Journeys on the Silk Road (31 page)

Despite Warner’s cautionary letter, and well aware of the changed political climate, Stein decided to mount a fourth expedition, funded by Harvard. Stein was sixty-seven years old and retired from the Indian civil service. If he hoped for a final victory lap of Turkestan, those dreams could not have been more misplaced. The expedition ended in a humiliating retreat.

The signs were ominous. Just as he was about to set off, he learned his good friend Thomas “the Saint” Arnold had died. Arnold’s one-word telegram—“Rejoice”—had elated Stein in 1905. Now the loss of the friend he had known since his Lahore days left him grief-stricken. Still, he departed from Kashmir in August 1930. Even before reaching Turkestan, one of his surveyors fell ill and abandoned the journey. And soon after Stein arrived in Kashgar, his dog Dash V died.

China’s attitude toward his work had changed dramatically. Its National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities strenuously opposed his expedition. The commission regarded Stein’s stated aim—to explore ancient trade routes and the path taken by Xuanzang—as cover for his true purposes: to excavate archaeological sites in Chinese Turkestan and to export artworks. The commission made its views clear in a 1,000-word document that reached the British Museum in early 1931.

The commission argued that the export of archaeological objects could be justified only when the objects were obtained legally, their removal caused no damage and if no one in the country of origin was sufficiently competent or interested in studying them or in their safekeeping. “Otherwise it is no longer scientific archaeology, but commercial vandalism. Sir Aurel Stein’s conduct during his previous journeys in Chinese Turkistan verges dangerously on the latter.” The commission was scathing of Stein’s treatment of Abbot Wang:

Sir Aurel Stein, taking advantage of the ignorance and cupidity of the priest in charge, persuaded the latter to sell to him at a pittance what he considered the pick of the collection which, needless to say, did not in any way belong to the seller. It would be the same if some Chinese traveller pretending to be merely a student of religious history goes to Canterbury and buys up the valuable relics from the cathedral care-taker.

The document, signed by nineteen scholars and the heads of Chinese cultural institutions, lamented that the collection lay scattered and unstudied between London, Paris, and Tokyo, while “their rightful owners, the Chinese, who are the most competent scholars for their study, are deprived of their opportunity as well as their ownership.”

The Times
weighed in, spirited in its defense of Stein and withering in its attitude to China, where people were “still in the stage of grinding down fossils in the belief that these are dragon bones with special medicinal properties.” By the middle of 1931, Stein’s passport had been cancelled and he had retreated to Kashmir. He would never see Turkestan again.

16

Hangman’s Hill

On a January morning in 1934, high above the quiet Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, a letter arrived on the desk of William Llewellyn Davies, head of the National Library of Wales. The imposing granite and stone building, with its sweeping view to the west over tranquil Cardigan Bay, faced away from the political storm clouds gathering over mainland Europe.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler had come to power a year earlier. Meanwhile, in London, thoughts turned to protecting the nation’s cultural treasures in the event of another war. The chiefs of the nation’s museums, libraries, and art galleries had met a few weeks earlier to discuss finding safe havens for their valuable works. The letter to Davies touched on that very question. It was from the British Museum and wanted to know if the National Library of Wales could offer shelter for some of the museum’s treasures, including books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings. It would not be the first time the library had done so.

The library, which opened in 1916, was the realization of the dream of a young Welshman, a politician named Thomas Edward Ellis who, like Stein, had been inspired since boyhood by ancient civilizations. As a result, he looked for a way to preserve his own culture and envisioned a repository of Welsh treasures. His vision became reality with the aid of local quarrymen and coalminers, who chipped in part of their meager wages to help pay for it.

By early 1918, the library, built on a humpbacked hill known locally as Grogythan, or Hangman’s Hill, was housing more than Welsh treasures. In the closing months of World War I, the British Museum sent prized items for temporary shelter. Although only a small number went from London to Wales—most objects were protected on site, including in vaults in the Bloomsbury basement—it was a dress rehearsal for what was to come.

Tensions across Europe escalated throughout the 1930s. As the Nazi regime became increasingly aggressive, war seemed inevitable, especially after the major European powers signed the Munich Agreement of September 1938. It was an act of appeasement that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland on its border with Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to reassure a nation and deliver his famous “peace for our time” speech. Many rightly believed Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler would deliver no such thing. However, it did deliver breathing space to prepare—as much as possible—for another conflict. A new war with Germany would be vastly different from the Great War. This time the conflict would be fought not in trenches but in the air above cities, and inevitably London would be targeted.

Air attack was rare in World War I. Nonetheless, the damage inflicted was high. London was bombed twenty-five times between May 1915, when the first German Zeppelin airship attacked, and May 1918. Almost 600 people were killed and 174 buildings destroyed. The British Museum escaped unscathed—the nearest bomb exploded about 450 feet away—but a new war might have vastly different consequences.

Within the British Museum, lists were drawn up of portable treasures to be evacuated, based on existing inventories of what to rescue in case of a fire. The twelfth-century Lewis Chessmen carved from walrus tusks and the Sutton Hoo treasures from a medieval Anglo-Saxon ship burial were among the top priorities. A month after the Munich Agreement was signed, the Oriental Department of the British Museum had its list ready. Stein’s manuscripts were among those singled out for rescue. From the King’s Library, six Oriental treasures on exhibition were earmarked for evacuation. Among them was the Diamond Sutra.

In March 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. In May, the Nazis forged an alliance with Italy. With each passing month, Germany’s aggressive intentions toward Poland became more apparent. On August 23, 1939—a week before World War II began—late-night calls went out to staff at the British Museum. Others received telegrams. Some were told to prepare for an early start next morning; others were ordered to pack a suitcase. Behind the scenes, word had come from the Home Office: war was inevitable. It was time to move the nation’s treasures.

Long before normal opening hours on August 24, vans drew into the museum’s forecourt and people began arriving at the building. Thousands of folding plywood cases the museum had amassed in its basement over the previous year were brought out of storage and packing began soon after 7 a.m. Members of the public arriving to use the Reading Room—it remained open that day—may have been puzzled to see box after box being carried out of the building and into waiting vans. However, anyone who had read
The Times
that morning knew Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a non-aggression pact, paving the way for the invasion of Poland, and may have guessed what was happening.

The destination of each box was initialed in chalk on the side. An initial “T” meant the tube. Many large sculptures and objects that would be unharmed by damp made the short trip to a disused section of the Aldwych tunnel, part of London’s Underground. The advantage of the tube—where the Elgin Marbles were stored—was its proximity to the museum. But there was a risk: if an airstrike hit one of the tunnels beneath the nearby River Thames, the entire network could be flooded.

Most material went to safe areas outside London. “Safe” meant at least two miles from towns, factories, and aerodromes. Coins, medals, and small, portable antiquities were bound for more salubrious surrounds than the tube. They went to two stately homes, Boughton House and Drayton House, about seventy miles away in Northamptonshire. Books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings were destined for a 250-mile journey to Aberystwyth.

For months, museum staff had been preparing for wartime, refining the lists to determine which among the hundreds of thousands of objects were most precious and practicing fire drills in case of an air raid. Now museum personnel were positioned at seven loading points around the building: one for material bound for the nearby Aldwych tunnel, and six for material destined for the railways. At the front of the museum’s colonnaded building, they filled vans with books, manuscripts, prints, and drawings to be loaded onto trains and transported to the National Library of Wales.

Late that day, a Great Western Railway train left London’s Paddington Station for Aberystwyth. The railway was dubbed the holiday line and since the mid-nineteenth century trains had brought vacationers to the seaside town to spend a week promenading along Cardigan Bay. But some of the passengers who alighted with their suitcases at Aberystwyth station were not embarking on a late summer break, and at least one would spend most of the war years there. They were part of a team of British Museum staff sent to receive the first of the irreplaceable cargo. For the next twelve days, consignments arrived, each accompanied by a museum escort and a railway inspector. They arrived by the ton. By the time Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, about a hundred tons had already arrived in Aberystwyth, including 12,000 books and the same number of manuscripts, and three-quarters of the museum’s most prized prints and drawings.

The volume of the works was breathtaking. So was their rarity. The gems of the collection went to Wales. These included the Magna Carta, quartos and folios of Shakespeare, Milton’s
Paradise Lost,
early books printed by William Caxton, and two Gutenberg Bibles. There were letters and documents written by England’s kings and queens, by Oliver Cromwell, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. There were prints and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael as well as by British artists J.M.W. Turner and William Blake. The jewels of Western culture were not all that went. So did 171 cases containing 6,000 Oriental books and manuscripts in more than fifty languages, including illuminated manuscripts in Persian and Hebrew as well as the Dunhuang scrolls.

Even today, Aberystwyth on the mid-Wales coast is remote—if not by Gobi Desert standards then at least by British standards. In 1939 it was considered an unlikely target for military attack, which is why its library was chosen for safe storage. Many other institutions also sought refuge within it for their treasures. Some of the National Gallery’s smaller paintings went to Aberystwyth. Its larger ones—too big to pass through the doors or windows of the library—went elsewhere. Jan van Eyck’s
The Arnolfini Portrait
and John Constable’s
The Hay Wain
were among those sent to Penrhyn Castle in north Wales. (That was not without problems; there were fears its habitually drunken owner might topple into the masterpieces.) Pictures in the Royal Collection arrived at Aberystwyth as did works from St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and, curiously, from the New South Wales Government in Australia.