Journeys on the Silk Road (29 page)

Stein’s regret at missing the forthcoming exhibition was fleeting. His interest was exploring, not working behind the scenes to prepare a show. “In a way I am sorry that neither of us will see the exhibition, on the other hand we shall both be saved from spending time over what is scarcely to be regarded as altogether productive work. Our experience at the ‘Empire Exhibition’ was enough for a long time,” he wrote to Andrews. Lorimer was left to oversee the details, sending weekly updates to Stein from the museum “cave.”

The museum’s new wing, due to be opened by King George V, was much anticipated.
The Times
of May 2, 1914, noted Stein’s antiquities would be on show and singled out a star attraction. “[The collection] contains some of the most remarkable curiosities of literature hitherto discovered. Among them is a complete printed roll of Chinese workmanship. It is 16 ft long and was printed in 868 by Wang Chieh [Wang Jie]. This is the oldest specimen of printing known to exist.”

The same day as
The Times
published its report about the Diamond Sutra, a death threatened to derail the public unveiling. The ninth Duke of Argyll, a former governor-general of Canada, died at Kensington Palace. The long-awaited opening planned for five days later might be delayed, Lorimer wrote.

Late on a spring morning, two open landaus, each pulled by four horses, left Buckingham Palace. The royal party, King George V and Queen Mary and their daughter Princess Mary, made the short journey along Pall Mall, Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road before arriving at the museum, where they were met by a guard of honor provided by the Artists Rifles, a volunteer regiment initially raised among painters, musicians, and actors.

Although the royal visitors wore mourning dress to mark their bereavement, the official opening went ahead on May 7 as planned. The Queen’s outfit was somber, but nonetheless impressed
The Times
correspondent, who noted approvingly that “the Queen wore a hat covered with black jet and a string of magnificent pearls.” In another newspaper, the
Daily Sketch,
the entire event was overshadowed by the appearance of the teenage princess and the sign of her growing maturity. Its headline the next day read: “Princess Mary makes her first public appearance since she put her hair up.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the museum’s principal trustee, was waiting on the steps. No doubt security was tight. Just a few weeks earlier, a suffragette had taken a meat cleaver to Velazquez’s
The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus)
in the nearby National Gallery, and the British Museum itself had been warned to expect similar attacks. The Prime Minister, Henry Herbert Asquith, politicians, ambassadors, and the building’s architect, John James Burnet, were among those gathered to hear the Archbishop’s opening address—“needlessly long,” according to
The Manchester Guardian.
After unveiling a bust of the late King Edward VII, the royal party toured the new galleries.

“The King and Queen showed especial interest in the astonishing collection of finds brought home by Sir Aurel Stein from Chinese Turkestan. These pictures and manuscripts—vestiges of civilisations hardly known to the experts in these matters—are arranged with strange effect in the wide bleak spaces of the great ground floor gallery,” the same paper noted.

The Times
also singled out Stein’s collection, calling it the most exciting part of the opening exhibitions of museum treasures, which also included works by William Hogarth and Leonardo da Vinci. “His two greatest finds were, first, the remains of a very ancient Chinese frontier wall, with towers and guard-houses, the whole of which was absolutely unknown; and secondly, in a region that is still inhabited, the marvellous contents of a certain walled-up cell in the caves known as the ‘Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.’”

After the morning’s pomp and ceremony, a private viewing was held in the afternoon. It took place in an elementally charged atmosphere. Clouds blackened the sky making it hard for visitors to see the Diamond Sutra or any of the other material in the thirty-two cases. Lorimer updated Stein: “There was a succession of heavy thundershowers and it became extremely dark. After a time they put on the big lights in the gallery but the lights at the top of the cases themselves were not yet finished, so that one could not see anything at all well.”

Among those peering into the cases was Stein’s one-time rival Albert von Le Coq. The German had arrived back in Europe two months earlier after another eight-month trip to Turkestan with his assistant, Bartus. Von Le Coq had returned with more than 150 cases of antiquities, but few of these matched the treasures he saw before him.

There was no sign of Paul Pelliot. Long before the exhibition opened, disquiet had been brewing over what came to be dubbed the “Affaire Pelliot.” Pelliot was a dazzling scholar, but the dawdling pace at which he was working on the cataloguing ignited fears the task might never be completed. Lionel Barnett, the British Museum’s keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, wrote a pointed letter to Pelliot. What progress was he making? When did he expect to finish? Barnett alluded to the possibility of appointing a replacement.

Stein was quick to defend the Frenchman. “He is better qualified than any scholar living to deal with the hundreds of local documents comprised in the collection. His readiness to prepare the inventory therefore represents an advantage such as is not likely ever to be offer [sic] again,” Stein wrote to the British Museum’s director, Sir Frederic Kenyon.

Pelliot insisted he would complete the work, yet soon a replacement was being discussed despite the Frenchman’s assurances. Lionel Giles, then assistant keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts, could take on the role, Barnett suggested to the museum’s director:

If you should prefer to break off the bargain [with Pelliot], I should think that Giles might do the work sandwiched in with his other cataloguing. He is not by any means a specialist in this subject; but he has a really good knowledge of the literary language, and could make a useful hand list. The work would probably not proceed very rapidly, but it would go on regularly.

The director concurred, and the huge task fell to Giles, among others. And it took years. Giles’s catalogue of Chinese manuscripts—the largest category—was not published until 1957. Stein did not live to see it.

How to divide Stein’s huge haul of manuscripts, murals, and other antiquities was a thorny question. With two backers, the British Museum and the government of India, the intention was the larger share of the treasures would return to India. Under the agreement reached before Stein left for Turkestan, India would get three-fifths of the treasures, having contributed £3,000 of the £5,000 allocated to the expedition, the British Museum two-fifths. The deal was agreed to long before anyone knew the nature of what Stein would uncover.

Most of the antiquities Stein brought back were fragile, and the contents of the Library Cave especially so, consisting mainly of paper scrolls and silk banners. A damp, unstable atmosphere could quickly destroy what had been preserved for a thousand years in the dry desert. Stein wrote to Kenyon setting out his views:

It is from every point of view desirable to keep those objects which are specially liable to injury through atmospheric and other influences in a place where every care can be given to their preservation. In the second place there can be no doubt that among such objects must be reckoned all paintings on silk and other fabrics; the tempera paintings on friable mud plaster; the wood carvings; the embroideries and figured textiles; and all written records on wood and paper. All these have during long centuries of burial become impregnated with fine disintegrated particles of salt from the desert and thus particularly liable to attract atmospheric moisture, etc.

Stein feared that even if the objects survived a return journey to India, no museum there would be able to care for them adequately. The tropical hothouse environment of Calcutta’s Imperial Museum—“a vast marshy delta”—was particularly unsuitable. The delicate material should remain in Britain, he argued. This effectively meant most of the finds—as well as the most valuable—should stay. There was another reason too: imperial pride. It would be difficult to compete with the great collections of Eastern art being built up by institutions in Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and elsewhere unless most of the collection was retained by Britain.

But when the India Office learned of Stein’s views on the inadequacy of their museums, its officials were furious:

The museums in this country have the first claim to such articles of archaeological interest as may be collected at the expense of Indian revenues . . . To the view that our Indian museums are, for climatic reasons, unsuitable for the preservation of articles of a perishable nature, we are unable to assent. On the contrary, we have reason to believe that, with proper precautions, antiquities can be quite as well preserved in Calcutta, Lahore or Delhi as in London.

Anyway, the intention was not to house the Indian share in Calcutta but in a new museum proposed for Delhi. In the meantime, India’s share of the manuscripts and documents still needed for study could remain for up to five years at the British Museum.

The tussle between Britain and India over the antiquities continued behind the scenes during the early years of World War I. There was agreement on one matter: it was too risky to remove anything until after the war ended. Barnett protested vehemently at what he called the proposal to assign “rotting lumps” to the British Museum. The acrimony escalated when Fred Andrews, then in Srinagar, weighed in on the Indian side. Andrews objected to some of the swaps suggested by Laurence Binyon, the museum’s deputy keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawing.

Binyon was also a poet and is best remembered for penning
For the Fallen
, with its lines still repeated at annual commemorations for the war dead in Britain and Australia: “Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn . . .” But over Andrews’s proposed division of some silk paintings, Binyon penned fighting words: “Mr Andrews’s disadvantages in the matter are apparent from the inaccuracies in his report, and from his own admissions.”

Eventually an agreement was reached, and today the manuscripts are in the British Library; silk paintings, sculptures, and coins in the British Museum; textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and murals and silk paintings in the National Museum in New Delhi.

When he had heard this much and penetrated deeply into its significance, the Venerable Subhuti was moved to tears.

VERSE
14,
THE
DIAMOND
SUTRA

15

Treasure Hunters

Stein was the first, but by no means the last, foreigner to arrive on Abbot Wang’s doorstep eager to relieve him of treasures. As Stein’s caravan desperately searched for the end of the Keriya River in the Taklamakan Desert and he counted cartridges ready to relieve the suffering of his ponies, his arch rival, Frenchman Paul Pelliot, arrived at Dunhuang on February 12, 1908. Pelliot was unaware that Stein had seized the Silk Road’s greatest prize.

Pelliot, too, had heard the rumor of a hidden cache of manuscripts, when passing through the Turkestan capital Urumqi, 600 miles from Dunhuang. Clearly word had spread along the northern Silk Road, which is where Albert von Le Coq heard the tale.