Part 6 (1/2)
Eventually an agreement was reached, and today the ma.n.u.scripts are in the British Library; silk paintings, sculptures, and coins in the British Museum; textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and murals and silk paintings in the National Museum in New Delhi.
When he had heard this much and penetrated deeply into its significance, the Venerable Subhuti was moved to tears.
VERSE 14, THE DIAMOND SUTRA.
15.
Treasure Hunters Stein was the first, but by no means the last, foreigner to arrive on Abbot w.a.n.g's doorstep eager to relieve him of treasures. As Stein's caravan desperately searched for the end of the Keriya River in the Taklamakan Desert and he counted cartridges ready to relieve the suffering of his ponies, his arch rival, Frenchman Paul Pelliot, arrived at Dunhuang on February 12, 1908. Pelliot was unaware that Stein had seized the Silk Road's greatest prize.
Pelliot, too, had heard the rumor of a hidden cache of ma.n.u.scripts, when pa.s.sing through the Turkestan capital Urumqi, 600 miles from Dunhuang. Clearly word had spread along the northern Silk Road, which is where Albert von Le Coq heard the tale.
Pelliot, on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, was joined on his first and, as it turned out, only Turkestan expedition by a photographer, Charles Nouette, and a doctor, Louis Vaillant. Like Stein, Pelliot found no sign of w.a.n.g on his initial visit to the site and discovered the Library Cave was locked. The Frenchman found w.a.n.g in Dunhuang and the pair agreed to meet at the caves. But when they did, a frustrated Pelliot learned that the key had been left behind in Dunhuang. He also learned that Stein had preceded him. But, w.a.n.g a.s.sured Pelliot, Stein had spent only three days at the caves. In fact, Stein stayed twenty-four days.
It was March 3 before the cave was unlocked and Pelliot was allowed inside. When he entered the holy of holies, as he called it, he was dumbfounded. The cave was still crammed with between 15,000 and 20,000 scrolls. Pelliot spent three feverish weeks going through them. He estimated it would take six months to examine every scroll properly. But he was determined to look briefly at each and raced through a thousand a day. Dust in the cramped cave caught in Pelliot's throat and the fragrance of ancient incense still lingered in some of the scrolls. A photograph from the time shows him in a heavy dark coat, hunched over a scroll just inside the Library Cave. The mural of the two trees, before which Hong Bian's statue once stood, is just visible on the rear wall. Pelliot is surrounded by tightly packed bundles. In front of him, the naked flame of his candle is perched alarmingly close to the priceless paper scrolls.
Although beaten to the cave by Stein, Pelliot had one clear advantage. He knew exactly what he was looking at, for he spoke and read Chinese. The Professor of Chinese at the ecole franaise d'Extrme-Orient in Hanoi had no need to rely on an a.s.sistant's scant knowledge of Buddhism. He could cherry-pick the best-and did. He set aside two piles of scrolls: those that he wanted at any cost, and a second pile that he would take if he could. As well as the Chinese scrolls, he picked his way through a range of other doc.u.ments in Tibetan, Uyghur, Khotanese, Sogdian, even Hebrew, and a Nestorian Gospel of St. John. He also examined the silk banners. Among the best were a silk depicting an ancient pilgrim carrying scrolls on his back-an image that evokes Xuanzang-and the painting of demons attempting to distract the Buddha with a fire-lance.
Pelliot learned Stein had paid w.a.n.g for ma.n.u.scripts and resolved to do likewise, and his negotiations with the abbot appear to have been less fraught than Stein's. By the time Pelliot arrived, w.a.n.g had already successfully sold scrolls and other material to a foreigner and was rea.s.sured to realize that no one had discovered his secret deal. Stein had laid the groundwork, and w.a.n.g had begun spending the money on restorations to his caves. But emboldened as he was to enter into a deal with Pelliot, w.a.n.g was not prepared to sell all the cave's remaining contents. Pelliot paid w.a.n.g about 90 for his haul, which included more than 4,000 scrolls in Tibetan, 3,000 in Chinese, thousands of fragments in Sanskrit, and about 230 paintings on silk, cotton, and hemp. The scrolls and ma.n.u.scripts are now in Paris's Bibliotheque nationale de France and the textiles, including the silk banner of the ancient pilgrim, are in the Musee Guimet.
As the antiquities safely steamed to France, Pelliot headed to Beijing. There he showed Chinese scholars some of what he had purchased. The reaction was immediate. Word went back to Dunhuang: everything left in the cave was to be sent to Beijing. Compensation would be paid to w.a.n.g.
w.a.n.g had seen the last of Pelliot, but not the last of the foreign devils. A j.a.panese aristocrat, Count Otani Kozui, head of the Pure Land School of Buddhism, was behind an expedition that arrived late in 1911. He was a mysterious figure-Britain suspected he was a spy-who sent two a.s.sistants to Dunhuang. Over eight weeks, the pair bought ma.n.u.scripts from w.a.n.g and left behind their names in two of the caves.
Seven years after Stein first arrived at Dunhuang-and just as the Diamond Sutra was being readied for its first exhibition in London-he returned. Zahid Beg, the trader who first told Stein about the ma.n.u.scripts, rode out to meet the explorer as he arrived at the oasis on March 24, 1914. His caravan included his new fox terrier-Dash III-and some of his old retainers, although not Chiang, who was still ensconced as Macartney's secretary in Kashgar. Chiang's hearing had improved, but he was no longer fit for harsh desert travel. Stein was less than impressed with the ”listless” replacement and dearly missed Chiang's companions.h.i.+p.
Much had changed at Dunhuang in the intervening years. Gone was the magistrate w.a.n.g Ta-lao-ye in whose yamen Stein had nearly frozen while wearing his thin European clothes, and the influential military chief Lin Ta-jen had died. But w.a.n.g was still the guardian of the caves, and the priest welcomed back his former patron. w.a.n.g was ”as jovial & benign as ever,” Stein told Allen. ”He had suffered in no way from the indulgence he showed me in a certain transaction and only regrets now that fear prevented him from letting me have the whole h.o.a.rd in 1907.”
It was an opinion shared by w.a.n.g's Dunhuang patrons, Stein claimed-with more than a touch of self-interest-so impressed were they on seeing how the money from Stein and Pelliot had been spent. Outside the caves w.a.n.g had planted an orchard, built stables and a large guesthouse. He had also been busy within the caves. Drift sand had been removed and gaudy new statues installed. But Stein's heart must have sunk when he saw the fate of the murals. Fresh plaster had been applied over some, others w.a.n.g had demolished to allow access through the rock walls to about fifty hard-to-reach grottoes. Stein could see for himself how the money had been used. Nonetheless w.a.n.g insisted Stein inspect a big red book that accounted for each horseshoe of silver.
w.a.n.g complained bitterly that money promised as compensation for the removal of the ma.n.u.scripts to Beijing never arrived. It had been skimmed off at the various yamens along the way. Some of the ma.n.u.scripts bound for Beijing also disappeared. w.a.n.g described how the scrolls had been carelessly bundled onto six carts. The carts were delayed in Dunhuang, during which time some of the ma.n.u.scripts were filched by locals. The pilfering continued during the journey, Stein later wrote. He was convinced many of the ma.n.u.scripts he bought in Gansu and in neighboring Turkestan during this third expedition came from the Library Cave. Although Beijing had ordered the cave be emptied, w.a.n.g, the former soldier, had not exactly followed orders. ”Honest w.a.n.g, the priest, has been acute enough to keep back abundant souvenirs of the great h.o.a.rd,” Stein confided to Allen.
w.a.n.g's former quarters were now a storeroom, and from them he produced boxes crammed with ma.n.u.scripts. Stein knew Pelliot had since selected the best of the scrolls and so did not realistically hope for important finds among w.a.n.g's secret cache. Nonetheless, he filled four cases with nearly 600 rolls. The ma.n.u.scripts w.a.n.g apparently squirreled away after the cave was emptied raise questions for scholars today. Were they really from the Library Cave? If not, where have they come from? Could some be forgeries? The jury is still out.
Four months after Stein's caravan pulled out of Dunhuang in April 1914, a Russian expedition arrived. Its leader, Sergei Oldenburg, also bought ma.n.u.scripts. Then, for a decade, the foreign explorers vanished from Dunhuang. Even so, Stein's thoughts at least were never far from the City of Sands. He worked on a five-volume scholarly account of his second expedition, Serindia. On the evening he finished it on Mohand Marg in 1918, he celebrated by lighting a bonfire, signaling the event to the Kashmiri mountains and to Andrews, who could see it fifteen miles down the valley in Srinagar. It was a fitting way to signpost a work that included his discovery of the beacon watchtowers from which ancient Chinese soldiers lit fires to signal to their comrades far across the desert.
The last of the foreign explorers to arrive in Dunhuang was American Langdon Warner in 1924. Warner knew the cave had been emptied, but his interest was in murals not ma.n.u.scripts, in the visual image rather than the written word. In spite of that, he too claimed to have bought ma.n.u.scripts that had ”strayed,” as he put it, from the Library Cave to nearby oases. Warner-purportedly a model for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones-was an art historian with Boston's Fogg Museum. Like those who preceded him, Warner was overwhelmed by what he saw: ”There was nothing to do but gasp,” he wrote.
But he did far more than gasp. Warner stripped murals from the walls with the conviction that, like Stein before him, he was ”rescuing” the artworks. In the years between Stein's departure and Warner's arrival, other foreigners had reached the caves. In the early 1920s, about 400 Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution across the border were interned at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Camped there for six months, the White Russians left their marks. Magnificent murals were blackened by soot from their fires. Others were deliberately defaced. Warner was appalled: ”Across some of these lovely faces are scribbled the numbers of a Russian regiment, and from the mouth of the Buddha where he sits to deliver the Lotus Law flows some Slav obscenity.”
Damage by other visitors was accidental and thoughtless, but no less destructive. Warner recorded how wors.h.i.+ppers put greasy palms on delicate murals or leaned against them. And he saw how sheepskin-clad visitors had brushed so often against a row of saintly figures in a narrow entrance that part of the painting had rubbed away. ”My job is to break my neck to rescue and preserve anything and everything I can from this quick ruin. It has been stable enough for centuries, but the end is in sight now.” He had no reservations about his actions. ”As for the morals of such vandalism I would strip the place bare without a flicker. Who knows when Chinese troops may be quartered here as the Russians were? And worse still, how long before the Mohameddan rebellion that everyone expects? In twenty years this place won't be worth a visit.”
By the time of Warner's arrival, w.a.n.g's secret stash of ma.n.u.scripts had been depleted. What Stein, Pelliot, and others failed to take had been souvenired by visiting magistrates, Warner believed. ”Each one visits the caves at the end of his term and carries off as many of the precious rolls as the priest admits are remaining. These rolls avert fire and flood and bring luck. They make splendid gifts to higher officials and sell for several hundreds of taels each.”
Warner's determination to strip the wall paintings was no snap decision. He arrived at the caves equipped to remove murals. Despite the January cold that froze the chemical fixative, he nonetheless removed about a dozen murals as well as a three-foot-tall kneeling Tang dynasty figure which he broke from its pedestal, wrapped in his woolen underwear and sent back to Harvard. ”No vandal hand but mine had disturbed it for eleven hundred years,” he wrote.
Within a year, Warner returned for more. But by then the mood had changed. His party arrived just as news swept China that a British police officer had shot dead a dozen protesting Chinese students in Shanghai in May 1925, sparking antiforeigner campaigns across the country. Anger at events in Shanghai was not all that turned the tide against Warner. Foreign explorers who were once welcomed were now shunned. The backlash focused on Stein and Pelliot, ”neither of whom could ever come back and live,” Warner wrote.
Warner's men were forbidden to camp at the caves and were threatened by angry locals who gathered nightly outside their Dunhuang inn. Warner had been so demonized that he was accused of blasting entire hillsides to remove chapels. He had even been blamed for causing a local drought and famine, he told Stein in a letter. Nor did Abbot w.a.n.g escape the s.h.i.+ft in local public opinion. The modest amount of money Warner had paid w.a.n.g on his first visit had ballooned to a vast sum around the oasis rumor mill. There were demands that w.a.n.g share his nonexistent fortune. When he failed to produce it, he was threatened with death. He saved himself by feigning madness.
Despite Warner's cautionary letter, and well aware of the changed political climate, Stein decided to mount a fourth expedition, funded by Harvard. Stein was sixty-seven years old and retired from the Indian civil service. If he hoped for a final victory lap of Turkestan, those dreams could not have been more misplaced. The expedition ended in a humiliating retreat.
The signs were ominous. Just as he was about to set off, he learned his good friend Thomas ”the Saint” Arnold had died. Arnold's one-word telegram-”Rejoice”-had elated Stein in 1905. Now the loss of the friend he had known since his Lah.o.r.e days left him grief-stricken. Still, he departed from Kashmir in August 1930. Even before reaching Turkestan, one of his surveyors fell ill and abandoned the journey. And soon after Stein arrived in Kashgar, his dog Dash V died.
China's att.i.tude toward his work had changed dramatically. Its National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities strenuously opposed his expedition. The commission regarded Stein's stated aim-to explore ancient trade routes and the path taken by Xuanzang-as cover for his true purposes: to excavate archaeological sites in Chinese Turkestan and to export artworks. The commission made its views clear in a 1,000-word doc.u.ment that reached the British Museum in early 1931.
The commission argued that the export of archaeological objects could be justified only when the objects were obtained legally, their removal caused no damage and if no one in the country of origin was sufficiently competent or interested in studying them or in their safekeeping. ”Otherwise it is no longer scientific archaeology, but commercial vandalism. Sir Aurel Stein's conduct during his previous journeys in Chinese Turkistan verges dangerously on the latter.” The commission was scathing of Stein's treatment of Abbot w.a.n.g: Sir Aurel Stein, taking advantage of the ignorance and cupidity of the priest in charge, persuaded the latter to sell to him at a pittance what he considered the pick of the collection which, needless to say, did not in any way belong to the seller. It would be the same if some Chinese traveller pretending to be merely a student of religious history goes to Canterbury and buys up the valuable relics from the cathedral care-taker.
The doc.u.ment, signed by nineteen scholars and the heads of Chinese cultural inst.i.tutions, lamented that the collection lay scattered and unstudied between London, Paris, and Tokyo, while ”their rightful owners, the Chinese, who are the most competent scholars for their study, are deprived of their opportunity as well as their owners.h.i.+p.”
The Times weighed in, spirited in its defense of Stein and withering in its att.i.tude to China, where people were ”still in the stage of grinding down fossils in the belief that these are dragon bones with special medicinal properties.” By the middle of 1931, Stein's pa.s.sport had been cancelled and he had retreated to Kashmir. He would never see Turkestan again.
16.
Hangman's Hill On a January morning in 1934, high above the quiet Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, a letter arrived on the desk of William Llewellyn Davies, head of the National Library of Wales. The imposing granite and stone building, with its sweeping view to the west over tranquil Cardigan Bay, faced away from the political storm clouds gathering over mainland Europe.
In Germany, Adolf Hitler had come to power a year earlier. Meanwhile, in London, thoughts turned to protecting the nation's cultural treasures in the event of another war. The chiefs of the nation's museums, libraries, and art galleries had met a few weeks earlier to discuss finding safe havens for their valuable works. The letter to Davies touched on that very question. It was from the British Museum and wanted to know if the National Library of Wales could offer shelter for some of the museum's treasures, including books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings. It would not be the first time the library had done so.
The library, which opened in 1916, was the realization of the dream of a young Welshman, a politician named Thomas Edward Ellis who, like Stein, had been inspired since boyhood by ancient civilizations. As a result, he looked for a way to preserve his own culture and envisioned a repository of Welsh treasures. His vision became reality with the aid of local quarrymen and coalminers, who chipped in part of their meager wages to help pay for it.
By early 1918, the library, built on a humpbacked hill known locally as Grogythan, or Hangman's Hill, was housing more than Welsh treasures. In the closing months of World War I, the British Museum sent prized items for temporary shelter. Although only a small number went from London to Wales-most objects were protected on site, including in vaults in the Bloomsbury bas.e.m.e.nt-it was a dress rehearsal for what was to come.
Tensions across Europe escalated throughout the 1930s. As the n.a.z.i regime became increasingly aggressive, war seemed inevitable, especially after the major European powers signed the Munich Agreement of September 1938. It was an act of appeas.e.m.e.nt that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland on its border with Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to rea.s.sure a nation and deliver his famous ”peace for our time” speech. Many rightly believed Chamberlain's agreement with Hitler would deliver no such thing. However, it did deliver breathing s.p.a.ce to prepare-as much as possible-for another conflict. A new war with Germany would be vastly different from the Great War. This time the conflict would be fought not in trenches but in the air above cities, and inevitably London would be targeted.
Air attack was rare in World War I. Nonetheless, the damage inflicted was high. London was bombed twenty-five times between May 1915, when the first German Zeppelin airs.h.i.+p attacked, and May 1918. Almost 600 people were killed and 174 buildings destroyed. The British Museum escaped unscathed-the nearest bomb exploded about 450 feet away-but a new war might have vastly different consequences.
Within the British Museum, lists were drawn up of portable treasures to be evacuated, based on existing inventories of what to rescue in case of a fire. The twelfth-century Lewis Chessmen carved from walrus tusks and the Sutton Hoo treasures from a medieval Anglo-Saxon s.h.i.+p burial were among the top priorities. A month after the Munich Agreement was signed, the Oriental Department of the British Museum had its list ready. Stein's ma.n.u.scripts were among those singled out for rescue. From the King's Library, six Oriental treasures on exhibition were earmarked for evacuation. Among them was the Diamond Sutra.
In March 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. In May, the n.a.z.is forged an alliance with Italy. With each pa.s.sing month, Germany's aggressive intentions toward Poland became more apparent. On August 23, 1939-a week before World War II began-late-night calls went out to staff at the British Museum. Others received telegrams. Some were told to prepare for an early start next morning; others were ordered to pack a suitcase. Behind the scenes, word had come from the Home Office: war was inevitable. It was time to move the nation's treasures.
Long before normal opening hours on August 24, vans drew into the museum's forecourt and people began arriving at the building. Thousands of folding plywood cases the museum had ama.s.sed in its bas.e.m.e.nt over the previous year were brought out of storage and packing began soon after 7 a.m. Members of the public arriving to use the Reading Room-it remained open that day-may have been puzzled to see box after box being carried out of the building and into waiting vans. However, anyone who had read The Times that morning knew Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a non-aggression pact, paving the way for the invasion of Poland, and may have guessed what was happening.
The destination of each box was initialed in chalk on the side. An initial ”T” meant the tube. Many large sculptures and objects that would be unharmed by damp made the short trip to a disused section of the Aldwych tunnel, part of London's Underground. The advantage of the tube-where the Elgin Marbles were stored-was its proximity to the museum. But there was a risk: if an airstrike hit one of the tunnels beneath the nearby River Thames, the entire network could be flooded.
Most material went to safe areas outside London. ”Safe” meant at least two miles from towns, factories, and aerodromes. Coins, medals, and small, portable antiquities were bound for more salubrious surrounds than the tube. They went to two stately homes, Boughton House and Drayton House, about seventy miles away in Northamptons.h.i.+re. Books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings were destined for a 250-mile journey to Aberystwyth.
For months, museum staff had been preparing for wartime, refining the lists to determine which among the hundreds of thousands of objects were most precious and practicing fire drills in case of an air raid. Now museum personnel were positioned at seven loading points around the building: one for material bound for the nearby Aldwych tunnel, and six for material destined for the railways. At the front of the museum's colonnaded building, they filled vans with books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings to be loaded onto trains and transported to the National Library of Wales.
Late that day, a Great Western Railway train left London's Paddington Station for Aberystwyth. The railway was dubbed the holiday line and since the mid-nineteenth century trains had brought vacationers to the seaside town to spend a week promenading along Cardigan Bay. But some of the pa.s.sengers who alighted with their suitcases at Aberystwyth station were not embarking on a late summer break, and at least one would spend most of the war years there. They were part of a team of British Museum staff sent to receive the first of the irreplaceable cargo. For the next twelve days, consignments arrived, each accompanied by a museum escort and a railway inspector. They arrived by the ton. By the time Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, about a hundred tons had already arrived in Aberystwyth, including 12,000 books and the same number of ma.n.u.scripts, and three-quarters of the museum's most prized prints and drawings.
The volume of the works was breathtaking. So was their rarity. The gems of the collection went to Wales. These included the Magna Carta, quartos and folios of Shakespeare, Milton's Paradise Lost, early books printed by William Caxton, and two Gutenberg Bibles. There were letters and doc.u.ments written by England's kings and queens, by Oliver Cromwell, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. There were prints and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael as well as by British artists J.M.W. Turner and William Blake. The jewels of Western culture were not all that went. So did 171 cases containing 6,000 Oriental books and ma.n.u.scripts in more than fifty languages, including illuminated ma.n.u.scripts in Persian and Hebrew as well as the Dunhuang scrolls.