Journeys on the Silk Road Read online

  JOURNEYS

  ON THE

  SILK ROAD

  JOURNEYS

  ON THE

  SILK ROAD

  A desert explorer, Buddha’s secret library, and the unearthing

  of the world’s oldest printed book

  JOYCE MORGAN & CONRADWALTERS

  LYONS PRESS

  Guilford, Connecticut

  An imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  First published 2011 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  First Lyons Press edition 2012

  Copyright © Joyce Morgan and Conrad Walters 2011

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press

  Map by Pan Macmillan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-8297-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  The authors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce the following copyright material. While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, we regret any inadvertent omissions.

  Epigraphs from the Diamond Sutra are reprinted from The Diamond that Cuts through Illusion: Commentaries on the Prajñaparamita Diamond Sutra (1992) by Thich Nhat Hanh with permission of Parallax Press, Berkeley, California, www.parallax.org.

  Quotations from Aurel Stein’s letters are courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

  Quotations from Ruins of Desert Cathay and Sand-Buried Ruins of Ancient Khotan by Aurel Stein, and C.E.A.W. Oldham’s obituary of Aurel Stein, are courtesy of the British Academy.

  Quotations from Serindia by Aurel Stein and An English Lady in Chinese Turkestan by Catherine Macartney appear by permission of Oxford University Press.

  Quotations from British Museum Central Archives are courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

  Quotations from Tun-huang Popular Narratives by Victor H. Mair are courtesy of Professor Mair.

  Quotations from The Times (London) are by permission of The Times.

  Quotation from The Manchester Guardian is courtesy of The Guardian (London).

  Cartographic art by Laurie Whiddon, Map Illustrations.

  E-ISBN 978-0-7627-8732-6

  To our parents

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. The Great Race

  2. Signs of Wonder

  3. The Listening Post

  4. The Moon and the Mail

  5. The Angels’ Sanctuary

  6. City of Sands

  7. Tricks and Trust

  8. Key to the Cave

  9. The Hidden Gem

  10. The Thieves’ Road

  11. Affliction in the Orchard

  12. Frozen

  13. Yesterday, Having Drunk Too Much...

  14. Stormy Debut

  15. Treasure Hunters

  16. Hangman’s Hill

  17. Facets of a Jewel

  18. Shifting Sands

  19. Scroll Forward

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Endnotes

  Select Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Prologue

  For nearly a thousand years two attendants waited, sealed from the world in a hand-carved cave, while the sands of the great Gobi Desert crept forward. The figures, one with a topknot of black hair, the other robed in red, guarded the darkness with only a wooden staff for protection and a fan for comfort. Their cave was three paces wide by three paces deep, but they maintained a motionless vigil from the northern wall, where they merged with the room’s arid earthy browns. Outside, the winds could howl, the sun could try to bake the sand into glass and the desert could encroach with each century until even a hidden doorway to the attendants’ cave was buried. But inside, time had halted and everything was safe.

  In front of the attendants were tens of thousands of manuscripts, piled as high as a man could reach. There were charts of the heavens, rules for monks, and deeds recording the ownership of slaves sold long ago. There were banners that could be unfurled from the cliffs outside and paintings on silk of enlightened beings. But outnumbering all of those were sutras—the words of the Buddha himself—piled into the black air, unheard, awaiting rebirth into a new realm.

  Most were copies made with brushes dipped in lustrous charcoal ink by hands unknown, in kingdoms forgotten. But one paper sutra held special significance. It could confer spiritual blessings as no other. Where the rest were laboriously copied by long-dead scribes, this had been created with a wooden block and reproduced at a rate once unimaginable. It was the oldest printed book in the cave—the Diamond Sutra—and although no one outside knew it yet, this dated scroll was the oldest of its kind anywhere. The sutra taught that life is illusory and as fleeting as a bubble in a stream. True to its message, all who once knew the printed scroll was inside the cave had long since turned to dust, yet the Diamond Sutra itself remained intact.

  Many copies of the sutra had preceded this one. Its words had been carried by man and beast through the wispy clouds of mountain passes, over the cracked earth of deserts, across the glacier-fed currents of surging rivers. In time this printed copy would cross the seas to reach lands unknown to its creators. One day it would even convey the Buddha’s wisdom invisibly through the air.

  While Christians fought the Crusades and Magellan circled the globe, while Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Genghis Khan united nomadic tribes, while the Black Death consumed Europe and Galileo imagined the cosmos, while Joan of Arc answered the voices in her head and Michelangelo sculpted David, the two attendants stood in meditative silence. Then, at the cusp of a new century, sound returned to the Library Cave. It was 1900—the Year of the Rat—and a faint noise announced the painstaking sweeping of the sand outside the attendants’ cave. Day by day, week by week, month by month, the level of the sand receded and the indistinct voices of laborers grew louder until their scrapings could be heard against the hidden door. For every moment across a millennium, the eyes of the two attendants had been open in anticipation. And, at last, a seam of light arrived.

  1

  The Great Race

  An unforgiving wind blew clouds of dust and sand as if every grain were aimed at one tired man astride a weary pony. He urged his mount forward, determined to keep a promise. He had set out long before dawn, leaving behind his team of men and pack animals, knowing he would have to cover in one day ground that would typically take three. Traveling through the heat and glare of the Central Asian desert, he now looked on his vow—to arrive that day on the doorstep of friends in a distant oasis—as uncharacteristically rash. But for seventeen hours he pressed on across parched wastes of gravel and hard-baked earth.

  As dusk approached, the sting of the day’s heat eased, yet the failing light compounded his struggle to keep to the track amid the blinding sand. His destination of Kashgar could not be far away. But where? He was lost. He looked for someone—anyone—who could offer directions, but the locals knew better than to go into the desert at night during a howling wind storm. He found a farm worker in a dilapidated shack and appealed for help to set him back on the path. But the man had no desire to step outside and guide a dirt-caked foreigner back to the road, until enticed by a piece of silver.

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sp; The rider still had seven miles to go. He groped his way forward as the horse stumbled in ankle-deep dust. Eventually, he collided with a tree and felt his way along a familiar avenue until he reached the outskirts of the old town. Then, as if conceding defeat, the wind abated and lights could be glimpsed through the murky dark. He crossed a creaking wooden bridge to reach the mud walls that encircled the oasis. The guns that signaled the sunset closing of the iron gates to the old Muslim oasis had been fired hours ago. The only sound was the howling of dogs, alert to the clip-clopping of a stranger on horseback passing outside the high wall. He continued until he reached a laneway. He had covered more than sixty miles to reach Chini Bagh, the home of good friends and an unlikely outpost of British sensibilities on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Its gates were open in anticipation. He shouted to announce his arrival. For a moment, silence. Then surprised voices erupted in the darkness as servants recognized him. At last Aurel Stein had arrived. They moved closer to greet the man they had not seen for five years. At forty-three, he was no longer young, but his features were as angular as ever, and his body—though just five feet four inches tall—still deceptively strong.

  Water was fetched so he could scrub away the sweat and grime etched into his skin. Only then did he present himself in the dining room. He eased into a chair, glad at last to sit on something other than his exhausted horse, and talked with his friends until well past midnight. At the dining table were Britain’s representative in Kashgar, George Macartney, and his wife, Catherine Theodora, both eager to hear of Stein’s journey so far and, equally important, his hopes for the trip ahead. The last time they had been together in Chini Bagh, in 1901, the explorer was at the end of his first expedition to Turkestan. He had been loaded with ancient treasures recovered from the desert, treasures that would stun scholars across Europe. Now he had returned, better equipped, better funded and better educated about the obstacles that lay ahead. George Macartney had been invaluable then, helping Stein assemble the crew that would pluck antiquities from beneath the sands. This time, the stakes were higher, the journey longer and the route more deadly.

  As they talked into the night of June 8, 1906, Stein had much to tell of the two-month trip that had brought him to Chini Bagh’s welcoming doorstep. His weather-beaten face had barely recovered from his trip over the mountains that separated Chinese Turkestan from northern India. The high-altitude sun left his face so blistered and swollen he had wondered if his friends would recognize him. But sunburn was the least of the hardships he encountered.

  His journey had begun on April 2, when he set out from northern India on a cold but sunny day. Spring had not yet greened the native chinar trees, nor had the irises sprouted as Stein left the alpine Kashmir Valley with a fox terrier named Dash at his heels. His intended route, at times following the footsteps of Alexander the Great, led up through the far north of present-day Pakistan, through lawless tribal territory, and briefly across Afghan terrain before descending to Turkestan. He knew robbery—or worse—was a risk and that at least one foreign explorer had been beheaded in the region, so he was armed with Lee-Enfield carbines and Webley revolvers. His path led over “the roof of the world,” the Pamir Mountains whose jagged peaks are some of the highest on earth. The route was the quickest way to Kashgar, and he had every reason to hurry.

  But the course was treacherous in the spring, as the arrival of Stein’s faithful old caravan man, Muhammadju, attested. On the way to join Stein for this second, more audacious exploration of Central Asia, Muhammadju narrowly escaped an avalanche on a mountain pass. Seven of his companions had been swept to their deaths. Indeed Stein himself, after passing through the lower Swat Valley, was forced to spend two miserable days in a leaky, crumbling shelter near the foot of one of the most avalanche-prone passes, the Lowari, until a thunderstorm passed and the sky cleared.

  The snow had been abnormally heavy the previous winter, and he had been warned not to attempt the crossing before June. But that was still a month off. If he waited until then, the gorges farther along his route would be rendered impassable by floodwaters from the melting snow. Stein knew the risks in early May could be reduced by crossing the 10,230-foot Lowari Pass at night, when plummeting temperatures firmed the snow fields into a hard crust. He divided his team of men and pack animals into three groups and spread his cargo so that each animal’s burden was no more than forty pounds. Then, at 1 a.m., with only moonlight and their lamps to guide them, Stein led the first group on the slow ascent. The other teams followed at fifteen-minute intervals to reduce the weight on the snow. All were aware that somewhere beneath their feet lay the frozen bodies of seventeen ponies and two dozen men who had perished there five months earlier when attempting to cross in a snowstorm.

  As dawn broke, Stein reached the wind-blown top of the Lowari Pass and saw that his frustrating wait had been justified. About halfway down he spotted the signs of an avalanche that had swept through on the previous afternoon. He watched anxiously as his porters zigzagged their way down the almost sheer descent. As he reached the bottom of the pass and looked back at his other teams, one sight cheered him: his incompetent, troublesome cook being carried down and looking “more like a log than an animate being,” he later wrote. The useless cook (Stein had a string of them) was “incapable of facing prolonged hard travel, even when fortified by clandestine drink and doses of opium.” Stein planned to offload him in Kashgar.

  Stein and his men continued through the mountains for most of May. The thin “poisonous air” made breathing difficult and caused severe high-altitude headaches. At times men sank up to their armpits in the snow and had to be pulled out by ropes. When they reached the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow strip of Afghan terrain that sticks out like a pointed finger in the country’s northeast, they supplemented their caravan with a team of yaks.

  Dash, almost invisible against the snow except for his one black ear, crossed the mountains with only a single complaint: a rare, subdued whine uttered as he traversed the 16,152-foot Wakhjir Pass that separated Afghanistan from Turkestan. Stein felt his two-year-old fox terrier had more than earned the noble title he bestowed on him as a high-spirited puppy. His full name was Kardash Beg, Sir Snow Friend. As Stein descended the mountains into Turkestan he did so riding a yak with brave Dash mounted in front of him.

  George and Catherine Macartney knew what drove their stocky middle-aged visitor to embark on his dangerous journey. It was not a thirst for adventures, although there would be plenty of those. Ideas were what fired him. Stein spoke of lost worlds, ancient civilizations and early encounters between East and West. He craved to know how ideas and cultures spread. And one in particular: how had tolerant, compassionate Buddhism, born in the Indian Himalayas, reached China, transforming and shape-shifting along the way? He was convinced the answer lay just beyond Kashgar, beneath the Taklamakan Desert, the vast almond-shaped eye in the center of Chinese Turkestan.

  But this was not a landscape that surrendered its answers readily. With dunes that can rise 1,000 feet, the Taklamakan is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Even its local name has an ominous, if apocryphal, translation: Go in and you won’t come out. Its shifting dunes, beside which the deserts of Arabia, Africa, and America seemed tame to Stein, are not the only formidable barriers to would-be explorers. To the east lies the legendary Gobi Desert. In the other three directions loom some of the world’s highest mountain ranges: the Kunlun and Karakorams to the south, the Pamirs to the west and the Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains, to the north. No divine protector could have conjured a more effective cosmic “keep out” sign.

  Much depended on this latest expedition. Stein had only reached this point by the tenacious persuasion of his dual masters—the British Museum and the government of India—and each would demand tangible results in return. Soon after starting his journey he had met with the new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto. They spoke of Stein’s lofty hopes for another Troy, the archa
eological site excavated by the German Heinrich Schliemann less than forty years earlier. The expectations circulating around Stein were high. Minto was encouraging, even when Stein said he could not promise another set of Elgin Marbles, the classical Greek sculptures removed from the Parthenon and brought to Britain in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the treasures he brought back would in time invite comparisons as China’s Elgin Marbles. What Stein’s masters wanted were antiquities to fill their museums and add prestige to the Empire. Some fortunate archaeologists and adventurers could fund their own explorations, but Stein was a civil servant and obliged to plead and cajole for time away from desk-bound duties in steamy Calcutta. And he did so for what to many must have seemed dubious rewards. Although he lived in an era of exploration, Europe’s attention was focused on the rich archaeological pickings closer to home—especially in Greece, Egypt and the biblical Middle East. These were places where the roots of Western culture could be discerned and where the show-stopper hoards of gold, jewels, and tombs covered in hieroglyphics ignited the public’s imagination. Few people gave more than a passing thought to the backblocks of Muslim Central Asia, let alone the possibility that lost Buddhist kingdoms might lie buried beneath its vast sands. Who even knew that long before the rise of Islam, a great Buddhist civilization had flourished across what we know today as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the far west of China? Who even cared?