Journeys on the Silk Road Read online

The supernatural account evoked awe in Chiang. If the desert could cast such a spell over the otherwise skeptical Chiang, a scholarly, erudite man, its effect was felt even more keenly among the more superstitious members of Stein’s party. Little wonder they were getting restive. So all were relieved when midway through their journey they spotted five toghrak trees. It signaled they had arrived at the place where they would rest for a day—the only one on the entire crossing. The windswept trees, bravely clinging to life in the desert, were rare enough in this wasteland to give their name to the site, Besh-toghrak, meaning simply five toghrak trees. Saddles were repaired and the camels and ponies were watered at two nearby wells and treated for sore backs. Stein planned to leave eight of the weakest donkeys no longer needed at this lonely spot. A young Abdal donkey man was left to care for them. The man was given a twenty-eight day supply of rations and a box of matches. Until the caravan collected him on the way back, he would “have to make the best of his solitude—or the visits of goblins,” Stein commented dryly.

  A fierce cold wind was blowing a few days later when, through the dust-filled haze, the party caught sight of an abandoned fort. They made their way toward it in a thin line to shield against the headwinds. Six times the height of the tallest man among them, the fort was entered via an archway carved into walls fifteen feet thick. Centuries ago, this would have seemed an impregnable stronghold for a ruler’s army. Now, nothing hinted at human habitation, save for the debris of a recent caravan that had attempted the perilous crossing.

  Stein climbed a staircase hewn perhaps 2,000 years ago into a corner of the massive clay fortress. Thirty feet up, he held his ground as he was buffeted by the gale. He reached for his binoculars and surveyed the forbidding expanse: beyond the beds of reeds near the fort, tamarisk scrub and bare gravel stretched to the barren foothills of a distant mountain range. He turned into the wind and focused his gaze on four distant mounds that stood out against the hazy grey horizon: watchtowers. His excitement rose. These were more evidence of a long-forgotten military frontier. He had spotted traces of a ruined wall and other watchtowers in recent days. As he stood on the immense clay walls, he imagined an ancient military chief surveying the line of watchtowers under his command, eager for signals—fire by night, smoke by day—that passed along them. Beacons that once signaled the approach, or retreat, of armed enemies. Could this fort and the watchtowers be part of that forgotten frontier? In the empty isolation of the desert, such answers seemed unknowable. And yet he would soon find an answer.

  Stein descended the fort’s staircase and rejoined his party. This was not the time to explore further, no matter how much curiosity the watchtowers provoked. The food and water were almost gone. The animals were hungry and his men were irritable and exhausted. They had not seen another soul since leaving Abdal nearly three weeks ago. They had crossed quickly, in a week less than Marco Polo estimated. But all now needed rest. They must get to Dunhuang as quickly as possible.

  A distant line of bare trees and cultivated fields on the edge of Dunhuang were heartening sights for Aurel Stein and his caravan on March 12, 1907. While a persistent wind howled its numbing welcome as they approached the town, at least the weary men and beasts were not enduring its blasts in the desert. Warmth and shelter would soon be at hand. Not that Stein wanted to linger in Dunhuang; he was eager to return to the ruined wall, fort, and the string of watchtowers he had seen as he crossed from Abdal.

  Dunhuang was the Silk Road’s gateway between China and Central Asia, which was why he planned to use it as a base for six months of archaeological work and exploration in the surrounding desert and mountains. He planned a short halt, just long enough for his men and animals to rest and for him to visit the painted meditation grottoes—the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas—about fifteen miles to the southeast. He had longed to see these remote, sacred caves, and he was determined to realize this dream. But his real work lay elsewhere. Or so he thought.

  His approach to his first oasis within China was unsettling after the hospitality he had enjoyed in Turkestan and where he felt at home. He knew its ways, its language and its daily rhythms, punctuated by the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. But now he was on foreign ground. In Turkestan, local headmen invariably rode out to meet his party as he approached an oasis. So too did the rapacious Hindu money-lenders, no doubt eager for business. But this time there was not so much as a single merchant to acknowledge his arrival. As always, Stein had attempted to smooth the path, sending word of his approach, his intended business and requesting accommodation. But unusually, no response had come. Was he being deliberately neglected? Was this how things were done on Chinese soil? What did it mean? Most immediately, it meant no quarters had been prepared for him or his party.

  First impressions of Dunhuang, the once-vibrant oasis on the edge of the vast Gobi Desert, were hardly encouraging. Few people were outside on this bitterly cold and dust-filled day as he passed down the narrow main street. The few locals who could be found directed him to the caravanserai, the main stopping place for travelers needing accommodation, but it was so filthy and cramped he looked elsewhere for a more suitable camp. About a half a mile from the walled town’s southern gate he found a large orchard with a dilapidated house. It was inhabited by a widow, her mother and several children, who agreed to house them in their unoccupied rooms.

  Other differences from Turkestan soon became apparent. Stein was accustomed to—and approved of—the way Muslim women promptly removed themselves from the company of strangers. But purdah was not practiced in Dunhuang. Instead, Chinese women with bound feet teetered around as his dusty, travel-weary party settled in the unused rooms built around a courtyard. Stein erected his tent in the orchard, preferring its peace and relative comfort to the cavernous hall he had been offered as quarters.

  Fuel, fodder, and food were his next concerns. But how to pay for them? Once again he was reminded that things were done differently in China, even in the far-flung western province of Gansu. As expected, no one would accept the coins of neighboring Turkestan, and the only silver bullion he had was in the form of horseshoes. Finding a blacksmith who could cut some silver into small change didn’t occur to him the first day. Meanwhile, the daily market had closed and it took hours for supplies to arrive. The mood of his men darkened, frustrated by the delays in finding shelter and then food. Already apprehensive of venturing onto foreign soil, it seemed their worst fears of China’s strange customs had been realized. All except Chiang, who instantly made friends with the widow’s children, were on unfamiliar turf. Frustrating as his arrival in Dunhuang was, Stein later saw its absurdity, writing: “It amused me to think what our experiences would have been, had our caravan suddenly pitched camp in Hyde Park, and expected to raise supplies promptly in the neighbourhood without producing coin of the realm!” He quickly grew alert to the tricks of the money-exchange trade—silver pieces loaded with lead, and the way merchants used different scales depending on whether the customer was buying, selling or exchanging silver.

  His men could at last rest the next day, fed and sheltered. Wrapped in their furs, they dozed in front of their fires. But, typically, Stein was not about to rest. He sent his last piece of yellow Liberty brocade to the local yamen as a gift for the magistrate. By midday he had swapped his travel-stained furs for his best European clothes—black coat, pith helmet, and patent leather boots—to pay his official visit. There the reason for the absence of a welcome became apparent. A new magistrate, Wang Ta-lao-ye, had himself only just arrived in Dunhuang—so recently that a fire had not been lit nor furniture installed in the bare reception hall. Stein felt the day’s chill in his spiffy but all-too-thin clothes. The new magistrate had only just found his predecessor’s documents about the impending arrival of this important visitor, and he was suitably impressed, even over-awed, by what he discovered in the papers. Whether through bureaucratic incompetence or clever mistranslation, Stein’s travel document had eleva
ted him to Prime Minister of Education of Great Britain.

  Protocol required a return visit, and it came more quickly than Stein expected. No sooner had he arrived back at his tent and swapped his thin footwear for fur boots than the magistrate arrived. Seated on a thick felt rug and with a charcoal fire to warm them, Stein showed off some of the ancient Chinese records he had uncovered in recent months, and he found an appreciative audience in the learned man. “I instinctively felt that a kindly official providence had brought to Tun-huang [Dunhuang] just the right man to help me,” Stein wrote. He soon called on the influential local military commander, the bluff and burly Lin Ta-jen, who provided a camp guard.

  But it was a meeting with a group of Turkestan traders in the oasis that would prove most fortuitous. Unlike the magistrate, the traders knew the area well from living many years in the province. Among them was Zahid Beg, who, like many of the traders in town, was on the run from his Turkestan creditors. Zahid Beg told Stein of various half-buried ruins he claimed to have seen north of Dunhuang. His information was vague, rumors perhaps, but at least he was more forthcoming than the local Chinese, who greeted Stein’s inquiries about ancient ruins in the area with steely silence. And Zahid Beg conveyed a tantalizing snippet, one that could not fail to ignite Stein’s imagination. A huge cache of manuscripts was said to have been discovered a few years earlier, hidden in one of the painted grottoes at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. And, so the rumor went, the manuscripts were still there.

  6

  City of Sands

  On the edge of the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang, a cliff about a mile long rises from a river valley. Beyond the cliff, sand dunes roll like ocean waves. In certain winds, these dunes were said to emit eerie music that inspired their name: the Ming Sha, or Singing Sands. But it was a vision, not a sound, that shaped history here, and it occurred more than 1,500 years before Stein’s caravan arrived.

  Legend has it that in AD 366, a wandering Buddhist monk named Lezun sat on the valley floor to rest from his travels across forests and plains. As he admired the sunset on Sanwei Mountain, he beheld a vision of a thousand Buddhas. Celestial nymphs danced in the rays of golden light, and Lezun watched the glorious scene until the dusk turned to dark. The monk, described as resolute, calm, and of pure conduct, was so inspired that the next day he set down his pilgrim’s staff and abandoned plans to cross the Gobi. Instead, he chiseled a meditation cave into the cliff. The following day he mixed mud and smoothed the walls of his tiny shelter. And on his third day, he painted a mural on the wall to record the wondrous vision he had witnessed.

  Lezun then visited Dunhuang to share his discovery, and the news quickly spread to the surrounding provinces, according to one folk tale. Similarly inspired, others joined him and honeycombed the conglomerate cliff with an estimated 1,000 hand-carved caves. The first caves were small, spartan cells, just big enough for a solitary monk. But as the religious community grew, elaborate grottoes were carved as chapels and shrines. Some were large enough for a hundred worshippers to gather. Murals in lapis, turquoise, and malachite covered the walls and ceilings in many of the caves. Nearly half a million square feet of magnificent murals were created. The wall paintings give an unparalleled picture of a thousand years of life along the Silk Road.

  The location would eventually become known in China and beyond as a place of unrivalled beauty, sanctity, and knowledge. Although the monk Lezun is credited with founding the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, or Mogao Caves as they are known today, he is but one of four men who have shaped their history through the centuries. The story of the Silk Road’s most sacred site is inextricably bound with clandestine journeys, wandering monks, and intrepid travelers.

  Why a sacred center flourished in such a remote place is simple. The reason is geography. Near Dunhuang, the Silk Road split in two to skirt the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. The roads met again 1,400 miles west at Kashgar. But between these two oases lay the Silk Road’s most dangerous terrain. Among the threats were starvation, thirst, bandits, and ferocious sandstorms that were known to bury entire caravans. For those traveling west, Dunhuang was the last stop for caravans to rest and stock up before they faced the desert. For those heading east, it was the first oasis on Chinese soil. Any traveler would want to express gratitude for surviving such a journey or pray for safe deliverance before embarking, so it is little wonder that as long as the Silk Road thrived, the caves did too. Wealthy merchants and other patrons paid for the grottoes to be created and decorated as acts of thanksgiving. Dunhuang—the name means Blazing Beacon and refers to the nearby line of military watchtowers that guarded the area—might have begun as a dusty military garrison town, but it became a prosperous, cosmopolitan center, the Silk Road’s great beacon of spiritual illumination.

  The Silk Road, or roads really, was a network of trade routes that linked China with the West. From its eastern end in the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an, now Xian, the route passed through Dunhuang before branching south to India, present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, or west to Samarkand, Bokhara, Persia, and the eastern Mediterranean. For about a thousand years, caravans of camels loaded with silk, rubies, jade, amber, musk, and far more halted at Dunhuang.

  But despite all its ancient connotations, the name Silk Road is relatively new, coined only in the nineteenth century by a German geographer and explorer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. It conjures exotic images of heavily laden camels plodding through rolling dunes, bells tinkling. The name is far more romantic than if it had been named after another desirable commodity traded along the way, which might have seen it dubbed the Rhubarb Road.

  Silk, which originated in China, was the best known and among the most prized of the route’s merchandise. Few caravans traveled the entire route. Rather, the goods would change hands—as well as camels and donkeys—many times along the way, and inhabitants at one end of the Silk Road knew little about those at the other. Consequently, the Romans, who had an insatiable hunger for the exquisite fabric (despite a Senate ban on men wearing it), had only vague ideas about the land or people who produced it. But rumors abounded. Some talked of Seres, the Kingdom of Silk, as a land inhabited by giants with red hair and blue eyes. Others thought it home to people who lived for 200 years. For centuries, the Romans thought the gossamer thread grew on trees and was combed from leaves. This suited the middlemen through whose lands the goods passed and who lived off the profits. Even when a Greek traveler asserted that it came from insects—giant beetles, he claimed—the West lacked the means to make the luxurious fabric. But in the sixth century, two Nestorian monks returning from China are said to have reached the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian with silkworm eggs concealed in their bamboo staffs.

  Coveted as it was, silk was not the only treasure to travel the ancient trade route. Ideas, too, made their way along the Silk Road, the original information superhighway. The most influential of these was Buddhism, whose story began around 400 BC, when Prince Siddhartha was born into the ruling Shakya clan in the Himalayan foothills of present-day Nepal. He grew up in luxurious seclusion, sheltered from life’s sufferings and harsh realities, according to Buddhist tales. At twenty-nine, he ventured beyond the palace and encountered the sufferings from which he had been shielded. He saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and an ascetic. Troubled by this confrontation with ageing, sickness, and death, he resolved to find a way to overcome suffering and mortality.

  He rejected his privileged life and secretly slipped away from the palace to become an ascetic himself. He wandered for years, studying under various teachers but, unsatisfied, continually moved on. He sought answers through extremes of spiritual renunciation and physical deprivation, including near starvation. At the age of thirty-five, he sat beneath a fig tree near present-day Bodhgaya and vowed not to rise until he attained enlightenment. He realized what Buddhists call the Four Noble Truths: suffering exists; desires cause suffering; it is possib
le to end suffering; and a path exists to achieve this. Freed from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, he arose as Buddha Shakyamuni, the Awakened One and the sage of the Shakya clan. He spent the rest of his life—the next forty-five years—traveling around northern India and teaching what he had learned. His teachings were later written in the form of thousands of sutras. Buddha Shakyamuni is sometimes referred to as the historical Buddha. There are said to be countless Buddhas; many have existed in the past, others will appear in the future.

  Buddha Shakyamuni delivered the teaching known as the Diamond Sutra in a garden near the ancient Indian city of Sravasti. According to Buddhist lore, a wealthy merchant named Sudatta, or Anathapindika, who was known for his generosity to orphans and the destitute, heard the Buddha teaching. The merchant was so impressed he invited the Buddha to Sravasti to teach. However, the only suitable place to build a temple to house the Buddha and his disciples was in a forest south of the city, and it belonged to the Crown Prince Jeta, who had no interest in selling his pristine real estate. “If you can cover the ground with gold pieces, I’ll sell it,” the prince allegedly joked. Undeterred, the philanthropic merchant went home, opened his treasury and brought back enough gold to carpet the 200-acre site. For twenty-five rainy seasons the Buddha gave some of his most important teachings in a park once covered in gold.

  More than 200 years after the Buddha Shakyamuni left his palace, another clandestine journey began, one that would ultimately result in the establishment of the Silk Road. It was a trip designed to prevent what China’s Great Wall could not—raids by a marauding tribe of Central Asian horsemen called the Xiongnu. Some say the Xiongnu were related to the Huns who would later cut a swath through Europe. Whatever the case, the Han emperor Wudi wanted them stopped. The emperor knew his people were not the only ones being terrorized by these fierce fighters. A nomadic group had been driven from their lands on China’s far western fringe, their king executed and his skull turned into a drinking cup. The Yuezhi, as the routed nomads were called, wanted revenge.