Journeys on the Silk Road (12 page)

Protocol required a return visit, and it came more quickly than Stein expected. No sooner had he arrived back at his tent and swapped his thin footwear for fur boots than the magistrate arrived. Seated on a thick felt rug and with a charcoal fire to warm them, Stein showed off some of the ancient Chinese records he had uncovered in recent months, and he found an appreciative audience in the learned man. “I instinctively felt that a kindly official providence had brought to Tun-huang [Dunhuang] just the right man to help me,” Stein wrote. He soon called on the influential local military commander, the bluff and burly Lin Ta-jen, who provided a camp guard.

But it was a meeting with a group of Turkestan traders in the oasis that would prove most fortuitous. Unlike the magistrate, the traders knew the area well from living many years in the province. Among them was Zahid Beg, who, like many of the traders in town, was on the run from his Turkestan creditors. Zahid Beg told Stein of various half-buried ruins he claimed to have seen north of Dunhuang. His information was vague, rumors perhaps, but at least he was more forthcoming than the local Chinese, who greeted Stein’s inquiries about ancient ruins in the area with steely silence. And Zahid Beg conveyed a tantalizing snippet, one that could not fail to ignite Stein’s imagination. A huge cache of manuscripts was said to have been discovered a few years earlier, hidden in one of the painted grottoes at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. And, so the rumor went, the manuscripts were still there.

6

City of Sands

On the edge of the Gobi Desert near Dunhuang, a cliff about a mile long rises from a river valley. Beyond the cliff, sand dunes roll like ocean waves. In certain winds, these dunes were said to emit eerie music that inspired their name: the Ming Sha, or Singing Sands. But it was a vision, not a sound, that shaped history here, and it occurred more than 1,500 years before Stein’s caravan arrived.

Legend has it that in AD 366, a wandering Buddhist monk named Lezun sat on the valley floor to rest from his travels across forests and plains. As he admired the sunset on Sanwei Mountain, he beheld a vision of a thousand Buddhas. Celestial nymphs danced in the rays of golden light, and Lezun watched the glorious scene until the dusk turned to dark. The monk, described as resolute, calm, and of pure conduct, was so inspired that the next day he set down his pilgrim’s staff and abandoned plans to cross the Gobi. Instead, he chiseled a meditation cave into the cliff. The following day he mixed mud and smoothed the walls of his tiny shelter. And on his third day, he painted a mural on the wall to record the wondrous vision he had witnessed.

Lezun then visited Dunhuang to share his discovery, and the news quickly spread to the surrounding provinces, according to one folk tale. Similarly inspired, others joined him and honeycombed the conglomerate cliff with an estimated 1,000 hand-carved caves. The first caves were small, spartan cells, just big enough for a solitary monk. But as the religious community grew, elaborate grottoes were carved as chapels and shrines. Some were large enough for a hundred worshippers to gather. Murals in lapis, turquoise, and malachite covered the walls and ceilings in many of the caves. Nearly half a million square feet of magnificent murals were created. The wall paintings give an unparalleled picture of a thousand years of life along the Silk Road.

The location would eventually become known in China and beyond as a place of unrivalled beauty, sanctity, and knowledge. Although the monk Lezun is credited with founding the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, or Mogao Caves as they are known today, he is but one of four men who have shaped their history through the centuries. The story of the Silk Road’s most sacred site is inextricably bound with clandestine journeys, wandering monks, and intrepid travelers.

Why a sacred center flourished in such a remote place is simple. The reason is geography. Near Dunhuang, the Silk Road split in two to skirt the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. The roads met again 1,400 miles west at Kashgar. But between these two oases lay the Silk Road’s most dangerous terrain. Among the threats were starvation, thirst, bandits, and ferocious sandstorms that were known to bury entire caravans. For those traveling west, Dunhuang was the last stop for caravans to rest and stock up before they faced the desert. For those heading east, it was the first oasis on Chinese soil. Any traveler would want to express gratitude for surviving such a journey or pray for safe deliverance before embarking, so it is little wonder that as long as the Silk Road thrived, the caves did too. Wealthy merchants and other patrons paid for the grottoes to be created and decorated as acts of thanksgiving. Dunhuang—the name means Blazing Beacon and refers to the nearby line of military watchtowers that guarded the area—might have begun as a dusty military garrison town, but it became a prosperous, cosmopolitan center, the Silk Road’s great beacon of spiritual illumination.

The Silk Road, or roads really, was a network of trade routes that linked China with the West. From its eastern end in the ancient Chinese capital of Chang’an, now Xian, the route passed through Dunhuang before branching south to India, present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, or west to Samarkand, Bokhara, Persia, and the eastern Mediterranean. For about a thousand years, caravans of camels loaded with silk, rubies, jade, amber, musk, and far more halted at Dunhuang.

But despite all its ancient connotations, the name Silk Road is relatively new, coined only in the nineteenth century by a German geographer and explorer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen. It conjures exotic images of heavily laden camels plodding through rolling dunes, bells tinkling. The name is far more romantic than if it had been named after another desirable commodity traded along the way, which might have seen it dubbed the Rhubarb Road.

Silk, which originated in China, was the best known and among the most prized of the route’s merchandise. Few caravans traveled the entire route. Rather, the goods would change hands—as well as camels and donkeys—many times along the way, and inhabitants at one end of the Silk Road knew little about those at the other. Consequently, the Romans, who had an insatiable hunger for the exquisite fabric (despite a Senate ban on men wearing it), had only vague ideas about the land or people who produced it. But rumors abounded. Some talked of Seres, the Kingdom of Silk, as a land inhabited by giants with red hair and blue eyes. Others thought it home to people who lived for 200 years. For centuries, the Romans thought the gossamer thread grew on trees and was combed from leaves. This suited the middlemen through whose lands the goods passed and who lived off the profits. Even when a Greek traveler asserted that it came from insects—giant beetles, he claimed—the West lacked the means to make the luxurious fabric. But in the sixth century, two Nestorian monks returning from China are said to have reached the court of the Byzantine emperor Justinian with silkworm eggs concealed in their bamboo staffs.

Coveted as it was, silk was not the only treasure to travel the ancient trade route. Ideas, too, made their way along the Silk Road, the original information superhighway. The most influential of these was Buddhism, whose story began around 400 BC, when Prince Siddhartha was born into the ruling Shakya clan in the Himalayan foothills of present-day Nepal. He grew up in luxurious seclusion, sheltered from life’s sufferings and harsh realities, according to Buddhist tales. At twenty-nine, he ventured beyond the palace and encountered the sufferings from which he had been shielded. He saw an old man, a sick man, a corpse, and an ascetic. Troubled by this confrontation with ageing, sickness, and death, he resolved to find a way to overcome suffering and mortality.

He rejected his privileged life and secretly slipped away from the palace to become an ascetic himself. He wandered for years, studying under various teachers but, unsatisfied, continually moved on. He sought answers through extremes of spiritual renunciation and physical deprivation, including near starvation. At the age of thirty-five, he sat beneath a fig tree near present-day Bodhgaya and vowed not to rise until he attained enlightenment. He realized what Buddhists call the Four Noble Truths: suffering exists; desires cause suffering; it is possible to end suffering; and a path exists to achieve this. Freed from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, he arose as Buddha Shakyamuni, the Awakened One and the sage of the Shakya clan. He spent the rest of his life—the next forty-five years—traveling around northern India and teaching what he had learned. His teachings were later written in the form of thousands of sutras. Buddha Shakyamuni is sometimes referred to as the historical Buddha. There are said to be countless Buddhas; many have existed in the past, others will appear in the future.

Buddha Shakyamuni delivered the teaching known as the Diamond Sutra in a garden near the ancient Indian city of Sravasti. According to Buddhist lore, a wealthy merchant named Sudatta, or Anathapindika, who was known for his generosity to orphans and the destitute, heard the Buddha teaching. The merchant was so impressed he invited the Buddha to Sravasti to teach. However, the only suitable place to build a temple to house the Buddha and his disciples was in a forest south of the city, and it belonged to the Crown Prince Jeta, who had no interest in selling his pristine real estate. “If you can cover the ground with gold pieces, I’ll sell it,” the prince allegedly joked. Undeterred, the philanthropic merchant went home, opened his treasury and brought back enough gold to carpet the 200-acre site. For twenty-five rainy seasons the Buddha gave some of his most important teachings in a park once covered in gold.

More than 200 years after the Buddha Shakyamuni left his palace, another clandestine journey began, one that would ultimately result in the establishment of the Silk Road. It was a trip designed to prevent what China’s Great Wall could not—raids by a marauding tribe of Central Asian horsemen called the Xiongnu. Some say the Xiongnu were related to the Huns who would later cut a swath through Europe. Whatever the case, the Han emperor Wudi wanted them stopped. The emperor knew his people were not the only ones being terrorized by these fierce fighters. A nomadic group had been driven from their lands on China’s far western fringe, their king executed and his skull turned into a drinking cup. The Yuezhi, as the routed nomads were called, wanted revenge.

The emperor decided to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi—“the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is hardly a new diplomatic strategy. He dispatched an envoy from the ancient capital of Chang’an on a secret mission about a hundred years before the birth of Christ. The man who volunteered for the dangerous assignment was a court official called Zhang Qian. He was about thirty years old and considered bold and trustworthy. He was given an escort of a hundred men, a yak-hair tail atop a bamboo pole—a symbol of imperial power—and effectively told to “go west, young man” and forge the alliance. That was easier said than done. To travel west meant venturing into unknown lands and crossing enemy territory. There was also a fearsome desert along the way and no known route around or across it.

As a diplomatic mission it was a disaster. All but one of his men perished during the journey. Zhang Qian himself was captured and spent a decade as a prisoner of the Xiongnu. When the envoy eventually escaped, he tracked the Yuezhi to present-day Afghanistan but life had utterly changed for them. The Yuezhi had settled down to a peaceful, prosperous existence and weren’t terribly interested in taking revenge on their one-time foe. The envoy turned around and trekked back to China. Although he returned from his thirteen-year journey without an alliance, he did not return home empty-handed. Aside from his remarkably resilient yak-hair tail, he brought something far more significant: knowledge. He had not only found a way around the Taklamakan Desert, he brought news of mysterious lands and great civilizations, places where dazzling goods and unknown foods such as grapes, carrots, walnuts, and alfalfa were traded. He also brought word of powerful blood-sweating horses from Ferghana, in present-day Uzbekistan, said to be descended from celestial steeds. (The blood is now thought to be the result of a parasite that causes lesions.) The strength of these horses made them ideal for battle, and the appeal of such superior steeds to the emperor was obvious. The Heavenly Horses have long inspired Chinese paintings, poems, and statues.