Journeys on the Silk Road Page 2

  Stein knew—and cared—more than most. He had already completed his first successful foray into the southern part of the Taklamakan, returning from his yearlong trip with evidence of sophisticated and unknown cultures. Among his treasures were coins, statues, and murals, but to Stein, with his love of the written word, it was the documents that were most fascinating. He returned with records on wood, paper, and leather and in a range of languages: Chinese, Tibetan, and, most intriguingly, ancient Indian scripts. Documents can never compete with glittering jewels and golden statues for dramatic, visual appeal, but for Stein they could reveal so much more. To his trained eye, the written word exposed how language, people, and customs traveled and revealed the poignant details of ordinary life. Whether it recorded the daily duties of soldiers, the chores of monks or even the clumsy attempts of a child to complete his schoolwork, a document could reconstitute a life, and through that Stein could glimpse a civilization. Such discoveries had dazzled his colleagues and made his name as an archaeologist and explorer. They also made him hungry for more.

  His first expedition laid essential groundwork. It was an apprenticeship during which he made vital contacts and friendships among the Muslim begs (headmen) and the Chinese ambans (high-ranking officials) along the desert’s southern oases. He had assembled a trusted team of men, some of whom, like Muhammadju, rejoined him for his second expedition. His first trip had convinced him he could push much farther into the desert to uncover the secrets of the sands. If successful, he would cement his reputation and he could then devote his life to uncovering ancient knowledge. And if he failed? He risked forever being frustrated as a colonial wage slave and never again being allowed the freedom to explore.

  He knew his intended route across the desert was feasible, if dangerous. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin had proved it about a decade earlier. Hedin was the first European in living memory—and possibly the first since Marco Polo—to succeed. Younger and more gung-ho than Stein, Hedin had left two of his men dead from thirst—and nearly succumbed himself. Hedin had plucked long-buried items from the sands as he charged across the desert, but he was a geographer and cartographer, not an archaeologist. His interest was in the terrain, not what might lie below it. Even so, Hedin’s example helped prompt Stein to mount his own more careful, systematic exploration.

  As Stein and the Macartneys conversed around the wooden dining table at Chini Bagh, the immediate concerns were practical. Stein’s main task in Kashgar was to put together the team of men and animals for a two-year journey. The wise selection of both would be critical to its success. He had brought some supplies and men with him over the mountains, and he had spent all winter in India amassing the essentials he would need for the long road ahead. Among these were 2,000 fragile glass negatives to photograph the landscape, the finds and the faces he encountered along the way. A medicine chest held opium for pain relief, iodine for antiseptic, and quinine for malaria, from which he suffered repeatedly. He was equipped for minor surgery with forceps, suture needles, and silk. He imported quantities of dried food, including tins of Symington’s pea soup and Captain Cookesley’s Scotch broth and tomato soup, fifty pounds of tea, and ten pots of a nutritious new food, a salty yeast extract called Marmite. When Stein dispatched his shopping list to his London supplier, he penned a stiff letter to accompany the order: he wanted no repeat of the “regrettable” experience on his first expedition when the dried vegetables they supplied had spoiled within three months. He preferred bland English “sahib” food to local fare, even if he couldn’t always find a cook able to prepare it. Stein was not a fussy eater, but perhaps only he could have thrived on a diet that included fifteen quarter-pound containers of desiccated cabbage.

  He prepared for his expedition like a military chief mounting a campaign. No detail, however small, escaped him. He even ordered some lengths of Liberty silk brocade for gifts, which he knew would be appreciated in Turkestan and help smooth the path ahead. Stein was typically specific about what he wanted: good-quality pink and green floral and a cheaper length in yellow. If it seemed ironic to take silk back to the Silk Road, Stein gave no hint of this when he asked a friend in London to please mail some to him. His tent, which had been made for his first expedition and lined to withstand the cold, was repaired, felt boots and furs were sewn. His Jaeger wool blanket was packed, as was a canvas bath. Even Dash got his own custom-made fur coat. Stein had to prepare for all weathers, from baking desert heat to nights so cold he would sleep breathing through the sleeve of his coat.

  The small party that started out with him from India included two men named Ram Singh. The older Ram Singh was an experienced Gurkha surveyor who had accompanied Stein’s first expedition. The other was a thirty-two-year-old Indian Army handyman/carpenter known as the Naik, or corporal. The Naik, who packed in his bags the uniform of his engineering regiment, would also sketch ancient ruins. Stein considered the Naik’s youth an advantage in learning new skills such as photography and enduring the hardships ahead.

  Macartney had been searching for months for other experienced hands to join the explorer in Kashgar, but this was no easy task. Macartney telegrammed Stein en route with an update on his efforts, including a few words about one unlikely caravan member. “Sadiq now in Chinese prison; but if you want him can probably get him out.” Apparently Stein did not want him. Aside from being proof of Macartney’s sway, the telegram suggests the lengths to which he was prepared to go to assist Stein. Now Stein needed Macartney’s help to find the expedition’s most crucial member: a Chinese assistant and interpreter. Of all the ways Macartney would help Stein—from arranging water tanks to organizing Stein’s travel documents—finding the right man for this role would be the most vital. Stein planned to travel much farther east than on his first trip, this time into “China proper,” as he called it. Although he was fluent in many languages, Chinese was not one of them. He needed an assistant who could not only speak the language, but who knew China’s culture and protocols. He expected to uncover ancient Chinese written material and needed someone who could grasp its meaning on the spot. And he wanted someone who could teach him colloquial Chinese. Moreover, his assistant would need to be fit and have the temperament to withstand the rigors of desert travel. It was a tall order.

  Chinese scholars were rare in far-flung Turkestan. The few who existed had been posted to sedentary, pen-pushing jobs in a local yamen or district office. They would hardly view as attractive a position that involved camping in a tent for months, with little more than Stein, a team of scruffy laborers and flatulent camels for company. Macartney had been keeping his eye out for a suitable candidate and had good news for Stein. He had learned of an educated Chinese man known as Chiang-ssu-yeh (Jiang Siye), or Secretary Chiang, who might be suitable. Chiang was believed to speak Turki, the local language. That would need to be their common tongue. Stein had learned Turki from a mullah during his first stay in Kashgar. Macartney would send for Chiang, but it would be ten days before he arrived.

  Macartney knew all too well the reasons for Stein’s race to Kashgar and his eagerness to get his caravan together as quickly as possible. Stein had fought long and hard to get this expedition under way. He had badgered and maneuvered, he had planned with meticulous care. But his masters had dragged their feet, delaying him a year. In that time formidable competition had mobilized. Others now had their eye on what Stein regarded as his stamping ground, among them teams from Germany and France. They were rivals for Turkestan’s treasures who, gallingly, had been inspired by the success of Stein’s first trip to mount their own expeditions. They had their eyes on the very places to which Stein was headed. The French were en route to the desert and the Germans had already arrived. Macartney had been quietly monitoring the latter’s movements for months. It was a rare intruder who could slip into Turkestan without the knowledge of the ever-watchful George Macartney.

  2

  Signs of Wonder

 
Aurel Stein hardly looked the archetypal explorer. With his well-trimmed moustache and fastidiously parted dark hair, he appeared more dapper banker than a man who would cross desert wastes and rugged mountains and whose discoveries would transform our knowledge of the Silk Road. The man who would make off with the Silk Road’s greatest treasure had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead and, even in old age, retained a firm, determined jaw. In photographs, he has a stiff, almost military air as he stands, hands in pockets, with his dark brown eyes more often fixed on a distant horizon than looking directly to camera. Whether posed in a pressed dark suit or bundled in a fur-lined coat to fend off the desert wind, a handkerchief often pokes jauntily from a breast pocket.

  He was not driven by physical pleasure. Food and drink were simply fuel for long hours of work. Years of meager suppers eaten at midnight in his tent prompted few complaints, although these may not have helped the dyspepsia he suffered from throughout his life. A friend was so horrified by the state of Stein’s kitchen that he marveled at the explorer’s immunity to typhoid. Stein once served the same friend breakfast porridge that emitted a pungent odor. Impervious to gastronomic matters, Stein had stored his bag of oats in a chest that also contained mothballs.

  He never married, never had a family and never appeared to have any romantic involvement with women or men. He had several long-lasting friendships, but there is nothing to suggest these were anything other than platonic. His friendships endured despite, or perhaps because of, long separations of time and distance. Although he mused repeatedly in his letters on the great joy he derived from his friends and how he wished he could be in their company, he chose a life that kept him from them for years at a time. Work, not romance, propelled him. And the work he valued was not easily undertaken with a wife and family in tow or abandoned while he disappeared into some of the world’s most inaccessible and dangerous places. For this he chose to forgo a family, a home and material riches, although he may not have regarded this as a sacrifice. His reams of letters, written in a firm cursive hand—thousands of pages of which are now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford—give no sense that the lack of these troubled him. Nor do they give more than a rare glimpse into his inner life. Even by the buttoned-down standards of the Victorian times through which he lived, Stein was the most private of men.

  Few could follow a clue like Stein. His persistence in pursuing leads—often from seemingly unpromising sources—was extraordinary. One friend dubbed him Sherlock Holmes for his ability to infer much from scant information. He frequently consulted the centuries-old accounts by his heroes, the Venetian Marco Polo and China’s great pilgrim monk Xuanzang, both of whom left detailed travel reports Stein could accurately cross-reference.

  He had no permanent home. The closest he came was a canvas tent he pitched in a meadow in mountainous Kashmir, where he lived on and off for years. He retreated to Mohand Marg, north of the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar, whenever he could. There he would walk, plan his expeditions or write. Surrounded by snow-capped mountains, he set his square wooden desk under pine trees, with vases of alpine flowers the only domestic flourish. He seems to most resemble the itinerant scholar-monks of China’s Buddhist past, not least his “patron saint” Xuanzang. He was a lone wanderer.

  But he did have one constant companion. He was rarely without a little dog at his side. He had a succession of seven over fifty years, all but one a fox terrier. Without exception, he named them Dash. Stein was not a man to waste time, not even on thinking up names for his dogs. The sturdy little fox terriers, known for their endurance and capacity for hard work, were an apt choice for a man with both traits in abundance. Stein’s favorite by far was Dash II, his fellow traveler on what would be his greatest expedition. The smooth-haired terrier cleared mountain passes of more than 18,000 feet above sea level, quaffing saucers of tea along the way. He spent the days scampering alongside the caravan, and only occasionally joining Stein on “pony back.” But each night was spent together in the relative comfort of Stein’s tent. In time, Stein would confer an illustrious title on his intrepid canine: Dash the Great.

  Little in Stein’s family background suggested the life he would lead. Born in Budapest into a middle-class Jewish family, he was baptized Lutheran. Such a practice was not uncommon then for the access it gave to education and the career doors it could open. Perhaps his name, Marc Aurel Stein, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, hinted at grand parental ambitions. He was a late, unexpected arrival for his mother Anna, then forty-five, and his struggling merchant father Nathan. They had already raised two children—Ernst was twenty-one and Theresa nineteen—when Stein was born on November 26, 1862. The age gap between himself and his parents and siblings may have prepared him for a solitary, self-reliant life. Certainly his education was overseen not so much by his parents but by Ernst and an uncle who was a pioneering ophthalmologist.

  As a boy, Stein developed a lifelong fascination with Alexander the Great, the ancient Greek military leader whose marks on India and Central Asia remain today. Long before comic book heroes became a schoolboy staple, Alexander’s ancient, and at times mythical, adventures had turned him into a sort of Superman. The young Stein read avidly of his hero’s conquests through remote deserts and mountains, terrain he would himself one day cross. He heard the echoes of a long-forgotten past that cried out to be understood. And, consciously or not, he began acquiring the means to do so. Languages offered a key, and the young Stein had an aptitude for them. He studied Oriental languages in Vienna, Leipzig and Tübingen, where he received his PhD, and was proficient in Greek, Latin, Persian, and Sanskrit, as well as several European languages, including French, German, and English.

  At twenty-one, he moved to Britain—whose nationality and Raj-era values he would later adopt—where, perhaps, there might be more opportunities than in Budapest for a young Oriental scholar. He undertook further studies, steeping himself in the great collections in the British Museum and at Oxford. His studies were interrupted for a year by military service in Hungary. Typically, he made good use of the time. He learned to ride a horse. He also studied surveying and mapmaking at Budapest’s Ludovica Military Academy. They were skills that would prove invaluable in Central Asia, where he filled in some of the region’s cartographic blanks.

  He returned to London in 1886, but with his student days and his money running out, it was time to consider his next move. He seemed set on an academic career until an opportunity arose not, as he might have hoped, in a European university, but in the sprawling civil service of British-ruled India. For a young man versed in India’s past, here was a chance to see first-hand the culture to which he was drawn and which, until then, he had studied only in books. For Stein, book learning alone would never satisfy. He accepted the dual role of registrar of Punjab University and principal of the Oriental College in Lahore. He said goodbye to his family and on the cusp of his twenty-sixth birthday set sail for India. He had begun to set his singular course.

  Stein was sailing into uncharted waters. It was a time full of startling discoveries and possibilities for a young man with an interest in ancient cultures. The West was just beginning to learn about one of the world’s oldest religions. The origins of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism had been known for centuries, but Buddhism’s origins were a mystery to the West even into the nineteenth century. Some scholars thought that with his tight curly hair, flattened nose, and fleshy lips, the Buddha originated in Africa. The idea of a black Buddha persisted until the 1830s. Indeed early Orientalists could find no trace of Buddhism in India, so thoroughly had it vanished from its birthplace. Some wondered if the Buddha had ever lived or was simply a legend.

  They might have saved themselves a lot of fruitless effort and theorizing if they had been able to read the tales of the ancient Chinese pilgrims. It was no mystery to these wandering monks where Buddhism came from. Traveling along the Silk Road from China into India and back, these monks had seen t
he Buddhist holy land with their own eyes and left accounts. They knew Buddhism came from northern India. It was the reason the monk Faxian had ventured there at the turn of the fifth century and the even more observant Xuanzang two centuries later.

  But few Europeans could read of their travels until the mid-nineteenth century, when the ancient writings were finally translated, first into French and then English. When a two-volume account of Xuanzang’s travels was published, it prompted a lengthy article in The Times in April 1857 that stated: “He describes some parts of the world which no one has explored since.”

  They soon would be. These accounts were seized on by a handful of Raj-era soldiers, adventurers and others who began to retrace the pilgrims’ steps. It was as if they had been handed a long-lost map of an ancient maze. The writings of these wandering Chinese monks helped unlock Buddhism’s forgotten Indian origins. It is hard to overestimate their significance: China’s ancient pilgrims held the cultural memories India had forgotten and Britain would help recover.

  A British army engineer and archaeologist, Alexander Cunningham, played a central role. In the 1860s, using the pilgrims’ accounts as his guide, he rediscovered many of the key sites of Buddhism’s beginnings. Today those places draw pilgrims from around the globe, but just 150 years ago they had been forgotten and overgrown for centuries. Cunningham identified the once-great monastic university of Nalanda, the city of Sravasti and the ruins of Jetavana Vihara, the garden where the Buddha taught the Diamond Sutra. Cunningham also restored Buddhism’s most sacred site, the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, near where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Stein closely followed the accounts of such discoveries. He arrived in India keen to make his own.