Foreign Devils on the Silk Road Read online

  The Survey of India was principally concerned with the topographical intelligence contained in the moonshee’s notes, as well as with his observations on the movements of the Russians in the area. However, Montgomerie also came upon an intriguing note which provided the first confirmation from a reliable source of what had previously been regarded as nothing more than fanciful legend.

  Admittedly the details are rather scanty, but then the moonshee’s business was not archaeology. ‘Khotan, the old capital of the province, was long ago swallowed up by the sand,’ reported Montgomerie, quoting from the moonshee’s notebook. According to the local inhabitants, however, after sandstorms some of the ancient houses were uncovered and ‘they often succeed in digging out various articles that have been buried’. The moonshee deduced from this that ‘it would appear as if the city had been buried suddenly before the inhabitants had time to remove their property.…’ Devoid of the usual embellishments – divine retribution, priceless treasures, protecting spirits and the like – the moonshee’s account, albeit hearsay, somehow rang true.

  The first European explorer to run the gauntlet of the murderous Khirgiz and to reach the Taklamakan from Indian territory was the surveyor William Johnson who had investigated Mohamed-i-Hameed’s death just one year before. Moreover, he actually visited a sand-entombed city near Khotan, if only briefly, and returned to India convinced of the existence of others. His chance to cross into Chinese Turkestan came unexpectedly one day when he was busy mapping the western end of the Kun Lun mountains, the range forming the northern bastion of Tibet. Trying to get a glimpse of the mysterious Taklamakan Desert, Johnson, a formidable mountaineer, had scaled three high peaks, known to the Indian Survey simply as E 57, E 58 and E 61. ‘But I could not get a view of any of the important towns of Khotan which I was so anxious to see,’ he recounted later in a paper addressed to the Royal Geographical Society in London. Disappointed, he returned to Leh, the capital of Ladakh. However, there a surprise was in store for him. ‘A native of Central Asia presented me with a letter from the Khan Badsha of Khotan inviting me to enter his territory,’ he related. Its bearer explained to him that the Khan, having learned of his presence in the region the previous season, had sent runners to invite him to visit Khotan, but they had failed to find him.

  Johnson knew full well that to make such a politically sensitive journey beyond India’s frontiers required approval at the very highest level in Calcutta. He also knew that it would take weeks to obtain a reply to such a request, and that the answer would almost certainly be no. The Khan, in his note, gave an assurance that the Englishman would be allowed to return to Ladakh as soon as he wished, and local traders who knew the country and its ruler were reassuring on this point. Justifying his decision afterwards, Johnson said that he saw the Khan’s invitation as an opportunity to gather valuable intelligence on this terra incognita, and particularly on the activities of the Russians in the area.

  Crossing the Kun Lun by a previously unknown pass shown him by his Khotanese escort, he reached Khotan in safety, where he was comfortably housed in an old Chinese fort in which the Khan himself also lived. There he had almost daily audiences with the eighty-year-old ruler, of whom he declared: ‘He is reported to be very ill-tempered and very strict in his government. I must however admit that he showed me much kindness while in his country and kept all his promises, with the exception of not allowing me to leave after a stay of four days, as had been agreed upon.’ The reason behind this apparent duplicity, it transpired, was rather pathetic. The Khan was planning to hold him hostage, albeit in comfort, in an attempt to force the British Government to send him troops and arms with which to hold back the Russians, whom he greatly feared, and who, according to Johnson, ‘are daily approaching towards Yarkand and Khotan’.

  During his stay in Khotan Johnson managed to gather a great deal of political and military intelligence. But he was also able to add considerably to the information about sand-buried cities that the luckless Mohamed-i-Hameed had obtained. Johnson reported: ‘At a distance of six miles to the north-east of Ilchi is the great desert of Taklamakan which, with its shifting sands that move along in vast billows overpowering everything, is said to have buried 360 cities in the space of 24 hours.’ While he was in the Khotan area quantities of tea bricks, ‘believed by the natives to be of great age’, were dug from one of the sand-entombed cities, and he managed to obtain one of these. This tea, despite its age, was in great demand among local people, particularly as supplies from China had dried up. Johnson also heard that gold coins ‘weighing four pounds’, as well as other precious objects, had been dug from the ruins. Johnson reported that the location of the buried cities was known ‘only to a few persons who keep it secret in order to enrich themselves’. He tells us, however – though only in passing – that he was able to visit ‘the site of an old city near Urankash, from which brick tea is exhumed’. But Johnson was a professional surveyor not an antiquarian and, tantalisingly, this is the only information he gives us.

  He was finally allowed by the Khan to leave Khotan and return home. But although his journey was hailed by the Royal Geographical Society as a triumph, all he received from the Survey of India was an official rebuke for crossing into Khotan without permission from his superiors. Affronted, Johnson resigned from the Survey and accepted the governorship of Ladakh at three times his previous salary. Not many years later he was the victim of an assassin’s knife.

  Despite growing evidence that more than a grain of truth might now lie behind the legends of fabulous cities buried under the Taklamakan, antiquarians had still not begun to show any serious interest in this region. What scientific interest there was confined itself to the geographical, geological and strategical aspects of this Central Asian backwater. For one thing European archaeologists were fully occupied with Greece, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Egypt, where spectacular discoveries were being made. For another, no one dreamed that a lost Buddhist world might lie in that waterless tract beyond the Karakoram. If anything, any ruins there would be Islamic. Lastly, as has been seen, access to the region was fraught with difficulties and perils. Already several European travellers had met with violent ends in the lonely passes leading to it.

  One man, however, was fascinated by the thought of what might lie hidden beneath the sands of the Taklamakan. He was a senior Punjab civil servant and authority on Central Asia, Sir Douglas Forsyth. In 1870, only five years after Johnson’s trail-blazing journey, Forsyth led a mission to Yarkand aimed at establishing friendly relations with Yakub Beg, a remarkable oriental adventurer who by 1866 had seized control of much of Chinese Turkestan, and whom some saw as the man to stem the tide of Russian expansion. The mission proved a failure as Yakub Beg was away from his capital and showed no sign of returning. Three years later Forsyth was once again sent to try to make contact with him, this time with a far larger expedition and rather more success. He was fortunate in having the assistance of his old friend Johnson, the surveyor-turned-Governor, to see his caravan safely across the perilous Karakoram. Forsyth’s paper, addressed to the Royal Geographical Society in London on his return, bears witness to his close interest in the dead cities of the Taklamakan. It was entitled ‘On the Buried Cities in the Shifting Sands of the Great Desert of Gobi’. (At that time, as few people had ever heard of the Taklamakan, the name Gobi was frequently used to describe both deserts.)

  ‘Among the many objects of interest which attracted our attention during the late mission to Kashgar,’ he wrote, ‘not the least interesting was an inquiry regarding the shifting sands of the Great Desert of Gobi and the reported existence of ancient cities which had been buried in the sands ages ago, and which are now gradually coming to light.’ Forsyth continued: ‘On the occasion of my first mission to Yarkand in 1870 we were unable to gather much information.… On my second visit in 1873 I determined to make more searching inquiries, and for this purpose I endeavoured to collate all the information obtainable from published works.’

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p; While there he noticed, as Johnson had seven years earlier, the ‘black bricks of tea, old and musty, exposed for sale in the bazaar’, which he was told had been dug up near Khotan. Forsyth was determined to locate one of these mysterious cities himself and see what he could find there. As he was unable to obtain permission from the local Moslem authorities to visit Khotan, he decided to take a leaf from Montgomerie’s book and dispatch two of the native ‘pundits’ accompanying his mission with instructions to discover what they could about the entombed cities around Khotan. The first returned with two figurines from a buried city near Keriya, to the east of Khotan. One of these Forsyth recognised as depicting Buddha, while the other was a clay figure of Hunooman, the monkey-god. Forsyth tells us : ‘These had only just been found, and it was fortunate that they soon fell into my pundit’s hands, for the pious zeal of a Mahommedan iconoclast would have consigned them to speedy destruction.’ The second man brought back ‘some gold finger rings and nose rings … also some coins, of which the most remarkable is an iron one, apparently of Hermaeus, the last Greek king of Bactria in the first century BC, and several gold coins of the reign of Constans II and Pognatus, Justinus, Antimachus and Theodosius.’ Forsyth adds in a footnote to his paper that scholars had since dated the figure of Buddha to around the tenth century, suggesting that the site had been engulfed by the desert some eight hundred years before.

  His two ‘pundits’ reported to him that other ancient finds had come to light in the Khotan region, including a gold ornament representing a cow, and a gold vase weighing some sixteen pounds. This was only hearsay, but the figure of Buddha, the monkey-god and the coins were real enough and appear to be the first antiquities from the lost world of the Taklamakan to fall into European hands. As such, they represent a small milestone in Central Asian studies.

  Within a year or two, Russian travellers thrusting down from the north also began to report finding abandoned cities on the fringes of the Taklamakan. However, being botanists, zoologists, cartographers and geologists with more urgent tasks in mind, none stopped to dig. One of them, Colonel Nikolai Prejevalsky, Russia’s greatest Central Asian explorer, stumbled upon various sand-buried or long-abandoned sites during his Lop-nor expedition of 1876–7 and on his subsequent travels in the region. In 1879, after dodging Chinese frontier guards, the Russian botanist Albert Regel discovered a huge walled city near Turfan whose ruins were later identified as those of the ancient Uighur capital of Karakhoja. He reported finding ‘Buddhist idols’, but he had no time to explore further as the Chinese hustled him back to Russia. That same year a Hungarian geological expedition entered the great Buddhist cave temples at Tun-huang but, not being antiquarians, went on their way.

  Perhaps the first visitor to Chinese Turkestan to whom the idea of digging occurred, although he did not attempt it himself, was Sir Francis (then Captain) Younghusband. In his book The Heart of a Continent, an account of his race across China with Colonel Bell in 1887, he tells how he engaged a Pathan named Rahmat-ula-Khan whose life’s ambition it was to visit England. To achieve this he was proposing to lead a string of rare white camels to London. Having visited the Calcutta zoo, and noted the interest displayed in unfamiliar animals, he was convinced that his camels would cause a sensation in London. However, Younghusband suggested another idea.

  ‘I told him that if he would search about among the old ruined cities of this country and those buried by the sand, he might find old ornaments and books for which large sums of money would be given him in England.’ Before they parted, Younghusband wrote letters of introduction on his behalf to the directors of the British Museum and those at Calcutta and Bombay.

  Although archaeologists today would deplore such advice, nonetheless Younghusband showed remarkable far-sightedness in making this suggestion, particularly with his mention of old books. Indeed it is mystifying where he obtained the idea. For this was three full years before the discovery of the famous Bower manuscript which was to send a shock-wave through the world of Indian scholarship, pointing to the existence of a forgotten Buddhist civilisation awaiting excavation in China’s back of beyond.

  3. The Great Manuscript Race

  * * *

  Rahmat-ula-Khan, Younghusband’s Pathan guide, appears either to have ignored his advice or to have dug in the wrong places. For nowhere in the record of early archaeological discoveries in the Taklamakan is there any reference to him, although other native treasure-hunters are named as the sources of particular finds. Writing some fifty years after their journey, Younghusband, by then a celebrated figure, notes that his letters of introduction were never used. It is possible that in a region where life was so cheap, the Pathan did not live long enough to make use of them. Anyway, within a year or two, others were busy with their spades and very soon a series of remarkable finds, including manuscripts written in previously unknown languages, began to emerge from the barren desert.

  The first of these early discoveries (and the most important as it turned out) was made inadvertently in 1889 by a party of native treasure-hunters who decided to tunnel their way into a mysterious, dome-like tower near Kucha, south of the T’ien Shan on the northern arm of the old Silk Road. For it was believed locally that the ruined building contained treasure.

  Once inside the tower (probably an old Buddhist stupa, or tomb) the intruders found themselves in a large room in the centre of which were heaped quantities of old papers. As their eyes became accustomed to the dark they also found themselves gazing on the mummified corpses of several animals, including a cow, propped up as though on guard. When touched these crumbled to dust. Written on one wall in characters they had never seen before was a mysterious inscription. Although disappointed at not finding the treasure they had hoped for, they carried the papers to the house of the local Qazi, or Moslem judge, in a basket. There, two days later, they were examined by a Haji (one who has been to Mecca) named Ghulam Qadir. Despite not being able to read a word of any of them, he decided to purchase several.

  At the same time, combing the region for the murderer of a young Scottish traveller was an Indian army intelligence officer, Lieutenant (later Major-General Sir Hamilton) Bower. The dead man was Andrew Dalgleish, who had already made a name for himself as a Central Asian explorer. For no apparent reason he had been treacherously shot and then hacked to death on a lonely pass by a huge Afghan called Daud Mohammed from Yarkand. Lieutenant Bower (who died only in 1940) happened to be in the region at the time, apparently conducting a clandestine survey under cover of a shooting expedition. Receiving orders from the Indian Government to track down the killer and bring him to justice, Bower set about organising a private intelligence service with tentacles reaching into Afghanistan, China and Russia. (Eventually two of his agents tracked down Daud Mohammed in Samarkand, coming face to face with him in the bazaar.) Meanwhile Bower himself had taken up the murder trail along the old Silk Road. In pursuit of his quarry he eventually reached the oasis of Kucha, which lies to the south of the T’ien Shan. There he heard of the manuscripts in the possession of Haji Ghulam Qadir. One of these, consisting of fifty-one birch-bark leaves, he bought and dispatched to Calcutta to the Asiatic Society of Bengal. At first the pages were judged to be unintelligible. However, they were finally deciphered by an Anglo-German orientalist, Dr Augustus Rudolf Hoernle. Consisting of seven distinct but incomplete texts, and written in Sanskrit using the Brahmi alphabet, the manuscript dealt largely with medicine and necromancy. Dating from around the fifth century, and probably written by Indian Buddhist monks, it proved to be one of the oldest written works to survive anywhere, older than anything that had come to light in India. It was only because of the extreme dryness of the Taklamakan region, whose climate can be likened to that of Egypt, that it had survived.

  The importance of the find is best summed up by Hoernle himself, who declared that ‘the discovery of the Bower manuscript and its publication in Calcutta started the whole modern movement of the archaeological exploration of Eastern Turkestan’. Anothe
r scholar, writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, declared, with some exaggeration, that as a consequence of Lieutenant Bower’s find and Hoernle’s publication : ‘All scientific Europe set forth on the quest for further antiquities in this region.’

  Meanwhile, the rest of the Kucha manuscripts acquired from the treasure-hunters by Haji Ghulam Qadir were beginning to find their way by tortuous routes into Hoernle’s hands. After Bower’s purchase, the Haji had sent all those he had left to his younger brother in Yarkand, who took them the following year across the Karakoram to Leh. There some of them were acquired by a Moravian missionary named Weber who passed them to Hoernle. The rest then continued on their way to India with the Haji’s brother, who left them there with a friend for four years. On his next visit he collected them and brought them back to Kashgar where he presented them to George Macartney, the British representative. In his turn, Macartney dispatched them back across the Karakoram – their third such crossing – to Simla, from where they too were forwarded to Hoernle in Calcutta. Thus in 1896, some seven years after their discovery in the ruined stupa, all three portions of the Haji’s collection – now known to scholars as the Bower, Weber and Macartney manuscripts – were reunited.

  But that still left those found in the stupa which had not been bought by the Haji. What had happened to them? Ever on the lookout for antiquities, the Russian consul in Kashgar, Nikolai Petrovsky, acquired these over the next few years. He was to keep scholars in St Petersburg supplied with a constant flow of manuscripts and other antiquities from the Silk Road until his retirement in 1903, some of which can be seen today in the Hermitage.