Color: A Natural History of the Palette (42 page)

We passed many beggars: men and boys who halfheartedly moved stones around the road all day, and waited for vehicle drivers to throw a few Afghan notes for them to chase in the wind. On the same road I also saw two travellers in a timeless scene. He was walking, she was riding a donkey, and her burka—that oppressive garment that covers the face and body, allowing women to look out on the world only through delicately laced bars—was sky blue. This was no doubt because it was the most fashionable color that season—burkas came in blue, olive, black, gold and white, and blue was the prettiest. But, with that color having such a potent symbolism when worn by veiled women on donkeys, it was impossible not to think of them as Mary and Joseph, travelling for miles to give birth to Christianity.

The Virgin Mary has not always worn blue. In Russian icons she is more often in red, while the Byzantine artists in the seventh century or so usually showed her in purple.
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Sometimes she is in white too—she had a big wardrobe. The trouble with color symbolism, or perhaps the joy of it, is that it is not a constant. Red could be for the birth, purple for her mystery; blue could dress the Queen of Heaven in the color of heaven; white is her innocence, black her grief. If they had wanted to, artists could have dressed her in the whole rainbow, although I don’t know of any who did. Instead they shifted their thinking to what would honor her, rather than resemble her compassion; and they often decided this on the basis of cost and rarity. In fifteenth-century Holland, Mary often wore scarlet because that was the most expensive cloth; the earlier Byzantine choice of purple was similarly because this was a valuable dye, and only a few people were important enough to carry it off. So when, in around the thirteenth century, ultramarine arrived in Italy as the most expensive color on the market, it was logical to use it to dress the most precious symbol of the faith.

And from that moment it became a reserved color in Christian churches. Even today, Catholic priests change their vestments according to the occasion: they can be black, red, purple, green or white, but only in Spain, and only for one day a year—the Festival of the Immaculate Conception—are they blue. Black explicitly represents death; red is fire or love or the blood of martyrs; violet is penitence; green is everlasting life; white symbolizes the pure union of the rays of light. But since Pope Pius V standardized liturgical color coding in the sixteenth century, blue has always been reserved for the Mother of Christ, not for the men who serve her. On the other hand, in parts of France and Spain, even until the twentieth century, parents of a sick child would promise the Virgin Mary that if the child recovered, he or she would be dressed in blue from hat to boot in gratitude. In French this was called “
enfant voué au bleu
.”

And as we arrived in the town of Bamiyan we mentally gave thanks as well—to whatever deities may have been looking after us. The United Nations had warned us the night before that the roads were not safe, but as we looked around we knew already that it had been worth the risk. The place was spectacular. The valley, in the shadow of the Grandfather Mountain, Koh-I-Babu, was fringed with sandstone, and we could see the two enormous Buddhas—55 and 35 meters high—guarding it, with their archways looking like sentry posts. When they were built, fourteen and thirteen centuries ago, this valley would have been packed with pilgrims and artisans, mixing with traders from Turkey and China. It was the end of the Gandharan period, and Bamiyan was full of some of the richest Buddhist art in the world. Thousands of monks lived there, and the grottoes were full of frescos and incense-filled shrines.

But when we arrived in 2000 there were just the Buddhas left, and they were in bad shape. A few months before, a commander had attacked them, saying they were pagan idols. His men shot rockets at the smaller Buddha’s face and groin. The larger statue was luckier: the men had just got to the point of suspending burning tractor tires from the top of its head when the order came from Taliban headquarters in Kandahar to stop the destruction. But by then the eyes were blackened, the effect one of haunting suffering as this lonely giant gazed blindly over the valley where once it had been worshiped.

They were just plain stucco, although once—according to local mythology—one was painted blue, the other red. They used to have wooden arms that lifted for prayer at sunset: the rattling of chains and pulleys must have quietened the noise of the bazaar every evening. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, as Islam spread, the meaning of the statues was forgotten. “We only know that once upon a time the big Buddha had eyes you could see from the other side of the valley, they shone so brightly,” said an Afghan charity worker over dinner that night. Were they blue? I wondered. “I believe they were green,” he answered. “Emeralds perhaps.”

The next morning we were given permission to visit the big Buddha; the other was only a few hundred meters away but it was under the control of another commander. We climbed up past the military post, then up steep hairpin paths cut into the startlingly orange sand. At the top we walked through low tunnels, and then out onto the Buddha’s head, which was big enough for a picnic. People had stubbed cigarettes out on it, and at the center—at the point that Buddhists would call the crown chakra—there was a hole for dynamite.

It was an extraordinary undertaking. How many artists had lain there on their backs, painting meditations all over the walls and the protective arched roof, praying that the 60-meter-high scaffolding was just wobbling, not tumbling? The frescos were faded, and some had crumbled when we saw them. But the Gandharan art—always so influenced by Greek ideas of what is beautiful—was extraordinarily delicate, with the draperies falling in classical folds. A series of Buddhas sat along both sides of the wall above us, each with their hands in a different meditation position, and each encased in a rainbow circle. And there, striped between yellow ochre and white lead and red vermilion (the Gandharans had idiosyncratic notions of the order of the rainbow), was the lapis I had travelled to see. The ultramarine still shone—just—against the ruined walls: and it was extraordinary to think that this was the first known use of the paint anywhere.
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The Egyptians had used it as stones, but not as pigment—their own blue paints had been based on glass that had been ground up finely into powder. And I wondered then, as I sat on the head of the great Buddha of Bamiyan, whether it was in that valley far below us that somebody once, fourteen centuries ago, had sat experimenting with blue powder and brown glue, and had discovered—by adding wood ash perhaps—how to make lapis lazuli into paint.

Those Buddhas and frescos were destroyed eleven months later. No drill holes and dynamite this time. The Taliban used rockets for two days of bombardment, and allowed their photography rule to be broken, sending out images of bare arches where once there had been two guardians of a forgotten faith. In their week of fame and destruction the statues were seen and discussed by people all round the world: people who had never heard of the Buddhas of Bamiyan were shocked that now they would be unable to see them for themselves. On most levels it was a terrible cultural tragedy. But on one level it was not. Buddhism is a faith that understands impermanence. When else in their long history could these two vast and armless trunks of stone standing in the desert have reminded so many people in so many countries that nothing lasts forever?

A GREMLIN BLUE

Half the ultramarine in the world must have passed through Bamiyan, and along parallel roads to the north and south. And there was another blue that travelled through the town the other way, from Persia and through into China. It was not quite so valuable, but it was almost as valued. It came from mines in Persia— now Iran—and in English it was called “cobalt.” Calling it “cobalt” is rather like calling it “goblin”: in German folk legend Kobald was the name of a vicious sprite, who lived in the earth and resented intruders. It is a decent metal on its own, but it attracts a nasty companion in the form of arsenic, so the European silver miners who often came across it hated it, gave it the name of a gremlin, and for centuries they threw it away before it ate their feet and attacked their lungs. It was not simply the arsenic which made it seem a mysterious force: in the seventeenth century people discovered its propensity to change color on heating and used it in invisible inks; when the plain paper was held over a fire it would magically turn green where secret messages had been traced.

As an ingredient of smalt—a pigment that had been made of ground-up blue glass since the 1500s—cobalt had been used in paint for years, but in its purer form it didn’t reach European paintboxes until the nineteenth century, when a scientist called Louis-Jacques Thénard managed to make it into a pigment. If he had been living today, Michelangelo would have liked this blue best. It is expensive, and leans toward violet. It was the Persians who really first found how good cobalt was as a glaze—they used it for the blue tiles of their mosques, representing the heavens, while copper makes the turquoise, remembering the green of the Prophet’s cloak. The results are spectacular. When traveller Robert Byron visited the town of Herat in the 1930s (which we would have reached, eventually, had we continued west from Bamiyan) he described the blue on the tomb of Gowhar Shad as “the most beautiful example of color in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of God and himself.”
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The Chinese coveted this color, and for four hundred years they would swap green for blue—sending green celadon-ware to Persia and getting “Mohammedan blue” back. In the national arts library at the Victoria and Albert Museum I read how the cobalt quality varied throughout the Ming dynasty. The finest blue was in the mid-fifteenth century Xuande reign, while under the emperors Zhengde and Jiajing a hundred years later, porcelain-makers were using an excellent violet glaze. Meanwhile—and bear with me on the dates here—the “blue and white” from the Chenghua (late fifteenth) and Wanli (late sixteenth) reigns was virtually “gray and white,” after those emperors imposed trade sanctions against Central Asia.
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With the details scribbled down in my notebook I went down, with some excitement, to the Chinese gallery and tested it out. To my delight I could now tell immediately, by color alone and from a distance, when a Ming vase was probably fired. The possibilities for pretentious expertise were endless.

SECOND ATTEMPT

The following year I was determined to get to Sar-e-sang. It was now exactly five hundred years since Michelangelo had been waiting for his blue. It was a nice conceit to go and collect it for him in the spring, when he would have needed it, even though I was half a millennium too late. It was also necessary timing. The season for blue was very short in 2001. There would be a month or so between when the passes melted in April and when the harvest was gathered in June. After that the fighting would start again, and who knew where the front line would go?

By Christmas the political situation in Afghanistan was even more precarious than before. So in February I changed tactics. I jumped on a plane to Hawaii to see the “Gem Hunter,” an American dealer who had been in and out of Afghanistan for thirty years. If anyone could help me then Gary Bowersox could. We met in Maui, where he was hosting a jewelry show, and talked for hours. He was a big friendly man who laughed a lot and told excellent stories of meeting mujahideen leaders and of smuggling himself into the country under chicken wire. He gave good advice about how to stroll into Afghanistan over the mountains, disguised in a burka (get a guide you trust and keep walking), and what to do if threatened by a yelling man with an AK-47 (smile). On the second day I asked him directly. Could I go with him on the next trip? He paused. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This year is going to be tough; I’d like to, but I can’t help.” As I flew back to Hong Kong a few days later I felt disconsolate: I was going to have to make it on my own.

My first hurdle was a visa. I had friends in Islamabad who could help get me on the twice-weekly United Nations plane to Faisabad, the nearest town to the mines. But internal protocol insisted that I could board it only if I had a Taliban visa, just in case we crash-landed. I couldn’t help but feel that if this happened then having the right documents would be the least of my problems, but rules were rules, and I applied. Of course I could have a visa, came the obliging reply from that usually least obliging of governments; all I needed was a supporting letter from my own government. Of course I couldn’t have a letter, came the reply from the British embassy. “We don’t recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government of Afghanistan.” I was in a bind, so I decided to go to Islamabad to sort it out.

And to my surprise I popped into Afghanistan like a cork from a non-alcoholic champagne bottle. On the first morning I got a call from the friend I was staying with, who worked for the U.N. “They’ve decided to take you without a visa,” she said. “I’ve sent a car—can you be ready in ten minutes?” I bundled three of her long-sleeved
shawar kameez
outfits of baggy pants, long shirts and scarves in my backpack, along with notebooks, hiking boots and Gary’s book (
Gemstones of Afghanistan
), and raced out of the house, scattering my belongings behind me. Two hours later I was on a nineteen-seater Beechcraft, heading west.

In his best-selling book about Afghanistan,
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Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid recounts a story he heard from an old man. “When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down onto the earth. That was Afghanistan.” And as we crossed the high Pamirs, the description seemed fair. We were flying over snow-covered mountains; somewhere beneath us were the fabled mines of Badakhshan and a village where only men were allowed to live. Looking down at the inhospitable terrain, it was almost impossible to believe that anybody could live there at all.