple.

  The castle-like ramparts, familiar from old photographs, and their whitewash and ochre exterior paintwork remain. But there are no traces of the shady orchard and gardens Mrs. Macartney so lovingly created, just a small vegetable patch beside some al fresco tables. Inside, the walls have been elaborately plastered and gilded, creating a baroque atmosphere in the light-filled rooms. From the rear, the view is no longer of a river, fields and the Russian cemetery where Father Hendricks’ friends kept a candle burning on his grave, but of buildings and construction sites.

  A fifteen-minute walk from Chini Bagh, the former Russian consulate also still stands. The once lonely outpost of the rival empire is similarly surrounded by Chinese hotel buildings. The original austere brown-and-grey-brick residence is less welcoming than Chini Bagh. In a rear room, a mural stretches the width of one wall. The painting depicts a classical landscape in which a brave Greek soldier wrestles a bull by its horns, a florid reworking of Carle van Loo’s Theseus, Vanquisher of the Bull of Marathon. The French artist’s name—in Russian script—appears in the corner. How long the mural has been there and who really painted it is unknown. Perhaps Petrovsky dined under it and saw in the mural an allegory of Great Game rivalries in which Imperial Russian force subdued the British beast. A more recent hand—perhaps of Chini Bagh’s plasterer—has been at work, covering the Russian consulate’s walls too in ornate curlicues. The building, known as the Seman, is not open to the public, but houses the office of a property company. The Russian Cossacks once stationed there, whose airs Stein could hear from Chini Bagh, would today be inaudible over the horns of taxis and buses that in the past two decades have replaced donkey carts as the main form of transport.

  The yellow-and-white Id Kah Mosque still calls the faithful to prayer and within its walls the shady poplars are a peaceful refuge from the bustle of the night market, flashing neon and a billboard advertising a forthcoming Kashgar attraction—a golf course. Men with wispy beards and green embroidered hats sell circular bread cooked in clay ovens. Elderly women, faces veiled for modesty in coarse brown fabric, nonchalantly raise their dresses to reveal ample bloomers in which they keep their money.

  From Kashgar, the southern oases through which Stein passed still see few foreigners. The route lacks the more impressive remains of Xinjiang’s Buddhist past that dot the northern oases. At Yarkand, there is no sign of the yamen where Chiang lived before joining Stein and eventually becoming Macartney’s secretary at Chini Bagh. No doubt Chiang knew of Yarkand’s female poet, Aman Isa Khan, who died in childbirth in the sixteenth century and whose tomb remains the town’s landmark. In its nearby bazaar, metal workers hammer tin into chests and the onion-domed barbecues used by street hawkers, the customers all locals. Yarkand was once a Silk Road crossroads, filled with travelers from Tibet, Afghanistan, and Ladakh and its population bigger than Kashgar. Today it is a backwater where the presence of foreigners sparks good-natured attention.

  Farther east, jade is still the mainstay of Khotan, known today as both Hotan and Hetian. The stone extracted from its mountain-fed rivers, especially the white “mutton fat” variety, continues to be highly prized among the Chinese. High-end shops attract the cashed-up while street traders display lumps of stone of dubious value on shabby cloths.

  Stein once dreamed of a museum in Hotan to house the treasures of Rawak Stupa, whose sculptures he reburied only to discover jade hunters had destroyed them in a futile search for treasures concealed within. The city does have a museum that displays remains of Hotan’s Buddhist past, including statues and two mummies, but nothing can undo the damage to Rawak.

  A camel across the sea of sand dunes was the only way to reach the stupa, until the recent opening of a road. Yet few visitors appear to travel along it. About ten miles from Rawak is the shrine of a Muslim saint where Stein once camped under a full moon. Each May pilgrims from far afield, including Sufi musicians, pay homage to the Islamic martyr. On a late summer day it is silent and devoid of pilgrims. But a soft cooing penetrates the still air. Behind the shrine, the sacred pigeons are better housed in their brick coop than when Stein offered them a handful of grain.

  The princess who brought to Hotan silkworm eggs concealed in her headdress—and hence the mean
s to make silk—may be largely forgotten, but a compound of silk-makers still spins and weaves the fabric just outside the oasis. A young woman, baby in her lap, sits before a bath of silkworm cocoons. She teases out a few threads and passes them to a man seated behind a large wheel, who hand spins the gossamer thread. It will be transformed into ikat-dyed fabric with a bold pattern favored by local women for clothing. On the edge of Hotan, an elderly man keeps another ancient tradition alive. He has been dubbed the last mulberry paper-maker of the Taklamakan. Within his family’s mud-brick compound he pounds the tree’s bark to a pulp. When it is the consistency of watery porridge, he pours it into a mold and leaves it to dry in the sun. The result is a strong creamy paper—the same type of paper on which the Diamond Sutra was once printed.

  In Hotan’s main square, the disparate influences of its recent past are evident. Beneath a statue of the late Chairman Mao, looming paternalistically over a former Uyghur leader, an evening concert begins. A man crooning pop songs vacates the stage for a group of Cossack-style dancers who perform a Cinderella story as they compete to fit a young maiden with a pair of red shoes. The streets teem with donkey carts next morning for the weekly Sunday market. The scents of cardamon, cumin, and rose flowers fill the air in a corner of the bazaar where merchants pound drums full of spices. Elsewhere, a man whittles wooden spoons, another sells metal-spiked brushes that create the swirling pattern on the circular naan bread. The old constantly bumps up against the new: two musicians perform on traditional Uyghur instruments to mark the opening of a whitegoods store.

  The Taklamakan Desert itself has been tamed. Near the Thieves’ Road, where Stein and his party almost died of thirst in search of the Keriya River, a sealed cross-desert highway links the northern and southern oases. Traders, travelers, and troops no longer have to take the slow, circuitous route to reach the far side of the desert, but can cut straight across it. Along each side of the road, mass plantings of rice straw in a neat grid attempt to hold back the moving sands—and the demons once conjured by this realm of deadly illusion. Trucks and buses now convey goods and people in about twelve hours along the once-trackless wastes. Passengers on a bus from Hotan to Kucha pass the hours watching dubbed Turkish soap operas, except for an elderly Uyghur man who quietly performs his prayers to Mecca in the aisle.

  Across the desert on the old northern Silk Road the work of Albert von Le Coq is evident. At the Kizil Caves near Kucha, the German sawed off many murals. But he is not the only one to have left a destructive mark there. Treasure hunters have removed gold leaf from the robes and haloes of the Buddhas painted on the walls. Muslim iconoclasts have scratched the eyes and mouths from the sacred images. The caves, some older even than those at Mogao, were still used as dwellings until the 1980s, a guide explains, and evidence of cooking and heating is apparent on some soot-blackened paintings. Nonetheless, many murals remain. Outside the caves, a statue of Kumarajiva honors the great translator who was born in Kucha and whose translation was used for the Diamond Sutra of 868.

  The Kizil Caves contain more surviving murals than at Bezeklik near the oasis of Turfan. Von Le Coq, who daubed “Robbers’ Den” over his accommodation near Bezeklik, stripped these domed caves more thoroughly. Also near Turfan are the ruins of the ancient Buddhist city of Gaochang. Donkey carts convey visitors a mile or so along its hot, dusty length. In the once-thriving city, Xuanzang was detained by its king before being released to make his epic trip to India and back, returning via Dunhuang.

  In Dunhuang’s open-air market, Muslim hawkers grill sticks of mutton over charcoals, a Tibetan in a cowboy hat sells “medicinal” dried snakes, animal horns and paws, while a Han Chinese artist etches images of angels onto gourds. The town remains a cultural crossroads, but it is far removed from the dusty garrison where Stein struggled to find someone to cut up his silver horseshoes for currency. Now he would queue at an ATM. With shop windows full of leather goods, fashion, and electronics, Dunhuang looks like any other prosperous Chinese town, although few anywhere are surrounded by towering sand dunes that creep ever closer.

  As in the days of the Silk Road, Dunhuang’s life blood is visitors from afar. But today’s travelers are the result of a recent phenomenon: global tourism. Travelers to Dunhuang no longer arrive on plodding camels or bumpy donkey carts, but by planes, trains, and private cars. They come to see the Jade Gate, the ruined clay fort through which so many Silk Road caravans traveled. And they come to see Crescent Lake, nestled in a hollow and surrounded by towering dunes. Stein once wished to be buried by its tranquil banks. Perhaps it is just as well his wish was never realized. There is little solitude by the lake today, where tourists ride brightly decked camels and hire toboggans to slide down the dunes. But the Ming Sha dunes no longer rumble. Pollution, not least from so many visitors, has affected the sands and since the early 1980s they have fallen silent.

  Above all, people come to Dunhuang to see the Mogao Caves. And they arrive not once a year for an annual pilgrimage, but daily. Today, a paved path to the caves crosses a footbridge over the dry bed of the Daquan River, near where Stein camped. The poplars Abbot Wang planted along the river banks still provide welcome shade from the summer heat. The caves remain a place of pilgrimage for some. A visiting brown-robed priest lights incense sticks near a central pagoda, places them in a large incense holder and bows three times. Other visitors follow his example, although most simply pose at the photogenic spot. The rickety ladders to the caves have been replaced by steps and walkways. The once-exposed entrances to the honeycombed grottoes that reminded Stein of troglodyte dwellings have been fitted with metal doors. It is no longer possible to wander unescorted from cave to cave, as Stein did.

  On a clear autumn day, a guide unlocks a door to one of the grottoes. She walks ahead down a narrow passage that opens onto a dark chamber. She flashes her torch on the wall. After the dazzling sunshine outside, our eyes adjust to the mute light, and murals in azure, lapis, and ochre emerge from the darkness. Row upon row of painted Buddhas adorn every inch of the walls. The ceiling is covered in images of celestial musicians and dramatic hunting scenes that include a galloping horse invested with the energetic confidence of a Picasso. The magnificence of this grotto alone—like a Buddhist Sistine Chapel—is overwhelming. It is just one of 492 remaining painted caves in the world’s greatest gallery of Buddhist art.

  Unlike the Sistine Chapel, the artists who painted these are unknown. So many hands have taken part in their creation. First came laborers who chipped and hollowed each cave out of conglomerate rock. Others hauled mud from the Daquan River in front of the cliff, mixed it with straw and lined each cave wall. This created a “canvas,” a smooth surface—finished with a thin layer of plaster—over the lumpy rock interiors. Next came the artists who, under the direction of a senior monk, drew and then painstakingly painted the walls and ceilings. Traces of gold and precious stones still adorn some of the images. By the flickering light of oil lamps, they must have looked especially magnificent. Artists also created the painted clay statues of fierce temple guardians, jeweled bodhisattvas and Buddhas of the past, present and future. More than 2,000 statues remain.

  We re-emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, and the guide leads the way to another cave behind a nine-story pagoda facade. Inside we are dwarfed by a 116-foot Buddha, the largest of three colossal Buddhas at the caves. Elsewhere are an eighty-five-foot seated Buddha of the future, Maitreya, and a fifty-one-foot sleeping Buddha. A smaller sleeping Buddha, forty-seven feet long, is surrounded by statues of seventy-two disciples. Each face reveals a different reaction as they observe the Buddha entering parinirvana—the final nirvana—on the point of physical death.

  Paintings on some of the walls are like storyboards on which unfold morality tales and legends of the Buddha. A sixth-century cave depicts a prince being devoured after he offers his body to a tigress so she can feed her hungry cubs. The final scene depicts the prince’s brothers making their gruesome
discovery and fleeing, their hair raised in horror. Painted when few could read, even an illiterate ancient peasant could grasp this story—a modern-day manga cartoon could not tell it more vividly.

  No two caves are alike. Each differs in size and decoration. Some evoke the interiors of tents, their high tapered ceilings painted like the drapery of richly patterned fabric. Yet many share an identical layout—a narrow hallway that opens onto a square chapel with a central altar. Most of the images are Buddhist, but there are also images of everyday life: a butcher cutting meat while three hungry dogs wait expectantly nearby, an artisan making pottery, even a man defecating. There are scenes that recall the ancient travelers from afar who ventured along the Silk Road, including images of big-nosed foreigners. Others portray an ever-present peril that faced Silk Road merchants—bandits. We enter a cave where the evidence of a more recent foreigner is evident. A rectangle on the wall is devoid of the murals that fill the rest of the chapel. The aftermath of Langdon Warner disfigures like a wound.

  At the northern end of the cliff is the cave all visitors want to see. Behind its door a narrow passageway leads to a large cave containing statues. On the right of the passage, about four feet above the ground, is the opening to an antechapel. The painted figures of two attendants—one holding a fan, the other a pilgrim’s staff—decorate the antechapel’s far wall. They flank two painted Bodhi trees whose leafy branches frame the statue of a seated monk. The figure is Hong Bian, once the most revered Buddhist dignitary west of China’s Yellow River. His statue, removed to make room for the scrolls, has been restored to the chapel built in his honor more than 1,000 years ago. The statue of Hong Bian and the painted figures of his two attendants are all that remain within the chapel. The Diamond Sutra and the 50,000-plus scrolls that once filled it from floor to ceiling are spread around the world. The mural and the statue within the niche can’t match the splendor of others at the caves. But this empty grotto is the site of one of the Silk Road’s most dramatic episodes and the place that has transformed our understanding of a culture unlike any other.