The Silk Road: A New History (33 page)

THE DUNHUANG CAVES AS STEIN FIRST SAW THEM
In 1907, when Aurel Stein first arrived at Dunhuang, the caves had no doors and were completely exposed to the elements. Visitors had to climb up the walls and through holes connecting the caves. Now under the management of the Dunhuang Research Institute, the caves all have walls and locked entrances, and a system of concrete walkways and stairways connects the 492 caves at the site. Courtesy of the Board of the British Library.

Although most of the pavilions in front of the caves had since collapsed, Stein noted, many images and paintings remained intact.
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According to an inscription in one of the caves, a monk had visited the site in 366
CE
, the date that the first cave was dug. Of the 492 caves at the Thousand Buddha (Qianfodong) site, the Dunhuang Research Institute dates the site’s earliest caves to the Northern Liang dynasty (422–39) and the latest to the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries.
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The earlier caves, like those at Niya or Kucha, show individual buddhas or scenes from the historic Buddha’s earlier lives; those built after 600 often depict narrative scenes from Buddhist texts. The caves were dug from extremely friable and soft gravel conglomerate, and several collapses occurred in the sixth and seventh centuries. The constant streams of visitors in recent years have damaged the caves further still, and the Dunhuang Institute has built facsimile caves in the hope of reducing the tourist traffic and the resulting damage to the paintings. They grant access to only a few, often charging high fees to enter the most famous of the caves (several hundred dollars per head is not unusual).

In 1907, after Stein and Jiang had finished their initial exploration of the site, they encountered a young Tibetan monk. When Jiang later met with him one on one, the monk showed him a single manuscript written in Chinese characters. While Jiang realized that the Chinese term for “bodhisattva” appeared multiple times, Stein’s secretary could not make sense of the text because he had no experience reading Buddhist materials. Stein wanted to reward the monk for showing them the scroll, but Jiang “advised moderation. A present too generous might arouse speculations about possible ulterior motives.” Stein and Jiang compromised on a price, and Stein gave a “piece of hacked silver, equal to about three rupees or four shillings.” As Stein explained in his first publication about the discovery,
Ruins of Desert Cathay,
“In secret council Jiang and myself had discussed long before how best to get access to the find, and how to break down if necessary any priestly obstruction.”

Understanding the sensitivity of the task, Stein and Jiang kept their discussions secret. Unlike the other sites that Stein had excavated, Dunhuang was a place of “actual worship,” and Stein wondered what “difficulties” he would meet. “Would the resident priests be sufficiently good-natured—and mindful of material interests—to close their eyes to the removal of any sacred objects? And, if so, could we rely on their spiritual influence to allay the scruples which might arise among the still more superstitious laity patronizing their pilgrimage place?” Even before meeting Daoist Wang, Stein resolved to restrict his activities to photographing and sketching, since devotees were bound to object to the removal of any statues or paintings.

Since Daoist Wang was away, Stein decided to investigate a line of watch-towers extending west from Dunhuang, and he found the Sogdian Ancient Letters at this time. When he returned to the caves on May 15, 1907, he witnessed an annual religious festival attended by “fully ten thousand” people. While Stein kept his distance, Jiang persuaded Daoist Wang to meet with Stein. Apprehensive, Daoist Wang walled up the only opening to the library cave. When the two men finally met, Stein recorded his initial impressions of Daoist Wang: “He looked a very queer person, extremely shy and nervous, with an occasional expression of cunning which was far from encouraging. It was clear from the first that he would be a difficult person to handle.”

In narrating his experience at Dunhuang, Stein continuously alludes to the difficulties he and Georg Bühler, his advisor at University of Vienna, had in obtaining Sanskrit manuscripts in India. At one point, in 1875, Bühler actually glimpsed the manuscript that he had come to India to study, but then the owner hid it away, and Bühler died without ever seeing it again. One of Stein’s greatest scholarly triumphs while in India was purchasing that very manuscript fourteen years later.
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Stein understood that the Dunhuang library cave posed challenges far different from getting lost in the desert or excavating abandoned ruins as at Niya: he had to draw on his ability, acquired in India, to wrest manuscripts from their human guardians. After meeting Daoist Wang for the first time, Stein prepared himself “for a long and arduous siege.”

On Jiang’s advice, Stein made a conscious decision not to discuss scholarship or archeology with Daoist Wang. Instead he invoked the memory of the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, his “Chinese patron saint.” Stein recounted what he had told Daoist Wang in his halting Chinese: “my devotion to Xuanzang: how I had followed his footsteps from India across inhospitable mountains and deserts; how I had traced the ruined sites of many sanctuaries he had visited and described; and so on.” Stein sustained the pretense that he was a devotee of Xuanzang’s; before his departure on June 13, he even paid for a new “clay image” of Xuanzang. Telling Daoist Wang that the scrolls were intended for a “temple of learning” in India, Jiang and Stein misled Daoist Wang so that he would think that Stein, like Xuanzang centuries earlier, was collecting Buddhist manuscripts for a distant monastic library.

After their first meeting, Stein left Jiang to negotiate alone with Daoist Wang. That night, under the cover of darkness, the Daoist brought a single roll to the secretary. When this turned out to be a Buddhist text translated by Xuanzang, Jiang immediately reported this auspicious sign to the Daoist. Daoist Wang removed the temporary wall blocking access to the cave that he had put up.

Negotiations then proceeded more smoothly. The three men agreed on the need for absolute secrecy. In Stein’s telling, Daoist Wang stipulated: “that nobody but us three was to learn what was being transacted, and that as long as I [Stein] was on Chinese soil the origin of these ‘finds’ was to be kept entirely secret.” For the next three weeks Daoist Wang brought Jiang different scrolls, and he and Stein set aside the most important. Near the end of their stay, Daoist Wang panicked and returned everything to the cave, but again Jiang intervened. After Jiang and Stein had made their final selection, two of Stein’s most trusted men sewed the scrolls in sacks so that no one could tell what they were.

Each step of the way, Stein reports the different conversations over price. After he and Jiang set a target, Jiang negotiated directly with Daoist Wang. Here Stein followed a practice common at the time: foreign residents all over Asia frequently entrusted their employees and servants to purchase groceries and other goods on their behalf. When Jiang and Wang reached a price of 130 British pounds for seven packing cases of manuscripts and five of paintings and other objects, Stein rejoiced in a letter to his close friend Percy Stafford Allen: “The single Sanskrit Ms. [manuscript] on palm leaf with a few other ‘old things’ are worth this.”
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After Stein’s departure in the summer of 1907, Daoist Wang continued to sell off the documents in the library cave to finance repairs to the cave complex. Jiang returned to Dunhuang in the fall of that year and bought another 230 bundles of material, which he sent on to Stein. Stein’s haul totaled some eleven thousand documents. In 1908 Paul Pelliot, the gifted French Sinologist, bought seven thousand documents and shipped them to Paris.
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In 1910 the Chinese government ordered that the remaining ten thousand documents in Chinese (not those in Tibetan) be transferred to Beijing, but Daoist Wang kept some, and others were stolen en route to Beijing.
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In 1912 the Russian S. F. Ol’denburg purchased roughly ten thousand documents, and in 1914 Stein returned to Dunhuang one final time and bought six hundred more scrolls.
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Stein triumphantly recounted his experiences at Dunhuang to a live audience in a series of lectures he gave at Harvard in 1929. When Stein returned to the site in 1914, Daoist Wang greeted him warmly and showed him the detailed accounts of how he had spent the money to refurbish the caves. “In view of the official treatment his cherished store of Chinese rolls had suffered, he expressed bitter regret at not having previously had the courage and the wisdom to accept the big offer I had made through Jiang Siye [Jiang Xiaowan] for the whole collection en bloc.”
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Since he had paid Daoist Wang more money than anyone else (the Chinese government had paid nothing), Stein reasoned that he should have been able to buy the whole collection and ship it out of China. Even in 1929, when so many European and Chinese scholars concurred that Chinese antiquities should remain in China, Stein saw nothing wrong with taking documents and objects from China.

In thinking about the removal of the Dunhuang documents to other countries, we should resist the urge to judge Stein by modern standards rather than by those of his own time. Today many observers support the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Consider, though, that Stein and the other explorers were operating at the height of imperialism before World War I. The European powers and Japan all sent teams to Xinjiang to excavate, and few contemporary observers voiced scruples. Among the few who did were Albert Grünwedel of Germany and the Russian scholar S. F. Ol’denburg, who both criticized Le Coq and others for removing wall paintings from their original sites.
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Foreign visitors had legitimate grounds for concluding that library cave materials were safer if taken away from Dunhuang. The caves at Dunhuang had suffered damage during the Muslim uprisings of 1862–77, and Stein was acutely aware of how restive the local population was.
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Only one month after Stein left, in June 1907, the town exploded in a riot over grain prices.

Chinese views of Stein’s conduct have softened over the years. During the Cultural Revolution, he was a thief, pure and simple. Even in the mid-1980s, when I was in graduate school, a Chinese classmate bristled with rage when our professor said that, if he were a Dunhuang document, he would prefer to have been taken to either Paris or London, because the conditions of preservation were so much better than those in Beijing. In 1998 the full Chinese translation of
Serindia,
including Stein’s detailed account of the negotiations at Dunhuang, appeared with a thoughtful preface by a prominent Chinese archeologist, Meng Fanren.
Serindia,
with its team of authors who translated the different materials Stein found, represented “the very highest level of research in this field before the 1920s,” yet Stein’s individual actions, Meng concluded, constituted “plundering behavior which deserves severe and justified criticism.”
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Advances in publishing have made the Dunhuang documents held in foreign countries increasingly available to Chinese scholars: first came the distribution of microfilm in the late 1970s, then the publication of multivolume sets with clearly legible photographs in the 1990s, and now the ongoing loading of photographs onto the website of the International Dunhuang Project based in London.
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In 2005 Professor Rong Xinjiang of Peking University, one of China’s leading historians of the Tang dynasty, published an article in China’s leading academic history journal,
Lishi Yanjiu
(Historical research), in which he contrasted the actions of Stein, who did not tell Chinese scholars of his finds, with those of Pelliot, who gave Chinese colleagues photographs of the materials he had purchased and shipped to Paris. Professor Rong reminded his readers of one indisputable fact: for all their calls to protect the Dunhuang documents, no early twentieth-century Chinese scholar ever left the comfort of his own home. Not one followed Stein and Pelliot’s example and personally visited the site of Dunhuang. The wholesale removal of the Dunhuang documents was the result.
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Still, even by the standards of his own day, Stein’s actions still seem deceitful. He claimed to be a devotee of Xuanzang. He knowingly paid a fraction of the market price for the scrolls and paintings. He took extreme measures to maintain secrecy, doing everything at night, and telling a minimal number of people what he was doing. One cannot help wondering why Stein writes so openly about being so clandestine.

Although Stein does not specifically mention William Matthew Flinders Petrie in his discussion of Dunhuang, his other writings frequently acknowledge his influence.
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Petrie, the leading British archeological excavator in Egypt, came to visit Stein in 1902 after Stein had returned from the First Expedition. In the preface to
Ancient Khotan,
Stein called Petrie an “archeological explorer of unequalled experience.”
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In 1904 Petrie published
Methods & Aims in Archaeology,
a step-by-step guide through all stages of an excavation: equipping an expedition, digging in the field, and the publication of results. Having excavated in Egypt, Petrie instructs archeologists how to work in poorer countries, explaining how to use small amounts of money to ensure that workmen submit their small portable finds to the excavator rather than sell them on their own: “Nothing can ensure better care than paying for it,” he concludes. Petrie also advised his readers to publish their results in two volumes, a cheaper version with fewer plates for “students and the general public” and “a magnificent edition for libraries, book-collectors, and rich amateurs.” Stein closely followed his advice; even the layout and typeface of his books replicated those of Petrie.
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