Journeys on the Silk Road (4 page)

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 Lahore 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 Lahore 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 gods. 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 classical 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 Lahore 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 Lahore’s Mayo School of Art. Andrews was an artistic young man, whose brother George Arliss became a filmmaker and an Academy Award–winning 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 Africanus, 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 appetite 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 Lahore 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 Pass in 1888. News of the Scotsman’s murder was reported widely. Why Dalgleish was slain was not known, but the identity 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 manuscript 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 Hoernle. The Bower Manuscript, 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 document, 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 document 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 Lahore, he moved to Calcutta to become principal 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 manuscripts 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.