Part 1 (2/2)

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 apt.i.tude for them. He studied Oriental languages in Vienna, Leipzig and Tbingen, 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 princ.i.p.al of the Oriental College in Lah.o.r.e. 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 the 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.

Stein found a city filled with Moghul-era splendors when he reached Lah.o.r.e at the beginning of 1888. The fort of its old walled city was a forty-nine acre citadel; the Badshahi Mosque dwarfed even the Taj Mahal; and the Shalimar Gardens featured more than 400 marble fountains. But it was inside the old Lah.o.r.e Museum where Stein's eyes were opened to much earlier treasures. The curator was John Lockwood Kipling, whose son Rudyard Kipling described the museum in his novel Kim and gave the building its moniker-the Wonder House. And the museum soon worked its wonders on Stein. Never before had he seen such an extraordinary collection of ancient Buddhist statues. Some had features more European than Asian, indeed many resembled Greek G.o.ds. Here were Buddhas with round eyes and wavy hair and moustaches, wearing what looked more like Roman togas than the patched robes of monks.

The figures were from Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist kingdom that flourished for centuries around the Peshawar Valley in northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its boundaries moved over the centuries, but it produced a rich vein of art, especially from the first century BC to the fifth century AD. Gandhara was where Eastern ideas met Western art, where Buddhism, migrating west from its Himalayan birthplace, encountered the legacy of Alexander the Great. His armies marched east and conquered the region. The soldiers departed, but the influence of cla.s.sical art remained. Gandhara also produced some of the oldest surviving images of the Buddha as a human figure. Because of this unique meeting of cultures, the Gandharan depictions of the Buddha have decidedly Western features.

For Stein, fascinated by the journey and the changing face of Buddhism and liminal places where cultures merged, these strange Buddhas were intriguing. He was as enchanted as the Tibetan lama in Kim's opening pages who stands awestruck on entering the Wonder House. Stein saw the figures when few Westerners were aware of Gandharan art. Lockwood Kipling, the model for Kim's white-bearded curator of the Wonder House, was an expert on Gandharan art and no doubt shared his knowledge with Stein in the many evenings they spent at Kipling's home. They also appeared to share a familiarity with the man who inspired English literature's first Buddhist character, for after Kim's publication, Lockwood Kipling wrote to Stein: ”I wonder whether you have seen my son's Kim & recognized the old Lama whom you saw at the old Museum.”

Through Lockwood Kipling, Stein met Fred Andrews, the first of his lifelong Lah.o.r.e friends who would provide intellectual sustenance and logistical support throughout his travels. Andrews was a friend of Rudyard Kipling and was Lockwood Kipling's deputy at Lah.o.r.e's Mayo School of Art. Andrews was an artistic young man, whose brother George Arliss became a filmmaker and an Academy Awardwinning actor who helped launch Bette Davis's career. Andrews would never achieve the fame of his brother-or that of his friend Rudyard-but he would become Stein's right-hand man.

Stein moved into Mayo Lodge, a large bungalow where Andrews lived with his wife and young daughter. In 1890 the two young men took a short trip to the Salt Range hills of Punjab, where Andrews introduced Stein to the new-fangled art of photography, which, like his mapmaking skills, Stein would put to good use in Central Asia.

The Mayo Lodge circle was widened to include Percy Stafford Allen, a young history professor, and Thomas Arnold, a philosophy professor. For a reticent man such as Stein, it was a sociable life with picnics, costume parties, and tennis games, although Stein avoided the latter. The four men soon developed chummy nicknames for each other. The names stuck and they addressed each other by them in letters throughout their lives. Andrews was the Baron, Arnold the Saint, and Allen, who would become Stein's closest friend and confidant, was Publius for sharing the three initials of Publius Scipio Africa.n.u.s, the Roman tactician who defeated Hannibal and his elephants. Stein himself became the General, a hint that the more commanding of his traits were already evident. Also apparent was Stein's appet.i.te for work, especially pursuing his own scholarly interests in the hours before and after his official day job. He rose before 6 a.m. and worked until dinner time. It was a prelude to his years as an explorer which invariably saw him up before dawn, traveling or exploring all day, and writing copious notes, diaries, and long letters to officials and friends for hours after his men were asleep around their campfires. His focus on his work was such that when a house in which he was a guest threatened to burn down one night, Stein's first response was not to save himself but to pile his books and papers into a blanket ready to toss them out the window.

As Stein was settling into his Lah.o.r.e life, a gruesome murder in the mountains that separate Turkestan from Ladakh would inadvertently set the trajectory for his future. Andrew Dalgleish, a young Scottish adventurer and trader, was hacked to death with a scimitar-along with his little dog-while crossing the Karakoram Pa.s.s in 1888. News of the Scotsman's murder was reported widely. Why Dalgleish was slain was not known, but the ident.i.ty of his attacker was. The killer was a bankrupt Afghan named Daud Mohammed. A British army officer, Lieutenant Hamilton Bower, was sent to arrest the culprit. The Afghan was eventually tracked by the Russians to a bazaar in distant Samarkand, where he was arrested and died (suicide, allegedly) before he could be brought to justice.

As a murder hunt it was a failure. But it sparked a different kind of chase-for buried treasures. During the pursuit for Dalgleish's killer, Lieutenant Bower arrived in the Turkestan oasis of Kucha, where he bought an ancient ma.n.u.script on birch-bark leaves that local treasure hunters had found in a ruined tower. He sent the fifty-one leaves to Calcutta, where they were eventually deciphered by Oriental scholar Dr. Rudolf h.o.e.rnle. The Bower Ma.n.u.script, as it came to be known, dealt with oddities such as therapeutic uses of garlic, necromancy-communing with the dead-and care of the mouth and teeth. But it wasn't the ancient tips on dental hygiene that set the scholarly world alight. Experts were intrigued by its Indian script, ancient Brahmi from around the fifth century. It was older than any other known Indian doc.u.ment, but it had been found in far-off Chinese Turkestan, across the Taklamakan Desert on the old northern Silk Road. Its isolation, far from humid, monsoonal India, was the very reason the doc.u.ment had survived. But how had it got there and what else was buried under the desert sands? Other fragments and artifacts soon began appearing in the oases that fringe the Taklamakan, making their way from the hands of locals to collectors in European capitals. It prompted some in Europe to wonder about the influence of India on this then little-known region in Central Asia. The more adventurous packed their bags, hired camels and went to find out.

Stein started planning his first expedition to Turkestan when, after more than a decade in Lah.o.r.e, he moved to Calcutta to become princ.i.p.al of a Muslim boys college in May 1899. He loathed the city's steamy climate but made the most of its proximity to Buddhism's birthplace and sacred sites. One of his first journeys out of Calcutta was to the ruins of Bodhgaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Although Stein wandered from early morning until dusk, the day was too short. Within months of arriving in India's northeast he embarked on a longer tour of ancient Buddhist sites, traveling partly on an elephant.

The trips equipped him with first-hand knowledge of Buddhism's roots when he left India for Turkestan in May 1900. He was then thirty-seven and planned to travel for a year. His sights were set on an area around Khotan on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The oasis, known today as both Hotan and Hetian, had for centuries been famed for its exquisite jade and its carpets. But these were not what interested Stein. He knew local treasure seekers had recently found fragments of ancient Indian ma.n.u.scripts in the region.

He had read the works of ancient Chinese pilgrims who told of a flouris.h.i.+ng Buddhist kingdom centered around Khotan. Stein had also read Swedish explorer Sven Hedin's accounts of his travels through the desert near Khotan and gleaned practical information about surviving the brutal desert climate. From the Swede's descriptions of ruined wall paintings encountered on his hasty trip, Stein was in no doubt that these were ancient Buddhist images. A thorough search, he believed, could reveal how far Indian culture had spread into Turkestan.

Stein was the first archaeologist to dig methodically into Turkestan's pre-Muslim past. Nearly a hundred miles northeast of Khotan was Dandan-Uiliq, or the Place of Houses of Ivory, where the bleached wooden posts of ruined houses stuck out of the sand dunes like ghostly fingers-fingers that beckoned to Stein on his first desert foray. This dig would be the training ground for the years ahead. He arrived amid the dunes in December 1900 with a team of camels, donkeys, laborers, and enough supplies to last a month. It meant he could stay longer and dig more thoroughly than any of the poorly equipped locals. He could see where they had worked, but much remained untouched. From murals on the walls, he quickly realized this had been a Buddhist settlement. In one temple, he found a pedestal where a colossal Buddha statue once stood. But all that remained were the feet. He found painted wooden panels that reflected the range of influences, including Gandhara, and even a black-bearded Persian-style Buddhist image. Never before had he seen such a feature on any Buddhist figure. It pointed to the influence of distant Persia across the Taklamakan Desert. In the ruins of a monastic library he found fragments of ancient Indian scripts.

In early January 1901, Stein resupplied his caravan in an oasis and moved to other sites. At one he found remarkable proof of the links with the cla.s.sical world. Amid ruins in the Turkestan desert, he found clay seals with images of the G.o.ds of ancient Greece: Eros, Heracles, and Athena. Stein was so taken with the image of the G.o.ddess of wisdom and strategy that he adapted her image from the seal and used it in the front of his published works. At another site, he uncovered what were then the oldest known Tibetan doc.u.ments. And at a solitary sacred mound, or stupa, named Rawak he found the remains of nearly a hundred large Buddhist statues, some with traces of gold leaf and their once-vivid color. The stucco figures were depicted wearing embroidered coats and large boots into which were tucked baggy trousers. Stein excavated and photographed the figures, some more than nine feet tall, but they were too fragile to remove and so he returned them to the sand. ”It was a melancholy duty to perform, strangely reminding me of a true burial,” he wrote. He hoped this would keep them safe until one day Khotan had its own museum.

His final task before leaving Turkestan on his first expedition involved uncovering material of a different sort. For several years Stein had been suspicious about some woodblock-printed books that had supposedly been found in the desert near Khotan. George Macartney had bought them in Kashgar and sent them to Calcutta to h.o.e.rnle, the eminent scholar who had deciphered the Bower Ma.n.u.script. The Orientalist labored long over these strange Khotanese books, but their printed script baffled him. h.o.e.rnle raised the possibility that they were fakes before he cast scholarly caution to the wind and dismissed the idea.

Stein was more skeptical. As he dug his way around the Taklamakan Desert, his suspicions grew. He had uncovered fragments of ancient doc.u.ments in the desert sands-in Chinese, Tibetan, and ancient Indian scripts. But not the tiniest fragment was in an unknown script. He knew the common link between h.o.e.rnle's mysterious old books and others that had turned up in London and Moscow was a Turkestan man. Stein resolved to confront him.

Islam Akhun had a checkered past. For years, he had survived by collecting coins, seals, and other antiques from around Khotan. But by the time Stein arrived in Turkestan, Islam Akhun had reinvented himself as a hakim, or medicine man. His therapeutic skills somehow involved the use of several pages of a French novel. Whether these were read aloud or administered internally, Stein quipped, he could not say.

Islam Akhun strenuously denied forging the doc.u.ments when he was first brought before Stein in Khotan. He was simply a middleman for others who had since died or disappeared. He had never even seen the sites where these finds were made, he protested. But then Stein confronted him with the account Islam Akhun had previously given Macartney of exactly how and where he had found the old books. Islam Akhun was outfoxed and oddly flattered that his fanciful tales had been recorded-and he confessed.

He said he knew Europeans were prepared to pay for old ma.n.u.scripts, but he had no wish to engage in back-breaking digging in the desert to uncover them. The enterprising scoundrel had a better idea. His first ”old books” were handwritten imitations of genuine fragments. However, as his European buyers couldn't read them anyway, the effort in copying real script seemed needless. Doc.u.ments in ”unknown scripts” began appearing. Business was brisk and soon supply of the handwritten doc.u.ments couldn't keep up with demand. By 1896 he turned to ma.s.s production using woodblock printing. Sheets of paper were dyed yellow and hung over a fireplace to ”age” them. At times this was done too enthusiastically and Stein noted some of the old books sent to Calcutta were scorched. They had been bound so as to imitate European volumes-which should have rung alarm bells-and their pages sprinkled with sand.

Stein had solved a mystery which had fooled a brilliant scholar. Even so, he had no wish to see Islam Akhun punished. The man was no stranger to harsh local justice. For past misdeeds, including fraud, he had been imprisoned, flogged, and forced to wear a wooden collar or cangue, similar to a portable pillory, which renders the offender unable to feed himself or lie down. Stein even developed a grudging respect for the ”versatile rogue,” whom he found witty and highly intelligent. Too intelligent to waste his not inconsiderable talents in Khotan, Stein told him in jest. And in this throwaway line, Islam Akhun was quick to sniff fresh opportunity. He begged Stein to take him to Europe where he could, no doubt, find a bigger market for his unique skills. Stein declined the rogue's entreaty.

A year after he arrived in Turkestan, Stein departed Kashgar with his treasures destined for the British Museum and his baggage loaded onto eight ponies. Flushed with success, Stein accompanied his cargo west across the border to the Russian railhead and on to London. He had learned how to work in the desert, uncovered a forgery and gathered a wealth of antiquities from a forgotten civilization.

Stein was never going to be content as a cog in the civil service. Soon after he returned to India from his first expedition into Turkestan, he began lobbying for another trip that would again take him away from the confines of desk work. Initially, it wasn't a return to Turkestan that called him but new ground, Tibet. He was keen to join a mission being led by British army officer Francis Younghusband, a man destined to become known as much for his eccentric, free-loving beliefs and a mystical vision in Tibet as for his daring military leaders.h.i.+p.

Stein's bid to go to Tibet was rejected because he lacked the language skills required. Undeterred, he switched his attention back to Turkestan, where there remained much more he could do. His first expedition had barely scratched the surface. Just think what he might achieve with more time and money. He set about getting both. He wanted to travel beyond Turkestan to the edge of China proper-as the neighboring province of Gansu was thought of-to explore the ancient route between China and the West.

He presented his masters with his grand plan in September 1904. He began by reminding them of what he had achieved in his first endeavor. The artifacts he had already unearthed in the desert showed how far Indian culture had spread. He also revealed that the area around Khotan had been a previously unknown meeting place between the great ancient civilizations of China, Persia, India, and the cla.s.sical West. And for those not impressed with scholars.h.i.+p, he drew attention to practical realities: he had done it within the time and budget allotted.

He wanted to return to Khotan, where he expected the ever-s.h.i.+fting dunes would have surrendered more ruins in the years since his first visit. Then he would strike out across the desert to the Lop Nor region in the Taklamakan's far east, where Sven Hedin had discovered an ancient settlement called Loulan. Just beyond the desert in Gansu was the oasis of Dunhuang, or Shazhou-the City of Sands. This was the ancient gateway between China and Central Asia through which all Silk Road travelers once pa.s.sed. Nearby were caves filled with murals and sculptures he wanted to explore. ”A great many of the grottos are now filled more or less with drift sand and hence likely to have preserved also other interesting remains,” he wrote with greater prescience than he could have imagined.

The urgency was obvious. The Bower Ma.n.u.script had drawn attention to the riches of the desert's sands. Local treasure seekers were destroying archaeological evidence, and rival European expeditions were likely. Stein's successes had already prompted a German team to head to Turkestan and return with forty-four crates of antiquities. And, he noted pointedly, they had three times his budget. The Russians, too, were considering mounting an expedition. The implications would not be lost on the British government. Stein was working against a backdrop of the Great Game, a phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Cold War.

Political uncertainties within China were also a factor, he argued. Local Chinese authorities had been helpful so far, but that could change. ”It seems scarcely possible to foresee whether . . . political changes may not arise which would close that field to researches from the British side.” Nor could he foresee that when the political winds did change, he would be at their center. Having already applied for British citizens.h.i.+p, he appealed to national and imperial pride. ”The wide-spread interest thus awakened makes it doubly desirable that the leading part so far taken in these explorations by British enterprise and from the side of India should be worthily maintained.”

To add further muscle to his application, he lobbied influential scholars and a.s.sociates-Stein was a great networker-for their support. He had characteristically argued his case from all directions: scholars.h.i.+p, patriotism, politics, and economics. He knew he needed to if he was to avoid a refusal by the bureaucracy, that ”centre of intellectual suns.h.i.+ne,” as he dubbed it.

The bottom line was he wanted to leave India in the spring of 1905 for two and a half years-more than twice the duration of his first expedition-and wanted a corresponding increase in funds to do so. It was an audacious request, as he well knew. ”A bold demand which possibly may make an impression-or frighten,” he admitted in a letter to his friend Fred Andrews. It did both. And the effect in certain quarters was not what he hoped. Some were miffed that within a year of a role being created for him Stein was lobbying to take off. The t.i.tle Archaeological Inspector had been added to his already long-winded one of Inspector General of Education for North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. The authorities were annoyed that he wanted to depart before he had completed a detailed report on his first Turkestan trip and helped settle how the antiquities he brought back should be divided between museums in Britain, Lah.o.r.e, and Calcutta. Stein realized he would have to delay his trip for a year to do this.

Behind the scenes, other objections were raised too. There were hidden costs, argued one official. Although Stein had prepared a detailed budget-even including the cost of presents to local officials-he had neglected a vital element: he hadn't allowed for his onward travel to Europe to accompany his finds and time in London to work on them. Meanwhile, another bean counter, scrutinizing the itinerary itself, pondered whether Stein couldn't perhaps reduce his traveling time by cutting the Dunhuang leg of his journey. Had he done so, Stein would have missed out on the site of the Silk Road's most remarkable discovery.

As officialdom dragged its wearying chain, Stein waited to hear the fate of his proposal. Then, unexpectedly, in April 1905, a telegram arrived from his old friend Thomas ”the Saint” Arnold. It must have seemed like news from the G.o.ds. Arnold, now back in London and working in the India Office, tipped Stein off that a decision on his proposal had finally been made. Arnold's one-word cable to Stein read simply: ”Rejoice.”

If daughters or sons of good family want to give rise to the highest, most fulfilled, awakened mind, what should they rely on and what should they do to master their thinking?

-VERSE 17, THE DIAMOND SUTRA

3.

The Listening Post Stein did indeed rejoice, but even before his pots of Marmite and desiccated cabbage reached him in India he was receiving unsettling news from Kashgar. Macartney regularly updated Stein about goings-on in the oasis, proudly boastful of his son Eric and quietly amused by the activities of a mutual friend there, an eccentric but much-loved Dutch priest named Father Hendricks. But Macartney's letters went well beyond domestic chit-chat.

”There is a piece of news which should interest you,” he wrote with typical British understatement. ”A German expedition is now at Turfan. I had a letter from them only this week . . . I don't know how many Germans there are. But the man who wrote me signed himself Albert von Lecoq [sic]; and he mentions a companion of his under the name of Bartus.” Exactly what they were up to at Turfan, more than 800 miles east of Kashgar, Macartney wasn't sure; he suspected they might be geologists or intruders on Stein's archaeological terrain. However, he did know they were heading for Kashgar. And the Germans were not the only ones bringing their buckets and spades to Turkestan. Macartney had learned of ”another poacher on your preserves.” An American named Ellsworth Huntington had asked Macartney if he knew anything about old ma.n.u.scripts discovered in the desert. ”The sooner you are on the field, the better,” Macartney warned Stein.

Having been forced to postpone his trip by a year, Stein's frustration grew the more he learned of these rivals. As his departure day drew closer, the news from Kashgar became increasingly alarming. The two Germans had arrived in Kashgar in October 1905 and were staying under Macartney's roof. Even as Macartney was enjoying the lively companions.h.i.+p of some new European faces in town-and a gregarious pair at that-he was gleaning information about their plans and quietly pa.s.sing the news to Stein, along with the confidential reports prepared for his own political masters in India. The Germans represented rival ambitions. Nothing personal, of course.

<script>