Journeys on the Silk Road (5 page)

Stein was the first archaeologist to dig methodically into Turkestan’s pre-Muslim past. Nearly a hundred miles northeast of Khotan was Dandan-Uiliq, or the Place of Houses of Ivory, where the bleached wooden posts of ruined houses stuck out of the sand dunes like ghostly fingers—fingers that beckoned to Stein on his first desert foray. This dig would be the training ground for the years ahead. He arrived amid the dunes in December 1900 with a team of camels, donkeys, laborers, and enough supplies to last a month. It meant he could stay longer and dig more thoroughly than any of the poorly equipped locals. He could see where they had worked, but much remained untouched. From murals on the walls, he quickly realized this had been a Buddhist settlement. In one temple, he found a pedestal where a colossal Buddha statue once stood. But all that remained were the feet. He found painted wooden panels that reflected the range of influences, including Gandhara, and even a black-bearded Persian-style Buddhist image. Never before had he seen such a feature on any Buddhist figure. It pointed to the influence of distant Persia across the Taklamakan Desert. In the ruins of a monastic library he found fragments of ancient Indian scripts.

In early January 1901, Stein resupplied his caravan in an oasis and moved to other sites. At one he found remarkable proof of the links with the classical world. Amid ruins in the Turkestan desert, he found clay seals with images of the gods of ancient Greece: Eros, Heracles, and Athena. Stein was so taken with the image of the goddess of wisdom and strategy that he adapted her image from the seal and used it in the front of his published works. At another site, he uncovered what were then the oldest known Tibetan documents. And at a solitary sacred mound, or stupa, named Rawak he found the remains of nearly a hundred large Buddhist statues, some with traces of gold leaf and their once-vivid color. The stucco figures were depicted wearing embroidered coats and large boots into which were tucked baggy trousers. Stein excavated and photographed the figures, some more than nine feet tall, but they were too fragile to remove and so he returned them to the sand. “It was a melancholy duty to perform, strangely reminding me of a true burial,” he wrote. He hoped this would keep them safe until one day Khotan had its own museum.

His final task before leaving Turkestan on his first expedition involved uncovering material of a different sort. For several years Stein had been suspicious about some woodblock-printed books that had supposedly been found in the desert near Khotan. George Macartney had bought them in Kashgar and sent them to Calcutta to Hoernle, the eminent scholar who had deciphered the Bower Manuscript. The Orientalist labored long over these strange Khotanese books, but their printed script baffled him. Hoernle raised the possibility that they were fakes before he cast scholarly caution to the wind and dismissed the idea.

Stein was more skeptical. As he dug his way around the Taklamakan Desert, his suspicions grew. He had uncovered fragments of ancient documents in the desert sands—in Chinese, Tibetan, and ancient Indian scripts. But not the tiniest fragment was in an unknown script. He knew the common link between Hoernle’s mysterious old books and others that had turned up in London and Moscow was a Turkestan man. Stein resolved to confront him.

Islam Akhun had a checkered past. For years, he had survived by collecting coins, seals, and other antiques from around Khotan. But by the time Stein arrived in Turkestan, Islam Akhun had reinvented himself as a
hakim
, or medicine man. His therapeutic skills somehow involved the use of several pages of a French novel. Whether these were read aloud or administered internally, Stein quipped, he could not say.

Islam Akhun strenuously denied forging the documents when he was first brought before Stein in Khotan. He was simply a middleman for others who had since died or disappeared. He had never even seen the sites where these finds were made, he protested. But then Stein confronted him with the account Islam Akhun had previously given Macartney of exactly how and where he had found the old books. Islam Akhun was outfoxed and oddly flattered that his fanciful tales had been recorded—and he confessed.

He said he knew Europeans were prepared to pay for old manuscripts, but he had no wish to engage in back-breaking digging in the desert to uncover them. The enterprising scoundrel had a better idea. His first “old books” were handwritten imitations of genuine fragments. However, as his European buyers couldn’t read them anyway, the effort in copying real script seemed needless. Documents in “unknown scripts” began appearing. Business was brisk and soon supply of the handwritten documents couldn’t keep up with demand. By 1896 he turned to mass production using woodblock printing. Sheets of paper were dyed yellow and hung over a fireplace to “age” them. At times this was done too enthusiastically and Stein noted some of the old books sent to Calcutta were scorched. They had been bound so as to imitate European volumes—which should have rung alarm bells—and their pages sprinkled with sand.

Stein had solved a mystery which had fooled a brilliant scholar. Even so, he had no wish to see Islam Akhun punished. The man was no stranger to harsh local justice. For past misdeeds, including fraud, he had been imprisoned, flogged, and forced to wear a wooden collar or
cangue
, similar to a portable pillory, which renders the offender unable to feed himself or lie down. Stein even developed a grudging respect for the “versatile rogue,” whom he found witty and highly intelligent. Too intelligent to waste his not inconsiderable talents in Khotan, Stein told him in jest. And in this throwaway line, Islam Akhun was quick to sniff fresh opportunity. He begged Stein to take him to Europe where he could, no doubt, find a bigger market for his unique skills. Stein declined the rogue’s entreaty.

A year after he arrived in Turkestan, Stein departed Kashgar with his treasures destined for the British Museum and his baggage loaded onto eight ponies. Flushed with success, Stein accompanied his cargo west across the border to the Russian railhead and on to London. He had learned how to work in the desert, uncovered a forgery and gathered a wealth of antiquities from a forgotten civilization.

Stein was never going to be content as a cog in the civil service. Soon after he returned to India from his first expedition into Turkestan, he began lobbying for another trip that would again take him away from the confines of desk work. Initially, it wasn’t a return to Turkestan that called him but new ground, Tibet. He was keen to join a mission being led by British army officer Francis Younghusband, a man destined to become known as much for his eccentric, free-loving beliefs and a mystical vision in Tibet as for his daring military leadership.

Stein’s bid to go to Tibet was rejected because he lacked the language skills required. Undeterred, he switched his attention back to Turkestan, where there remained much more he could do. His first expedition had barely scratched the surface. Just think what he might achieve with more time and money. He set about getting both. He wanted to travel beyond Turkestan to the edge of China proper—as the neighboring province of Gansu was thought of—to explore the ancient route between China and the West.

He presented his masters with his grand plan in September 1904. He began by reminding them of what he had achieved in his first endeavor. The artifacts he had already unearthed in the desert showed how far Indian culture had spread. He also revealed that the area around Khotan had been a previously unknown meeting place between the great ancient civilizations of China, Persia, India, and the classical West. And for those not impressed with scholarship, he drew attention to practical realities: he had done it within the time and budget allotted.

He wanted to return to Khotan, where he expected the ever-shifting dunes would have surrendered more ruins in the years since his first visit. Then he would strike out across the desert to the Lop Nor region in the Taklamakan’s far east, where Sven Hedin had discovered an ancient settlement called Loulan. Just beyond the desert in Gansu was the oasis of Dunhuang, or Shazhou—the City of Sands. This was the ancient gateway between China and Central Asia through which all Silk Road travelers once passed. Nearby were caves filled with murals and sculptures he wanted to explore. “A great many of the grottos are now filled more or less with drift sand and hence likely to have preserved also other interesting remains,” he wrote with greater prescience than he could have imagined.

The urgency was obvious. The Bower Manuscript had drawn attention to the riches of the desert’s sands. Local treasure seekers were destroying archaeological evidence, and rival European expeditions were likely. Stein’s successes had already prompted a German team to head to Turkestan and return with forty-four crates of antiquities. And, he noted pointedly, they had three times his budget. The Russians, too, were considering mounting an expedition. The implications would not be lost on the British government. Stein was working against a backdrop of the Great Game, a phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Cold War.

Political uncertainties within China were also a factor, he argued. Local Chinese authorities had been helpful so far, but that could change. “It seems scarcely possible to foresee whether . . . political changes may not arise which would close that field to researches from the British side.” Nor could he foresee that when the political winds did change, he would be at their center. Having already applied for British citizenship, he appealed to national and imperial pride. “The wide-spread interest thus awakened makes it doubly desirable that the leading part so far taken in these explorations by British enterprise and from the side of India should be worthily maintained.”

To add further muscle to his application, he lobbied influential scholars and associates—Stein was a great networker—for their support. He had characteristically argued his case from all directions: scholarship, patriotism, politics, and economics. He knew he needed to if he was to avoid a refusal by the bureaucracy, that “centre of intellectual sunshine,” as he dubbed it.

The bottom line was he wanted to leave India in the spring of 1905 for two and a half years—more than twice the duration of his first expedition—and wanted a corresponding increase in funds to do so. It was an audacious request, as he well knew. “A bold demand which possibly may make an impression—or frighten,” he admitted in a letter to his friend Fred Andrews. It did both. And the effect in certain quarters was not what he hoped. Some were miffed that within a year of a role being created for him Stein was lobbying to take off. The title Archaeological Inspector had been added to his already long-winded one of Inspector General of Education for North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. The authorities were annoyed that he wanted to depart before he had completed a detailed report on his first Turkestan trip and helped settle how the antiquities he brought back should be divided between museums in Britain, Lahore, and Calcutta. Stein realized he would have to delay his trip for a year to do this.

Behind the scenes, other objections were raised too. There were hidden costs, argued one official. Although Stein had prepared a detailed budget—even including the cost of presents to local officials—he had neglected a vital element: he hadn’t allowed for his onward travel to Europe to accompany his finds and time in London to work on them. Meanwhile, another bean counter, scrutinizing the itinerary itself, pondered whether Stein couldn’t perhaps reduce his traveling time by cutting the Dunhuang leg of his journey. Had he done so, Stein would have missed out on the site of the Silk Road’s most remarkable discovery.

As officialdom dragged its wearying chain, Stein waited to hear the fate of his proposal. Then, unexpectedly, in April 1905, a telegram arrived from his old friend Thomas “the Saint” Arnold. It must have seemed like news from the gods. Arnold, now back in London and working in the India Office, tipped Stein off that a decision on his proposal had finally been made. Arnold’s one-word cable to Stein read simply: “Rejoice.”

If daughters or sons of good family want to give rise to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, what should they rely on and what should they do to master their thinking?

—
VERSE
17,
THE
DIAMOND
SUTRA

3

The Listening Post

Stein did indeed rejoice, but even before his pots of Marmite and desiccated cabbage reached him in India he was receiving unsettling news from Kashgar. Macartney regularly updated Stein about goings-on in the oasis, proudly boastful of his son Eric and quietly amused by the activities of a mutual friend there, an eccentric but much-loved Dutch priest named Father Hendricks. But Macartney’s letters went well beyond domestic chit-chat.