Journeys On The Silk Road Part 1

JOURNEYS.

ON THE.

SILK ROAD.

A desert explorer, Buddha's secret library, and the unearthing of the world's oldest printed book.

JOYCE MORGAN & CONRADWALTERS.

Prologue.

For nearly a thousand years two attendants waited, sealed from the world in a hand-carved cave, while the sands of the great Gobi Desert crept forward. The figures, one with a topknot of black hair, the other robed in red, guarded the darkness with only a wooden staff for protection and a fan for comfort. Their cave was three paces wide by three paces deep, but they maintained a motionless vigil from the northern wall, where they merged with the room's arid earthy browns. Outside, the winds could howl, the sun could try to bake the sand into gla.s.s and the desert could encroach with each century until even a hidden doorway to the attendants' cave was buried. But inside, time had halted and everything was safe.

In front of the attendants were tens of thousands of ma.n.u.scripts, piled as high as a man could reach. There were charts of the heavens, rules for monks, and deeds recording the ownership of slaves sold long ago. There were banners that could be unfurled from the cliffs outside and paintings on silk of enlightened beings. But outnumbering all of those were sutras-the words of the Buddha himself-piled into the black air, unheard, awaiting rebirth into a new realm.

Most were copies made with brushes dipped in l.u.s.trous charcoal ink by hands unknown, in kingdoms forgotten. But one paper sutra held special significance. It could confer spiritual blessings as no other. Where the rest were laboriously copied by long-dead scribes, this had been created with a wooden block and reproduced at a rate once unimaginable. It was the oldest printed book in the cave-the Diamond Sutra-and although no one outside knew it yet, this dated scroll was the oldest of its kind anywhere. The sutra taught that life is illusory and as fleeting as a bubble in a stream. True to its message, all who once knew the printed scroll was inside the cave had long since turned to dust, yet the Diamond Sutra itself remained intact.

Many copies of the sutra had preceded this one. Its words had been carried by man and beast through the wispy clouds of mountain pa.s.ses, over the cracked earth of deserts, across the glacier-fed currents of surging rivers. In time this printed copy would cross the seas to reach lands unknown to its creators. One day it would even convey the Buddha's wisdom invisibly through the air.

While Christians fought the Crusades and Magellan circled the globe, while Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and Genghis Khan united nomadic tribes, while the Black Death consumed Europe and Galileo imagined the cosmos, while Joan of Arc answered the voices in her head and Michelangelo sculpted David, the two attendants stood in meditative silence. Then, at the cusp of a new century, sound returned to the Library Cave. It was 1900-the Year of the Rat-and a faint noise announced the painstaking sweeping of the sand outside the attendants' cave. Day by day, week by week, month by month, the level of the sand receded and the indistinct voices of laborers grew louder until their sc.r.a.pings could be heard against the hidden door. For every moment across a millennium, the eyes of the two attendants had been open in antic.i.p.ation. And, at last, a seam of light arrived.

1.

The Great Race.

An unforgiving wind blew clouds of dust and sand as if every grain were aimed at one tired man astride a weary pony. He urged his mount forward, determined to keep a promise. He had set out long before dawn, leaving behind his team of men and pack animals, knowing he would have to cover in one day ground that would typically take three. Traveling through the heat and glare of the Central Asian desert, he now looked on his vow-to arrive that day on the doorstep of friends in a distant oasis-as uncharacteristically rash. But for seventeen hours he pressed on across parched wastes of gravel and hard-baked earth.

As dusk approached, the sting of the day's heat eased, yet the failing light compounded his struggle to keep to the track amid the blinding sand. His destination of Kashgar could not be far away. But where? He was lost. He looked for someone-anyone-who could offer directions, but the locals knew better than to go into the desert at night during a howling wind storm. He found a farm worker in a dilapidated shack and appealed for help to set him back on the path. But the man had no desire to step outside and guide a dirt-caked foreigner back to the road, until enticed by a piece of silver.

The rider still had seven miles to go. He groped his way forward as the horse stumbled in ankle-deep dust. Eventually, he collided with a tree and felt his way along a familiar avenue until he reached the outskirts of the old town. Then, as if conceding defeat, the wind abated and lights could be glimpsed through the murky dark. He crossed a creaking wooden bridge to reach the mud walls that encircled the oasis. The guns that signaled the sunset closing of the iron gates to the old Muslim oasis had been fired hours ago. The only sound was the howling of dogs, alert to the clip-clopping of a stranger on horseback pa.s.sing outside the high wall. He continued until he reached a laneway. He had covered more than sixty miles to reach Chini Bagh, the home of good friends and an unlikely outpost of British sensibilities on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Its gates were open in antic.i.p.ation. He shouted to announce his arrival. For a moment, silence. Then surprised voices erupted in the darkness as servants recognized him. At last Aurel Stein had arrived. They moved closer to greet the man they had not seen for five years. At forty-three, he was no longer young, but his features were as angular as ever, and his body-though just five feet four inches tall-still deceptively strong.

Water was fetched so he could scrub away the sweat and grime etched into his skin. Only then did he present himself in the dining room. He eased into a chair, glad at last to sit on something other than his exhausted horse, and talked with his friends until well past midnight. At the dining table were Britain's representative in Kashgar, George Macartney, and his wife, Catherine Theodora, both eager to hear of Stein's journey so far and, equally important, his hopes for the trip ahead. The last time they had been together in Chini Bagh, in 1901, the explorer was at the end of his first expedition to Turkestan. He had been loaded with ancient treasures recovered from the desert, treasures that would stun scholars across Europe. Now he had returned, better equipped, better funded and better educated about the obstacles that lay ahead. George Macartney had been invaluable then, helping Stein a.s.semble the crew that would pluck antiquities from beneath the sands. This time, the stakes were higher, the journey longer and the route more deadly.

As they talked into the night of June 8, 1906, Stein had much to tell of the two-month trip that had brought him to Chini Bagh's welcoming doorstep. His weather-beaten face had barely recovered from his trip over the mountains that separated Chinese Turkestan from northern India. The high-alt.i.tude sun left his face so blistered and swollen he had wondered if his friends would recognize him. But sunburn was the least of the hardships he encountered.

His journey had begun on April 2, when he set out from northern India on a cold but sunny day. Spring had not yet greened the native chinar trees, nor had the irises sprouted as Stein left the alpine Kashmir Valley with a fox terrier named Dash at his heels. His intended route, at times following the footsteps of Alexander the Great, led up through the far north of present-day Pakistan, through lawless tribal territory, and briefly across Afghan terrain before descending to Turkestan. He knew robbery-or worse-was a risk and that at least one foreign explorer had been beheaded in the region, so he was armed with Lee-Enfield carbines and Webley revolvers. His path led over "the roof of the world," the Pamir Mountains whose jagged peaks are some of the highest on earth. The route was the quickest way to Kashgar, and he had every reason to hurry.

But the course was treacherous in the spring, as the arrival of Stein's faithful old caravan man, Muhammadju, attested. On the way to join Stein for this second, more audacious exploration of Central Asia, Muhammadju narrowly escaped an avalanche on a mountain pa.s.s. Seven of his companions had been swept to their deaths. Indeed Stein himself, after pa.s.sing through the lower Swat Valley, was forced to spend two miserable days in a leaky, crumbling shelter near the foot of one of the most avalanche-p.r.o.ne pa.s.ses, the Lowari, until a thunderstorm pa.s.sed and the sky cleared.

The snow had been abnormally heavy the previous winter, and he had been warned not to attempt the crossing before June. But that was still a month off. If he waited until then, the gorges farther along his route would be rendered impa.s.sable by floodwaters from the melting snow. Stein knew the risks in early May could be reduced by crossing the 10,230-foot Lowari Pa.s.s at night, when plummeting temperatures firmed the snow fields into a hard crust. He divided his team of men and pack animals into three groups and spread his cargo so that each animal's burden was no more than forty pounds. Then, at 1 a.m., with only moonlight and their lamps to guide them, Stein led the first group on the slow ascent. The other teams followed at fifteen-minute intervals to reduce the weight on the snow. All were aware that somewhere beneath their feet lay the frozen bodies of seventeen ponies and two dozen men who had perished there five months earlier when attempting to cross in a snowstorm.

As dawn broke, Stein reached the wind-blown top of the Lowari Pa.s.s and saw that his frustrating wait had been justified. About halfway down he spotted the signs of an avalanche that had swept through on the previous afternoon. He watched anxiously as his porters zigzagged their way down the almost sheer descent. As he reached the bottom of the pa.s.s and looked back at his other teams, one sight cheered him: his incompetent, troublesome cook being carried down and looking "more like a log than an animate being," he later wrote. The useless cook (Stein had a string of them) was "incapable of facing prolonged hard travel, even when fortified by clandestine drink and doses of opium." Stein planned to offload him in Kashgar.

Stein and his men continued through the mountains for most of May. The thin "poisonous air" made breathing difficult and caused severe high-alt.i.tude headaches. At times men sank up to their armpits in the snow and had to be pulled out by ropes. When they reached the Wakhan Corridor, the narrow strip of Afghan terrain that sticks out like a pointed finger in the country's northeast, they supplemented their caravan with a team of yaks.

Dash, almost invisible against the snow except for his one black ear, crossed the mountains with only a single complaint: a rare, subdued whine uttered as he traversed the 16,152-foot Wakhjir Pa.s.s that separated Afghanistan from Turkestan. Stein felt his two-year-old fox terrier had more than earned the n.o.ble t.i.tle he bestowed on him as a high-spirited puppy. His full name was Kardash Beg, Sir Snow Friend. As Stein descended the mountains into Turkestan he did so riding a yak with brave Dash mounted in front of him.

George and Catherine Macartney knew what drove their stocky middle-aged visitor to embark on his dangerous journey. It was not a thirst for adventures, although there would be plenty of those. Ideas were what fired him. Stein spoke of lost worlds, ancient civilizations and early encounters between East and West. He craved to know how ideas and cultures spread. And one in particular: how had tolerant, compa.s.sionate Buddhism, born in the Indian Himalayas, reached China, transforming and shape-shifting along the way? He was convinced the answer lay just beyond Kashgar, beneath the Taklamakan Desert, the vast almond-shaped eye in the center of Chinese Turkestan.

But this was not a landscape that surrendered its answers readily. With dunes that can rise 1,000 feet, the Taklamakan is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Even its local name has an ominous, if apocryphal, translation: Go in and you won't come out. Its shifting dunes, beside which the deserts of Arabia, Africa, and America seemed tame to Stein, are not the only formidable barriers to would-be explorers. To the east lies the legendary Gobi Desert. In the other three directions loom some of the world's highest mountain ranges: the Kunlun and Karakorams to the south, the Pamirs to the west and the Tian Shan, or Celestial Mountains, to the north. No divine protector could have conjured a more effective cosmic "keep out" sign.

Much depended on this latest expedition. Stein had only reached this point by the tenacious persuasion of his dual masters-the British Museum and the government of India-and each would demand tangible results in return. Soon after starting his journey he had met with the new Viceroy of India, Lord Minto. They spoke of Stein's lofty hopes for another Troy, the archaeological site excavated by the German Heinrich Schliemann less than forty years earlier. The expectations circulating around Stein were high. Minto was encouraging, even when Stein said he could not promise another set of Elgin Marbles, the cla.s.sical Greek sculptures removed from the Parthenon and brought to Britain in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the treasures he brought back would in time invite comparisons as China's Elgin Marbles. What Stein's masters wanted were antiquities to fill their museums and add prestige to the Empire. Some fortunate archaeologists and adventurers could fund their own explorations, but Stein was a civil servant and obliged to plead and cajole for time away from desk-bound duties in steamy Calcutta. And he did so for what to many must have seemed dubious rewards. Although he lived in an era of exploration, Europe's attention was focused on the rich archaeological pickings closer to home-especially in Greece, Egypt and the biblical Middle East. These were places where the roots of Western culture could be discerned and where the show-stopper h.o.a.rds of gold, jewels, and tombs covered in hieroglyphics ignited the public's imagination. Few people gave more than a pa.s.sing thought to the backblocks of Muslim Central Asia, let alone the possibility that lost Buddhist kingdoms might lie buried beneath its vast sands. Who even knew that long before the rise of Islam, a great Buddhist civilization had flourished across what we know today as Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the far west of China? Who even cared?

Stein knew-and cared-more than most. He had already completed his first successful foray into the southern part of the Taklamakan, returning from his yearlong trip with evidence of sophisticated and unknown cultures. Among his treasures were coins, statues, and murals, but to Stein, with his love of the written word, it was the doc.u.ments that were most fascinating. He returned with records on wood, paper, and leather and in a range of languages: Chinese, Tibetan, and, most intriguingly, ancient Indian scripts. Doc.u.ments can never compete with glittering jewels and golden statues for dramatic, visual appeal, but for Stein they could reveal so much more. To his trained eye, the written word exposed how language, people, and customs traveled and revealed the poignant details of ordinary life. Whether it recorded the daily duties of soldiers, the ch.o.r.es of monks or even the clumsy attempts of a child to complete his schoolwork, a doc.u.ment could reconst.i.tute a life, and through that Stein could glimpse a civilization. Such discoveries had dazzled his colleagues and made his name as an archaeologist and explorer. They also made him hungry for more.

His first expedition laid essential groundwork. It was an apprenticeship during which he made vital contacts and friendships among the Muslim begs (headmen) and the Chinese ambans (high-ranking officials) along the desert's southern oases. He had a.s.sembled a trusted team of men, some of whom, like Muhammadju, rejoined him for his second expedition. His first trip had convinced him he could push much farther into the desert to uncover the secrets of the sands. If successful, he would cement his reputation and he could then devote his life to uncovering ancient knowledge. And if he failed? He risked forever being frustrated as a colonial wage slave and never again being allowed the freedom to explore.

He knew his intended route across the desert was feasible, if dangerous. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin had proved it about a decade earlier. Hedin was the first European in living memory-and possibly the first since Marco Polo-to succeed. Younger and more gung-ho than Stein, Hedin had left two of his men dead from thirst-and nearly succ.u.mbed himself. Hedin had plucked long-buried items from the sands as he charged across the desert, but he was a geographer and cartographer, not an archaeologist. His interest was in the terrain, not what might lie below it. Even so, Hedin's example helped prompt Stein to mount his own more careful, systematic exploration.

As Stein and the Macartneys conversed around the wooden dining table at Chini Bagh, the immediate concerns were practical. Stein's main task in Kashgar was to put together the team of men and animals for a two-year journey. The wise selection of both would be critical to its success. He had brought some supplies and men with him over the mountains, and he had spent all winter in India ama.s.sing the essentials he would need for the long road ahead. Among these were 2,000 fragile gla.s.s negatives to photograph the landscape, the finds and the faces he encountered along the way. A medicine chest held opium for pain relief, iodine for antiseptic, and quinine for malaria, from which he suffered repeatedly. He was equipped for minor surgery with forceps, suture needles, and silk. He imported quant.i.ties of dried food, including tins of Symington's pea soup and Captain Cookesley's Scotch broth and tomato soup, fifty pounds of tea, and ten pots of a nutritious new food, a salty yeast extract called Marmite. When Stein dispatched his shopping list to his London supplier, he penned a stiff letter to accompany the order: he wanted no repeat of the "regrettable" experience on his first expedition when the dried vegetables they supplied had spoiled within three months. He preferred bland English "sahib" food to local fare, even if he couldn't always find a cook able to prepare it. Stein was not a fussy eater, but perhaps only he could have thrived on a diet that included fifteen quarter-pound containers of desiccated cabbage.

He prepared for his expedition like a military chief mounting a campaign. No detail, however small, escaped him. He even ordered some lengths of Liberty silk brocade for gifts, which he knew would be appreciated in Turkestan and help smooth the path ahead. Stein was typically specific about what he wanted: good-quality pink and green floral and a cheaper length in yellow. If it seemed ironic to take silk back to the Silk Road, Stein gave no hint of this when he asked a friend in London to please mail some to him. His tent, which had been made for his first expedition and lined to withstand the cold, was repaired, felt boots and furs were sewn. His Jaeger wool blanket was packed, as was a canvas bath. Even Dash got his own custom-made fur coat. Stein had to prepare for all weathers, from baking desert heat to nights so cold he would sleep breathing through the sleeve of his coat.

The small party that started out with him from India included two men named Ram Singh. The older Ram Singh was an experienced Gurkha surveyor who had accompanied Stein's first expedition. The other was a thirty-two-year-old Indian Army handyman/carpenter known as the Naik, or corporal. The Naik, who packed in his bags the uniform of his engineering regiment, would also sketch ancient ruins. Stein considered the Naik's youth an advantage in learning new skills such as photography and enduring the hardships ahead.

Macartney had been searching for months for other experienced hands to join the explorer in Kashgar, but this was no easy task. Macartney telegrammed Stein en route with an update on his efforts, including a few words about one unlikely caravan member. "Sadiq now in Chinese prison; but if you want him can probably get him out." Apparently Stein did not want him. Aside from being proof of Macartney's sway, the telegram suggests the lengths to which he was prepared to go to a.s.sist Stein. Now Stein needed Macartney's help to find the expedition's most crucial member: a Chinese a.s.sistant and interpreter. Of all the ways Macartney would help Stein-from arranging water tanks to organizing Stein's travel doc.u.ments-finding the right man for this role would be the most vital. Stein planned to travel much farther east than on his first trip, this time into "China proper," as he called it. Although he was fluent in many languages, Chinese was not one of them. He needed an a.s.sistant who could not only speak the language, but who knew China's culture and protocols. He expected to uncover ancient Chinese written material and needed someone who could grasp its meaning on the spot. And he wanted someone who could teach him colloquial Chinese. Moreover, his a.s.sistant would need to be fit and have the temperament to withstand the rigors of desert travel. It was a tall order.

Chinese scholars were rare in far-flung Turkestan. The few who existed had been posted to sedentary, pen-pushing jobs in a local yamen or district office. They would hardly view as attractive a position that involved camping in a tent for months, with little more than Stein, a team of scruffy laborers and flatulent camels for company. Macartney had been keeping his eye out for a suitable candidate and had good news for Stein. He had learned of an educated Chinese man known as Chiang-ssu-yeh (Jiang Siye), or Secretary Chiang, who might be suitable. Chiang was believed to speak Turki, the local language. That would need to be their common tongue. Stein had learned Turki from a mullah during his first stay in Kashgar. Macartney would send for Chiang, but it would be ten days before he arrived.

Macartney knew all too well the reasons for Stein's race to Kashgar and his eagerness to get his caravan together as quickly as possible. Stein had fought long and hard to get this expedition under way. He had badgered and maneuvered, he had planned with meticulous care. But his masters had dragged their feet, delaying him a year. In that time formidable compet.i.tion had mobilized. Others now had their eye on what Stein regarded as his stamping ground, among them teams from Germany and France. They were rivals for Turkestan's treasures who, gallingly, had been inspired by the success of Stein's first trip to mount their own expeditions. They had their eyes on the very places to which Stein was headed. The French were en route to the desert and the Germans had already arrived. Macartney had been quietly monitoring the latter's movements for months. It was a rare intruder who could slip into Turkestan without the knowledge of the ever-watchful George Macartney.

2.

Signs of Wonder.

Aurel Stein hardly looked the archetypal explorer. With his well-trimmed moustache and fastidiously parted dark hair, he appeared more dapper banker than a man who would cross desert wastes and rugged mountains and whose discoveries would transform our knowledge of the Silk Road. The man who would make off with the Silk Road's greatest treasure had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead and, even in old age, retained a firm, determined jaw. In photographs, he has a stiff, almost military air as he stands, hands in pockets, with his dark brown eyes more often fixed on a distant horizon than looking directly to camera. Whether posed in a pressed dark suit or bundled in a fur-lined coat to fend off the desert wind, a handkerchief often pokes jauntily from a breast pocket.

He was not driven by physical pleasure. Food and drink were simply fuel for long hours of work. Years of meager suppers eaten at midnight in his tent prompted few complaints, although these may not have helped the dyspepsia he suffered from throughout his life. A friend was so horrified by the state of Stein's kitchen that he marveled at the explorer's immunity to typhoid. Stein once served the same friend breakfast porridge that emitted a pungent odor. Impervious to gastronomic matters, Stein had stored his bag of oats in a chest that also contained mothb.a.l.l.s.

He never married, never had a family and never appeared to have any romantic involvement with women or men. He had several long-lasting friendships, but there is nothing to suggest these were anything other than platonic. His friendships endured despite, or perhaps because of, long separations of time and distance. Although he mused repeatedly in his letters on the great joy he derived from his friends and how he wished he could be in their company, he chose a life that kept him from them for years at a time. Work, not romance, propelled him. And the work he valued was not easily undertaken with a wife and family in tow or abandoned while he disappeared into some of the world's most inaccessible and dangerous places. For this he chose to forgo a family, a home and material riches, although he may not have regarded this as a sacrifice. His reams of letters, written in a firm cursive hand-thousands of pages of which are now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford-give no sense that the lack of these troubled him. Nor do they give more than a rare glimpse into his inner life. Even by the b.u.t.toned-down standards of the Victorian times through which he lived, Stein was the most private of men.

Few could follow a clue like Stein. His persistence in pursuing leads-often from seemingly unpromising sources-was extraordinary. One friend dubbed him Sherlock Holmes for his ability to infer much from scant information. He frequently consulted the centuries-old accounts by his heroes, the Venetian Marco Polo and China's great pilgrim monk Xuanzang, both of whom left detailed travel reports Stein could accurately cross-reference.

He had no permanent home. The closest he came was a canvas tent he pitched in a meadow in mountainous Kashmir, where he lived on and off for years. He retreated to Mohand Marg, north of the Kashmiri summer capital Srinagar, whenever he could. There he would walk, plan his expeditions or write. Surrounded by snow-capped mountains, he set his square wooden desk under pine trees, with vases of alpine flowers the only domestic flourish. He seems to most resemble the itinerant scholar-monks of China's Buddhist past, not least his "patron saint" Xuanzang. He was a lone wanderer.

But he did have one constant companion. He was rarely without a little dog at his side. He had a succession of seven over fifty years, all but one a fox terrier. Without exception, he named them Dash. Stein was not a man to waste time, not even on thinking up names for his dogs. The st.u.r.dy little fox terriers, known for their endurance and capacity for hard work, were an apt choice for a man with both traits in abundance. Stein's favorite by far was Dash II, his fellow traveler on what would be his greatest expedition. The smooth-haired terrier cleared mountain pa.s.ses of more than 18,000 feet above sea level, quaffing saucers of tea along the way. He spent the days scampering alongside the caravan, and only occasionally joining Stein on "pony back." But each night was spent together in the relative comfort of Stein's tent. In time, Stein would confer an ill.u.s.trious t.i.tle on his intrepid canine: Dash the Great.

Little in Stein's family background suggested the life he would lead. Born in Budapest into a middle-cla.s.s Jewish family, he was baptized Lutheran. Such a practice was not uncommon then for the access it gave to education and the career doors it could open. Perhaps his name, Marc Aurel Stein, after the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, hinted at grand parental ambitions. He was a late, unexpected arrival for his mother Anna, then forty-five, and his struggling merchant father Nathan. They had already raised two children-Ernst was twenty-one and Theresa nineteen-when Stein was born on November 26, 1862. The age gap between himself and his parents and siblings may have prepared him for a solitary, self-reliant life. Certainly his education was overseen not so much by his parents but by Ernst and an uncle who was a pioneering ophthalmologist.

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 flourishing 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 leadership.

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 scholarship, 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-shifting 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 citizenship, 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: scholarship, patriotism, politics, and economics. He knew he needed to if he was to avoid a refusal by the bureaucracy, that "centre of intellectual sunshine," 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 companionship 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.