Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Read online

  FOREIGN DEVILS ON THE SILK ROAD

  The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia

  Peter Hopkirk

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 1980 by John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK Company

  Copyright © The Estate of Peter Hopkirk 1980

  The moral right of the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN: 978-1-84854-632-5

  Book ISBN: 978-0-7195-6448-2

  John Murray (Publishers)

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Also by Peter Hopkirk

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Note on Place Names

  British Museum

  Prologue

  1. The Rise and Fall of the Silk Road

  2. Lost Cities of the Taklamakan

  3. The Great Manuscript Race

  4. Sven Hedin – the Pathfinder

  5. Aurel Stein – Treasure-Seeker Extraordinary

  6. Stein Strikes it Rich

  7. The Unmasking of a Forger

  8. The Race Begins in Earnest

  9. Von Le Coq Spins a Coin

  10. ‘The Finest Paintings in Turkestan …’

  11. Secrets of a Chinese Rubbish Dump

  12. Tun-huang – the Hidden Library

  13. Pelliot – the Gentle Art of Making Enemies

  14. Spies Along the Silk Road

  15. Langdon Warner Attempts the Unthinkable

  16. The Chinese Slam the Door

  Bibliography of Principal Sources

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Hopkirk

  Trespassers on the Roof of the World

  Setting the East Ablaze

  The Great Game

  On Secret Service East of Constantinople

  Quest for Kim

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In piecing together this little-known episode in Central Asian history I have drawn on many sources, written and unwritten, published and unpublished. All written sources, save for one or two contemporary newspaper reports and obituaries, are listed in the bibliography. But it is to four men, now all dead, that I owe my greatest debt. Without them – and the detailed accounts of their exploits which they left – there would be no book. These four are Sven Hedin, Sir Aurel Stein, Albert von Le Coq and Professor Langdon Warner, all of whom played leading roles in this narrative. All four wrote vividly and entertainingly, but their books are long out of print and difficult – and expensive – to obtain. These long-forgotten works are listed separately in the bibliography with their publishers. I am particularly grateful to the Stein Trustees for permission to quote extensively from Sir Aurel Stein’s own writings.

  A most valuable source has also been Jeannette Mirsky’s recent biography of Stein – the outcome of many years’ work, particularly on his previously unpublished correspondence.

  In writing this book I owe a great deal, too, to my wife Kath who did much of the initial research, helped me with my enquiries in Peking, Tokyo and Delhi, translated the Pelliot material, made many improvements in the text and much else besides. I am indebted also to the following distinguished scholars who helped me with matters of fact, but who are in no way responsible for the use I have put these to. What views I have expressed are entirely my own. In Peking: Professor Hsia Nai, Director of the Institute of Archaeology. In West Berlin: Prof. Dr Herbert Härtel, Director of the Museum of Indian Art. In Leningrad: Mme Natalia Diakonova of the Hermitage Museum. In Tokyo: Dr Jiro Sugiyama, Curator of Oriental Art at the National Museum. In Delhi: Dr P. Bannerjee, Curator of the Indian National Museum.

  My gratitude is also due to the following individuals: William St Clair who persuaded me that it was time to write something more lasting than newspaper articles. John R. Murray, my publisher (and editor), whose family have a long and distinguished tradition of producing classic works on Central Asia, and without whose personal interest in the subject and unflagging encouragement this book would have remained no more than an idea.

  I also owe thanks to David Loman and Christer von der Burg, both oriental booksellers, for finding me rare and little-known items of source material. My gratitude is due, too, to Simon Scott Plummer, a colleague at The Times, who tracked down the Otani murals for me in Seoul and discovered there the answers to two other mysteries. Again, without the interest of Frances Wood and Howard Nelson of the British Library I would never have found out what became of the long-forgotten forgeries of Islam Akhun.

  The following have also assisted me with various matters Chinese and Japanese: Verity Wilson, now of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Annette Lord (currently of Peking), Kate Owen (formerly of the Contemporary China Institute) and Michiyo Sawada (of Kyoto). I must thank, too, Heidi St Clair who helped me with German translations, Diana Balfour who typed every word of this book, and Libby Perkins and Tessa Hughes who both read the typescript. Finally I am grateful to the staff of those two vast repositories of oriental intelligence, the India Office Library and the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

  P.H.

  The Main Routes of the Old Silk Road

  Chinese Turkestan and Adjacent Areas

  NOTE ON PLACE NAMES

  Apart from the different ways of romanising Chinese and Turkic place names (Tun-huang, Touen-houang, Dun-huang), some towns and villages possess several totally different names – a Turkic one, a Chinese one, a Mongolian one and sometimes one or more historic titles. Thus Urumchi (Wurumuchi) is sometimes called Tihwa by the Chinese, also Bung Miao Tze, Bashbalikh and Peitin – the last two being ancient names. Kashgar is also known as Kashi Shi, Yarkand as Shache, Hami as Kumul, and so on. All this can be extremely confusing to a reader who turns to other sources, whether books or maps. I have used, throughout, the name by which a place is best known, or was known at the time by those who visited it in the course of this narrative.

  BRITISH MUSEUM – AN UPDATE

  When this book was written, more than a quarter of a century ago, the mass of Silk Road treasures brought back from China by Sir Aurel Stein was given little more than a token display by the British Museum – despite their immense historical and artistic importance. For years Stein’s name too was similarly downplayed, while the bulk of his discoveries were stored out of sight in the museum’s basement. This curious reticence was largely intended to appease the Chinese, outraged at this plunder of their heritage by Stein and other ‘foreign devils’ – though they had done little or nothing to halt it at the time. For the museum trustees, who had partly funded Stein’s excavations, were understandably anxious to avoid having another Elgin Marbles quarrel on their hands. Happily, much more recently, the thaw in Sino-British relations has allowed both Stein and his treasures to enjoy, at last, the prominence and scholarly attention they deserve, although the Chinese would undoubtedly still like them returned. This rehabilitation reached a climax in 2004 with the spectacular and highly successful exhibition of Silk Road treasures at the British Library.

  February 2006

  Prologue

  * * *

  ‘The Chinese complain, and the foreigner cannot well deny it, that ca
ravan-loads of priceless treasures from the temples, tombs and ruins of Chinese Turkistan have been carried off to foreign museums and are for ever lost to China.’ So wrote Sir Eric Teichman in Journey to Turkistan, an account of his travels along the old Silk Road on a Foreign Office mission in 1935. It made the Chinese ‘boil with indignation,’ he added, ‘to read in the books of foreign travellers descriptions of how they carried off whole libraries of ancient manuscripts, frescoes and relics of early Buddhist culture in Turkistan’.

  My aim in this book is to tell the story of these long-range archaeological raids made by foreigners into this remote corner of Central Asia during the first quarter of this century. It is primarily about six men – Sven Hedin of Sweden, Sir Aurel Stein of Britain, Albert von Le Coq of Germany, Paul Pelliot of France, Langdon Warner of the United States, and the somewhat mysterious Count Otani of Japan.

  Between them, until the Chinese finally put a stop to it, they removed wall-paintings, manuscripts, sculptures and other treasures literally by the ton from the lost cities of the Silk Road. Today, to the bitter chagrin of the Chinese and the exasperation of scholars, this great Central Asian collection is scattered through the museums and institutions of at least thirteen different countries. Some of it, through inattention or lack of funds, is crumbling away. Much also has disappeared or been destroyed. To see everything that has survived one must be prepared to travel to India, Japan, Russia, America, Taiwan, South Korea, Sweden, Finland, East and West Germany, Britain, France and China, and to visit over thirty institutions.

  The men who carried off all these treasures had few qualms about the rightness of what they were doing. Nor, it should be said, did the governments or institutions (including the British Museum) which sent them. At the time they were lionised and honoured for their remarkable discoveries and unquestionable contributions to the scholarship of Central Asia and China. Stein and Hedin, neither of whom was British born, even received knighthoods. The Chinese, on the other hand, view their archaeological activities in a very different light, although they did nothing to prevent them at the time. To the Chinese, ‘so-called scholars’ like Stein, Pelliot and von Le Coq were no more than shameless adventurers who robbed them of their history. It is an issue, moreover, on which they are not entirely without allies in the West.

  In 1956, some thirty years after Teichman, another rare British traveller to the region passed along the ancient Silk Road and at Bezeklik was shown the blank walls which had once borne brilliant murals. In Turkestan Alive, Basil Davidson recounts how the official conducting him around the cliff-hewn temples pointed to each of the gaps in turn and uttered the one word ‘Stolen!’ Davidson, who leaves us in no doubt where his own sympathies lie, goes on: ‘He said it wherever we came across a large and painful excision; and he said it often.’ It was echoed each time, first by the girl from the antiquities department who accompanied them, and then by the driver. ‘They felt aggrieved; and they were right,’ Davidson adds.

  He himself felt aggrieved when, on returning to London, he saw how Sir Aurel Stein’s collection was displayed in the British Museum – ‘tucked away in a corner with little room to explain or reveal its unique value’. Even today, perhaps in deference to Chinese feelings, there is nothing to indicate that almost everything in the small Central Asian section was acquired through the prodigious, if (to some) questionable, efforts of one man. Perhaps out of similar deference to our feelings, at Bezeklik and elsewhere the Chinese today no longer point accusingly at the incisions left by von Le Coq and his rivals.

  For starting what he calls the ‘international race for antiquities from Chinese Turkestan’, Davidson blames Hedin and Stein, the first men to realise the archaeological possibilities of the region. He goes on: ‘The Germans sent out four expeditions between 1902 and 1914; the French sent expeditions; the Russians and Japanese sent expeditions. These bold scholars staked out “spheres of influence” and “fields of discovery” and quarrelled vigorously over the one and the other.’ He concludes: ‘Nowadays it is a sad and weary sight to stare at rock-temple frescoes where these ruthless old collectors used their knives. Many of the frescoes had survived for over a thousand years: had they managed to survive a bare half-century longer they would be there to this day.’

  But not everyone would agree with Davidson’s confident assertion. For a start, was the damage always inflicted by those ‘ruthless old collectors’? It certainly seems not if one is to accept the accounts of earlier eye-witnesses. One British traveller, Colonel Reginald Schomberg, who passed that way in 1928, reported that most of the frescoes from one site had been removed by von Le Coq, but added: ‘providentially so, for nearly all the remaining ones had been shamelessly defaced by the local Mohammedans’. He went on: ‘It cannot be too often emphasised that it is solely due to European archaeologists that any of the Buddhist treasures of Turkestan have been saved from Turki fanaticism and vandalism.’ Of another site he wrote: ‘The damage done to the pictures was lamentable, for the faces of the Buddha had been slashed across or scarred and the few remaining statues almost destroyed.’ Those who have been privileged to visit the great monastery of Bezeklik, near Turfan, will testify to the destruction wrought by religious vandals (and possibly by Red Guards) before, belatedly, the Chinese authorities took it upon themselves to protect the few surviving frescoes.

  Iconoclasm, however, was not the only threat to the survival of these treasures. Those remarkable missionaries Mildred Cable and Francesca French, in their book The Gobi Desert published nearly forty years ago, describe the casual damage they witnessed in progress not far from Bezeklik at the ancient walled city of Karakhoja. ‘Destruction of the buildings had been going on for a long time,’ they reported, ‘and we saw farmers at work with their pickaxes pulling down the old ruins and probably destroying many relics in the process.’ The farmers found the old earth valuable for enriching their fields. They furthermore ploughed up the land within the enclosure and sowed crops round the old monuments. Cable and French add: ‘Unfortunately the irrigation which is necessary for raising crops is fatal to structures made of earth, to mural decorations and to all other remains which depend on the dryness of desert conditions for their preservation.’

  Professor von Le Coq, who himself dug extensively at this site, reported that between the first and second German expeditions – a period of some eighteen months – ‘the locals have destroyed a very great deal by their constant digging’. In his Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan he explains that the local farmers scraped off the brightly coloured pigment from the frescoes, regarding this as a particularly powerful fertiliser. Ancient beams from ruined temples, moreover, preserved for centuries by the moistureless climate, were especially prized, either as fuel or for building in a region where wood was so scarce. The wall-paintings, he explained, were ‘an abomination to Moslems, and hence wherever they are found they are damaged – at all events on their faces’. Chinese officials, he claimed, made no attempt to stop them, being Confucians and despising Buddhism.

  He was told of one villager who, pulling down a wall, had unearthed cartloads of manuscripts, many decorated in colour, including gold. As a Moslem he dared not keep them lest the mullah should punish him for possessing infidel books, so he had thrown the whole lot into the river. Le Coq himself reports stumbling upon another ancient library which, together with frescoes of once-exquisite quality and quantities of textiles, had been totally destroyed by irrigation water.

  Other hazards included earthquakes and local treasure-hunters. Professor von Le Coq recalled that many of the temples from which he had removed wall-paintings as late as 1913 were destroyed by earthquakes three years later. As Stein ruefully discovered, native treasure-seekers were particularly active along the southern arm of the Silk Road, a factor in the Germans’ decision to concentrate their resources on the sites around Turfan and Kucha, which lie on the northern arm. The eagerness shown by western travellers to purchase old manuscripts and other antiquities during the clos
ing years of the nineteenth century undoubtedly encouraged treasure-hunters to pillage important sites which might otherwise have remained intact. It was also to encourage enterprising local forgers whose often ingenious counterfeits were to baffle seasoned orientalists.

  But such hazards were by no means purely local, as the Chinese are quick to point out. On seven terrible nights in World War II, more masterpieces of Central Asian art were wiped out in Berlin than tomb-robbers, farmers, irrigation schemes or earthquakes could have accounted for in many years. It is to these treasures, lost for ever when the old Ethnological Museum was destroyed by Allied bombing, that the Chinese inevitably refer if one tries to argue that men like Stein and von Le Coq were doing no more than rescue for posterity what otherwise would have perished anyway. Nor were the Berlin frescoes the only Central Asian treasures which might have fared better if they had been left where they were found. A large part of the collection of Buddhist art brought back from Chinese Turkestan by Count Otani’s three expeditions has not been seen since World War II, and Japanese scholars have so far been unable to trace it.

  The whole question of the Turkestan treasures, and in particular the thousands of manuscripts from Tun-huang, now divided between London and Paris, remains a highly emotive one. It is one which still greatly exercises the Chinese, as I found in Peking when I discussed it at length with Dr Hsia Nai, Director of China’s Institute of Archaeology, and himself a veteran Silk Road excavator. Sir Aurel Stein of Britain is unquestionably regarded as the most villainous of the foreign archaeologists, followed closely by Professor Pelliot of France. For their removal of the so-called ‘secret’ library from the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas at Tun-huang is something that the Chinese can never forgive. Sven Hedin of Sweden, who dug up highly important historical documents from sand-buried Lou-lan, comes third on their blacklist. From this it will be seen that it is the loss of the written evidence of their past which (to use Sir Eric Teichman’s phrase) causes the Chinese to ‘boil with indignation’, even more than the removal of the great wall-paintings and other works of art.