Part 7 (2/2)
Conserving the scroll has also involved separating it into its seven sheets, just as when the sutra was printed from woodblocks. Keeping the sections flat makes them easier to work on and, more importantly, it removes strain on the scroll caused by repeated rolling and unrolling.
The Diamond Sutra of 868 was once a well-used scroll. To Barnard's trained eye, the evidence is apparent in wear along the middle where ties once prevented it from unrolling. Damage is also evident on the innermost portion, where the scroll has been wrapped tightest, and on the exposed exterior, which contains the frontispiece. Before it was stored in the Library Cave, the sutra had already been patched to prolong its life. Those repairs from centuries ago are visible in the earliest photograph of the sutra, published in Stein's Ruins of Desert Cathay.
”If you look very closely, there's evidence of patches on the verso [back] of the scroll,” Barnard says. ”It was fractured in places and repaired, which implies it was actually slightly worn, which is hardly surprising.”
Also visible in that first photograph is a water stain that darkens part of the ill.u.s.tration, including the Buddha's face. Before the scroll's first exhibition in London, the frontispiece was separated from the rest of the scroll and washed. The disfiguring stain and the ancient patches were removed and the first lining was added.
Barnard has removed at least four linings applied between 1909 and the mid-1960s. In the years since the last lining was added, conservation skills and knowledge of materials have changed substantially. Conservation now involves techniques considerably more sophisticated than gluing one paper to another. However, the question of whether or not to line has been a source of debate. Current thinking is that unlined scrolls fare better. In addition, unlike Chinese calligraphy and paintings, religious scrolls such as the Diamond Sutra were not lined in antiquity. So leaving the Diamond Sutra unlined is consistent with its original form.
For many years after World War II, the scroll was on permanent display in the King's Library of the British Museum. (Appropriately for the Diamond Sutra, that s.p.a.ce is now called the Enlightenment Gallery.) While ceramics, bronzes, and other objects can be displayed without harm for long periods, books, with their sensitivity to light, need rest. Ideally, such sensitive material should occasionally be taken off exhibition.
Yet the renown of the world's oldest dated printed book made it difficult to remove the Diamond Sutra from permanent exhibition, says Dr. Frances Wood, head of the British Library's Chinese section. The scroll was on permanent display when she joined the library in 1977, but was removed in 1995, around the time the library prepared to move from Bloomsbury to its current purpose-built home at St. Pancras. ”It was always something people asked for and it was therefore difficult to take it off display,” she says. ”So it had been on display for, we felt, too long.”
Whether the scroll will be rea.s.sembled is still to be decided. But Wood does not favor this. ”I don't think we should put it back as a scroll, because the endless rolling and unrolling is what does damage. If we can keep the sheets separate, if you wanted to exhibit it, you could put them back together to look as if it was a scroll.”
In May 2010, after nearly 1,000 hours of conservation work, the sutra was on temporary display as the centerpiece of a British Museum exhibition. The five-month show, The Printed Image in China, covered 1,300 years of the artform's development. The scroll is unlikely to go on permanent exhibition again. But that does not mean the public can no longer see it. Online ways of viewing the scroll have become available in recent years. These reveal the Diamond Sutra in detail not possible for someone peering at it in subdued light through the gla.s.s of a display cabinet. An interactive version allows people to scrutinize the entire doc.u.ment. Viewers can pause at the ill.u.s.trated frontispiece where, with the click of a mouse, it is possible to zoom in on the downcast eyes of the Buddha and the wrinkles on Subhuti's neck. Even the creases that have acc.u.mulated as the scroll has been wrapped and unwrapped over the centuries are apparent. Along the scroll, the Chinese characters of the Buddha's teaching and the colophon that gives its date are all visible. This is part of the British Library's Turning the Pages project, which lets viewers inspect some of the most precious works among the library's 150 million items. William Blake's notebook, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart's musical diary, and Lewis Carroll's original Alice's Adventures Under Ground are other gems that can be viewed this way. Just a few years ago, this method of enjoying a literary treasure would have seemed as fanciful as a caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe. For some, it will never replace the experience of viewing the real object. But if the Diamond Sutra's life is to be extended, it offers a way to appreciate the scroll without causing harm-guiding principles of conservation and Buddhism.
For much of the twentieth century, even experts were unable to readily see the treasures of Dunhuang's Library Cave. The scattering of the objects posed geographic obstacles. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain posed political ones. Even after China opened its door and perestroika thawed Russia, deep pockets were still needed to examine relics as far apart as London and St. Petersburg or New Delhi and Beijing.
Now the contents of the Library Cave are being reunited in cybers.p.a.ce. The Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts, paintings, and other Silk Road discoveries are accessible through a unique digital archive. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), based at the British Library, was established in 1994 and grew out of the first meeting of conservators from the various international collections. When the specialists gathered, they recognized a common problem, says IDP's director, Dr. Susan Whitfield. ”Everybody in all the collections felt a bit anxious, as if they hadn't done enough with this material and it wasn't accessible enough,” she says. ”It was quite a cathartic experience for everyone. It was like confession time and now let's work together.”
Whitfield suggested one way to improve access was by digitizing the material and putting it online. It was a radical suggestion in the mid-1990s with the internet in its infancy. ”Everybody looked at me as if I must be mad. 'There's no way the web is ever going to do that. There's too much material. It will be too slow,'” Whitfield said. Nonetheless, the work proceeded. The result is an extensive digital archive, among the largest of its kind in the world.
The website (idp.bl.uk) has information on ma.n.u.scripts, textiles, and paintings as well as historic photographs. By the middle of 2012, the online archive had digitized more than 125,000 of these items and contained more than 350,000 images-all freely available. From Stein's journeys alone, the website holds everything from his hand-drawn maps of the Mogao Caves to a portrait of the forger Islam Akhun and a mountain panorama taken the day Stein suffered frostbite. There is even information about Stein's dynasty of dogs named Dash.
The resource, available in seven languages, continues to grow. The aim is to have 90 percent of the Dunhuang collection online by 2015. The search for Silk Road antiquities may have been characterized by international rivalry and hostility, but today there is collaboration between cultural inst.i.tutions-including the National Library of China, the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, and the Inst.i.tute for Oriental Ma.n.u.scripts in St. Petersburg-to understand, conserve and make the material available to scholars and the public. IDP has received funding from the European Union as well as the Mellon and Ford foundations. But another way of financing the work has not changed since the days of the Diamond Sutra's merit-making patron w.a.n.g Jie. Individuals, or groups, can sponsor a sutra. The sponsored doc.u.ment is copied-through digital photography, not hand-copying-and made available online for free. The woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra is among those that have benefited from this program.
Much of what is known about the Silk Road and Buddhism's migration along it has its roots in Stein's epic journeys, his scholars.h.i.+p, and his stamina. He brought tangible evidence of how present-day Muslim Central Asia rests on Buddhist foundations. It is impossible to comprehend contemporary Central Asia-and its increasing importance in world events-without understanding the Silk Road. Stein is the thread that makes that possible.
He uncovered some of the only surviving records of daily life as it was more than a millennium ago-poignant letters by lonely soldiers, an angry missive from an abandoned wife. With his Persian Buddha, hymns to Jesus, and images of Eros, Heracles and Athena, Stein returned from the desert with sacred treasures from possibly the world's greatest and certainly least-known cultural melting pot. He showed that among the Silk Road's sands lie a magnificent lost Buddhist civilization, epitomized in the Diamond Sutra. In a world today riven by sectarian conflict, his discoveries remind us of the existence of places where people of different cultures and beliefs once coexisted peacefully and give hope that they may do so again.
Stein's resourcefulness is beyond doubt. His ability to plan and execute his epic journey over towering mountains and parched deserts and to organize teams of men and supplies is all the more remarkable given it was done without today's communication lifelines: satellite navigation, the internet, cell phones. At times, he had nothing more than a hand-drawn map to guide him, at others, not even that. But as much as his dedication and determination can be admired, his actions are more problematic. From today's perspective, the removal of ma.n.u.scripts and murals is alarming, his treatment of Abbot w.a.n.g seems calculating and manipulative. But these were not the standards of his era, and it is facile to judge one era by the values of another. Stein worked in an era when Western powers viewed the cultural objects of others as theirs for the taking and jockeyed for the right to do so. It was a time when the West claimed ”superior” knowledge and argued it alone could care for the world's treasures. Not even the bones of indigenous people were safe, as Australia's Aboriginal people know.
While the Romantic poet Robert Byron railed against Lord Elgin, who made off with the Parthenon marbles, and writer Victor Hugo against Britain and France's looting of Beijing's Summer Palace, few Western voices were raised against Stein in his lifetime. One who did protest was Sinologist Arthur Waley, the translator of the Xuanzang-inspired Monkey. Waley asked people to ”imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval MSS [ma.n.u.scripts] at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them, and carry them off to Peking.” His words recalled criticism of Stein made by China's National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities in the 1930s. Not that Waley had any sympathy for Abbot w.a.n.g, the ”precious old humbug” as he called him. Stein well knew the Chinese were interested in their remote past, according to Waley. ”But I was never able to convince him that the Chinese scholars who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote about the geography and antiquities of Central Asia were anything more than what he called 'arm-chair archaeologists.'”
Waley's dissenting voice aside, Stein died a hero in the West. But not so in China, where he has long been reviled as the greatest pirate to have crossed the ocean of sand, far worse than France's Paul Pelliot, America's Langdon Warner, Russia's Sergei Oldenburg or j.a.pan's Count Otani. Of all the material Stein removed, the Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts have attracted the most ire. Certainly more than the murals he cut from desert shrines and which arguably caused greater damage and despoiled what remained. Perhaps part of the reason for this anger is because the ma.n.u.scripts were removed from within the confines of China itself, rather than Turkestan. China continues to feel aggrieved at being deprived of these records of its culture. A recent Chinese government book about the caves describes Stein as a looter and defrauder. Visitors to the Mogao Caves, or Peerless Caves, today receive a brochure that refers to the ”theft” of the doc.u.ments and concludes: ”We hope that later generations will learn from this lesson.” But the lesson of the Library Cave is ambiguous and raises questions about what the fate of its scrolls might otherwise have been.
When Abbot w.a.n.g broke open the cave, he could elicit little interest from local authorities in its contents. By the time Stein arrived, w.a.n.g had already given away some ma.n.u.scripts to ingratiate himself with local officials. Stein's fear was that the rest would face a similar fate and be destroyed or lost. Wily and exploitative as Stein undoubtedly was in his treatment of w.a.n.g, there is no doubt his aim was to save the scrolls for the future and to better understand the past.
Personal gain and enrichment were never his motives. He lived frugally and his most treasured home was his tent. His appet.i.te for work and his eagerness to reveal the past never dimmed. His will provided for a fund to encourage Central Asian exploration. To see Stein simply as either hero or plunderer is simplistic, the reality is more nuanced. However one views the ethics of his actions, the consequences are that the Diamond Sutra and the other scrolls he took have been well cared for in one of the world's finest inst.i.tutions. They have been doc.u.mented and are increasingly available in ways unimaginable a century ago. Stein removed the scrolls when to do so was not illegal and China had neither laws nor advocates to prevent this. Certainly that had changed by the time Stein pig-headedly persisted three decades later in the face of Chinese protests.
It is possible China may one day seek the return of the Diamond Sutra and other Dunhuang treasures. China was weak and racked by political upheaval when Stein took them. Today it is a global player with the world's fastest-growing economy. As its power has increased, so has its interest in the fate of cultural treasures removed from its soil. So far this has focused on objects plundered from the Summer Palace. China estimates about 1.5 million items were stolen when French and British troops under the command of Lord Elgin-whose father acquired the Elgin Marbles-sacked and burned the palace in 1860 during the Second Opium War.
In early 2009, China attempted to stop the auction of two bronze heads belonging to the late fas.h.i.+on designer Yves Saint Laurent that once adorned a fountain at the Summer Palace. The Paris auction by Christie's went ahead, but then the buyer refused to pay. He later identified himself as Cai Mingchao, an adviser to China's National Treasures Fund, which seeks to retrieve treasures from abroad. A few months after the auction, China asked the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other inst.i.tutions in the UK, the United States, and France to allow its teams to doc.u.ment the artifacts looted from the Summer Palace. In 2010, on the 150th anniversary of the sacking of the Summer Palace, Chinese authorities called for the return of the looted artefacts.
These moves come as other countries are increasingly seeking the return of iconic objects, reigniting debate about rest.i.tution and the repatriation of cultural treasures. Greece has long demanded that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles and has built a museum in sight of the Parthenon to house them. Not that this has altered Britain's resolve to retain the statues. The British Museum argues the sculptures are part of everyone's heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. More recently Egypt has demanded Nefert.i.ti's bust from Berlin's Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.
The argument that only the West can adequately care for cultural items is less tenable than it was even a few decades ago. Yet so is the argument that the Dunhuang doc.u.ments are not available for study. Some argue that objects belong to the cultures that produced them. But even that is not clear-cut with the Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts. Most of them are in Chinese, including the Diamond Sutra, but others are in a range of languages. Where, then, should the Manichean hymns go? Or the Sogdian letters?
Most countries today are more protective of their heritage with laws preventing the removal of their cultural objects. The ancient pilgrim Xuanzang could not openly venture from China to India now, intent on removing religious scrolls. Nor could he readily give objects to a major gallery or museum. Aware that acquiring antiquities can encourage looting, many museums no longer buy them without proof they left their country of origin legally. Yet despite international laws and museum ethical codes, the black market trade in looted antiquities has mushroomed. As ancient treasures are reefed from the soil or chipped off monuments without study or doc.u.mentation, their history and context are lost. The illegal trade has been fuelled in part by buyers' ignorance. Others have deliberately turned a blind eye to the most basic question: where did this come from and how did it get here?
One area especially vulnerable to looting is the Gandharan art Stein so admired. The war in Afghanistan has taken a tragic human toll, but the continued conflict has meant the region's ancient culture is at risk of systematic destruction, according to the International Council of Museums, which has issued a ”red list” of items at risk. Among the targets of the illicit trade are ancient ma.n.u.scripts on palm leaf, birch bark, and vellum, as well as fragments of Buddhist wall paintings and figures.
Even as its art is at risk, knowledge of the Silk Road's 2,000-year history grows. Since the turn of the millennium, exhibitions in cities as far apart as London, Kyoto, Hong Kong, and St. Petersburg attest to the burgeoning interest. The romance of the Silk Road may have gone, but its imaginative power endures. Tourism has stimulated curiosity about an area off-limits to foreigners for much of the twentieth century. So has politics. As rival powers again compete for influence in Central Asia, and oil, not silk, becomes the coveted commodity, some speak of a new Great Game.
19.
Scroll Forward.
Traveling the Silk Road today no longer means facing the hazards the ancient caravans endured-not least hunger, thirst, and attack by bandits-nor even the privations faced by Stein just a century ago. The old walls of Kashgar, along which Stein groped his way in a dust storm, have gone. They have fallen victim to the wrecker's ball that has reduced much of the old city to rubble in the past decade. But tucked away behind two high-rise hotel buildings bearing its name, Chini Bagh still stands. The former British consulate is a Chinese restaurant today. Diners fill the tables on a shady veranda beside the main entrance, through whose welcoming doorway over the years have pa.s.sed Stein and Dash, Chiang, Father Hendricks, the formidable Russian consul Petrovsky, Australian journalist and correspondent for The Times G.E. Morrison, and writers Peter Fleming and William Dalrymple.
The castle-like ramparts, familiar from old photographs, and their whitewash and ochre exterior paintwork remain. But there are no traces of the shady orchard and gardens Mrs. Macartney so lovingly created, just a small vegetable patch beside some al fresco tables. Inside, the walls have been elaborately plastered and gilded, creating a baroque atmosphere in the light-filled rooms. From the rear, the view is no longer of a river, fields and the Russian cemetery where Father Hendricks' friends kept a candle burning on his grave, but of buildings and construction sites.
A fifteen-minute walk from Chini Bagh, the former Russian consulate also still stands. The once lonely outpost of the rival empire is similarly surrounded by Chinese hotel buildings. The original austere brown-and-grey-brick residence is less welcoming than Chini Bagh. In a rear room, a mural stretches the width of one wall. The painting depicts a cla.s.sical landscape in which a brave Greek soldier wrestles a bull by its horns, a florid reworking of Carle van Loo's Theseus, Vanquisher of the Bull of Marathon. The French artist's name-in Russian script-appears in the corner. How long the mural has been there and who really painted it is unknown. Perhaps Petrovsky dined under it and saw in the mural an allegory of Great Game rivalries in which Imperial Russian force subdued the British beast. A more recent hand-perhaps of Chini Bagh's plasterer-has been at work, covering the Russian consulate's walls too in ornate curlicues. The building, known as the Seman, is not open to the public, but houses the office of a property company. The Russian Cossacks once stationed there, whose airs Stein could hear from Chini Bagh, would today be inaudible over the horns of taxis and buses that in the past two decades have replaced donkey carts as the main form of transport.
The yellow-and-white Id Kah Mosque still calls the faithful to prayer and within its walls the shady poplars are a peaceful refuge from the bustle of the night market, flas.h.i.+ng neon and a billboard advertising a forthcoming Kashgar attraction-a golf course. Men with wispy beards and green embroidered hats sell circular bread cooked in clay ovens. Elderly women, faces veiled for modesty in coa.r.s.e brown fabric, nonchalantly raise their dresses to reveal ample bloomers in which they keep their money.
From Kashgar, the southern oases through which Stein pa.s.sed still see few foreigners. The route lacks the more impressive remains of Xinjiang's Buddhist past that dot the northern oases. At Yarkand, there is no sign of the yamen where Chiang lived before joining Stein and eventually becoming Macartney's secretary at Chini Bagh. No doubt Chiang knew of Yarkand's female poet, Aman Isa Khan, who died in childbirth in the sixteenth century and whose tomb remains the town's landmark. In its nearby bazaar, metal workers hammer tin into chests and the onion-domed barbecues used by street hawkers, the customers all locals. Yarkand was once a Silk Road crossroads, filled with travelers from Tibet, Afghanistan, and Ladakh and its population bigger than Kashgar. Today it is a backwater where the presence of foreigners sparks good-natured attention.
Farther east, jade is still the mainstay of Khotan, known today as both Hotan and Hetian. The stone extracted from its mountain-fed rivers, especially the white ”mutton fat” variety, continues to be highly prized among the Chinese. High-end shops attract the cashed-up while street traders display lumps of stone of dubious value on shabby cloths.
Stein once dreamed of a museum in Hotan to house the treasures of Rawak Stupa, whose sculptures he reburied only to discover jade hunters had destroyed them in a futile search for treasures concealed within. The city does have a museum that displays remains of Hotan's Buddhist past, including statues and two mummies, but nothing can undo the damage to Rawak.
A camel across the sea of sand dunes was the only way to reach the stupa, until the recent opening of a road. Yet few visitors appear to travel along it. About ten miles from Rawak is the shrine of a Muslim saint where Stein once camped under a full moon. Each May pilgrims from far afield, including Sufi musicians, pay homage to the Islamic martyr. On a late summer day it is silent and devoid of pilgrims. But a soft cooing penetrates the still air. Behind the shrine, the sacred pigeons are better housed in their brick coop than when Stein offered them a handful of grain.
The princess who brought to Hotan silkworm eggs concealed in her headdress-and hence the means to make silk-may be largely forgotten, but a compound of silk-makers still spins and weaves the fabric just outside the oasis. A young woman, baby in her lap, sits before a bath of silkworm coc.o.o.ns. She teases out a few threads and pa.s.ses them to a man seated behind a large wheel, who hand spins the gossamer thread. It will be transformed into ikat-dyed fabric with a bold pattern favored by local women for clothing. On the edge of Hotan, an elderly man keeps another ancient tradition alive. He has been dubbed the last mulberry paper-maker of the Taklamakan. Within his family's mud-brick compound he pounds the tree's bark to a pulp. When it is the consistency of watery porridge, he pours it into a mold and leaves it to dry in the sun. The result is a strong creamy paper-the same type of paper on which the Diamond Sutra was once printed.
In Hotan's main square, the disparate influences of its recent past are evident. Beneath a statue of the late Chairman Mao, looming paternalistically over a former Uyghur leader, an evening concert begins. A man crooning pop songs vacates the stage for a group of Cossack-style dancers who perform a Cinderella story as they compete to fit a young maiden with a pair of red shoes. The streets teem with donkey carts next morning for the weekly Sunday market. The scents of cardamon, c.u.min, and rose flowers fill the air in a corner of the bazaar where merchants pound drums full of spices. Elsewhere, a man whittles wooden spoons, another sells metal-spiked brushes that create the swirling pattern on the circular naan bread. The old constantly b.u.mps up against the new: two musicians perform on traditional Uyghur instruments to mark the opening of a whitegoods store.
The Taklamakan Desert itself has been tamed. Near the Thieves' Road, where Stein and his party almost died of thirst in search of the Keriya River, a sealed cross-desert highway links the northern and southern oases. Traders, travelers, and troops no longer have to take the slow, circuitous route to reach the far side of the desert, but can cut straight across it. Along each side of the road, ma.s.s plantings of rice straw in a neat grid attempt to hold back the moving sands-and the demons once conjured by this realm of deadly illusion. Trucks and buses now convey goods and people in about twelve hours along the once-trackless wastes. Pa.s.sengers on a bus from Hotan to Kucha pa.s.s the hours watching dubbed Turkish soap operas, except for an elderly Uyghur man who quietly performs his prayers to Mecca in the aisle.
Across the desert on the old northern Silk Road the work of Albert von Le Coq is evident. At the Kizil Caves near Kucha, the German sawed off many murals. But he is not the only one to have left a destructive mark there. Treasure hunters have removed gold leaf from the robes and haloes of the Buddhas painted on the walls. Muslim iconoclasts have scratched the eyes and mouths from the sacred images. The caves, some older even than those at Mogao, were still used as dwellings until the 1980s, a guide explains, and evidence of cooking and heating is apparent on some soot-blackened paintings. Nonetheless, many murals remain. Outside the caves, a statue of k.u.marajiva honors the great translator who was born in Kucha and whose translation was used for the Diamond Sutra of 868.
The Kizil Caves contain more surviving murals than at Bezeklik near the oasis of Turfan. Von Le Coq, who daubed ”Robbers' Den” over his accommodation near Bezeklik, stripped these domed caves more thoroughly. Also near Turfan are the ruins of the ancient Buddhist city of Gaochang. Donkey carts convey visitors a mile or so along its hot, dusty length. In the once-thriving city, Xuanzang was detained by its king before being released to make his epic trip to India and back, returning via Dunhuang.
In Dunhuang's open-air market, Muslim hawkers grill sticks of mutton over charcoals, a Tibetan in a cowboy hat sells ”medicinal” dried snakes, animal horns and paws, while a Han Chinese artist etches images of angels onto gourds. The town remains a cultural crossroads, but it is far removed from the dusty garrison where Stein struggled to find someone to cut up his silver horseshoes for currency. Now he would queue at an ATM. With shop windows full of leather goods, fas.h.i.+on, and electronics, Dunhuang looks like any other prosperous Chinese town, although few anywhere are surrounded by towering sand dunes that creep ever closer.
As in the days of the Silk Road, Dunhuang's life blood is visitors from afar. But today's travelers are the result of a recent phenomenon: global tourism. Travelers to Dunhuang no longer arrive on plodding camels or b.u.mpy donkey carts, but by planes, trains, and private cars. They come to see the Jade Gate, the ruined clay fort through which so many Silk Road caravans traveled. And they come to see Crescent Lake, nestled in a hollow and surrounded by towering dunes. Stein once wished to be buried by its tranquil banks. Perhaps it is just as well his wish was never realized. There is little solitude by the lake today, where tourists ride brightly decked camels and hire toboggans to slide down the dunes. But the Ming Sha dunes no longer rumble. Pollution, not least from so many visitors, has affected the sands and since the early 1980s they have fallen silent.
Above all, people come to Dunhuang to see the Mogao Caves. And they arrive not once a year for an annual pilgrimage, but daily. Today, a paved path to the caves crosses a footbridge over the dry bed of the Daquan River, near where Stein camped. The poplars Abbot w.a.n.g planted along the river banks still provide welcome shade from the summer heat. The caves remain a place of pilgrimage for some. A visiting brown-robed priest lights incense sticks near a central paG.o.da, places them in a large incense holder and bows three times. Other visitors follow his example, although most simply pose at the photogenic spot. The rickety ladders to the caves have been replaced by steps and walkways. The once-exposed entrances to the honeycombed grottoes that reminded Stein of troglodyte dwellings have been fitted with metal doors. It is no longer possible to wander unescorted from cave to cave, as Stein did.
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