Journeys on the Silk Road (27 page)

China’s preoccupation with documenting and dating events shows up elsewhere: in almanacs and calendars found in the Library Cave. Almanacs could only be printed with the emperor’s approval, although the cave’s treasures prove there was some bending of these rules. In the West, almanacs with their voluminous facts may seem like statements of the obvious, but China placed great importance on them. Their use in predicting cosmic events—eclipses, the alignment of planets and the like—was viewed as evidence of an emperor’s perfection. If, through his diviners, the emperor could distinguish auspicious days from catastrophic days, it was proof of his divine entitlement to rule. But there was a downside to what was known as “heaven’s mandate.” Fail to predict the arrival of a celestial event such as a comet or even sun spots and the masses didn’t merely grumble. They felt entitled to rebel against a leader who they believed had been abandoned by the gods.

The Library Cave contained a handful of black-market almanacs, including a complete copy for the year 877. Produced nine years after the Diamond Sutra was printed, it shows entrepreneurs willingly muscled in on the emperor’s monopoly, even though the punishment for printing or possessing banned documents was harsh. Merely owning books on astronomy or prognostication could incur two years’ forced labor. The rewards for printers, though, were abundant. For sellers, the books were in high demand but cheap to make, courtesy of the same woodblock-printing techniques that produced the Diamond Sutra. For buyers, an almanac could divine the opportune days for marriage or moving into a new house, even the best time to trim one’s fingernails. In short, they provided the recipe for a better life.

The need for almanacs and calendars was acute, in part because China employed a complex method of calculating dates using the moon as well as the sun. Much as we now add a leap day to a modern calendar, the emperor occasionally added an entire month to reconcile solar and lunar time. While the superstitious modern man can easily work out the next Friday the thirteenth, his counterpart in ancient China was helpless without consulting the works of the emperor’s astronomers.

Of course, to make such predictions required great precision in reading the heavenly omens. Chief among those were the stars and planets, and here, too, the mountain of documents inside the Library Cave contained vital material, including a seventh-century star chart. The 11-foot-wide chart is the oldest known map of the stars from any civilization. In China’s world view, the heavens were part of the human realm, not distinct from it. The role of astronomers and astrologers was to monitor the celestial and terrestrial to ensure the two were in harmony.

The great Sinologist Joseph Needham is believed to be the first to recognize the significance of the Dunhuang star chart. In the late 1950s, he estimated the chart was created in 940. More recently, French scholars Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud and Françoise Praderie, together with the British Library’s Dr. Susan Whitfield, concluded it is centuries older. Chinese taboo characters were one factor, but the other involved a crudely drawn illustration on the far left of the scroll. The image depicts an archer, believed to be the god of lightning. Just as the fashion-conscious today can date a dress by its hemline or shoulder pads, the hats of ancient China can be assessed by the ear flaps. Those on the archer’s hat are flat; later fashion saw men starch the flaps so they stuck out. The result of this detective work into language and millinery has been to push back the date of the star chart’s creation to between 649 and 684.

Aside from the fact that it survived at all—the chart is the thickness of cigarette paper—the chart’s accuracy and comprehensiveness are remarkable. Where Greek mathematician and astronomer Ptolemy catalogued 1,022 stars, Chinese astronomers recorded 1,339 stars. The celestial scroll begins with drawings and interpretations of clouds and vapors—one in the shape of a prancing wolf portends a son becoming a general or high official. It unrolls to reveal twelve panels showing the positions of the stars in black, white, and red, corresponding to three schools of Chinese astrology. The star chart is also notable for solving the challenge of how to render the three dimensions of a spherical world onto the two dimensions of paper. The West wrestled with the problem until the sixteenth century, when the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator produced the solution still used today.

A comparison of the ancient map and the charts of modern astronomers reveals that the Chinese rendered the sky with startling accuracy. But there is one significant omission: the North Star. As with the prohibition of certain Chinese characters, the polar star is absent because it symbolized the emperor.

Apart from manuscripts on paper, the other great finds in the cave were splendid paintings on silk. At one point when Abbot Wang was fetching items from the Library Cave in 1907, Stein rescued some cloth Wang used to level the floor on which the Library Cave’s scrolls were stacked. Today, that fabric is among the most prized pieces of Chinese silk embroidery in the British Museum. The eighth-century piece, “Shakyamuni preaching on the Vulture Peak,” is nearly eight feet long and more than five feet wide. The British Museum considers the split-stitch embroidery to be “one of the most magnificent of all the compositions found in the hidden library at Dunhuang.” At its center is the Buddha, who stands on a lotus pedestal, flanked on each side by a crouching lion. From his indigo hair to each toenail on his bare feet, he has been rendered with exquisite Tang dynasty care. His right shoulder is bare and he preaches the Lotus Sutra. On each side he is accompanied by a bodhisattva and a disciple, and the cheek of the bodhisattva on the left is rendered in a whorl of tight stitching.

Of China’s four great inventions—paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass—the first three feature in the Library Cave. Paper and printing are obvious, but gunpowder figures as well. A painted silk banner, obtained by Pelliot and now in the Musée Guimet in Paris, contains the world’s earliest known depiction of firearms. The banner shows the Buddha Shakyamuni withstanding an assault by the demon Mara and his fellow tormentors who are trying to prevent the Buddha’s enlightenment. As the Buddha sits impervious in lotus position, the demons deploy a fire-lance—an early flamethrower—and a hand grenade against their serene target.

Another textile, one that speaks of human yearning, is an altar valance with colored strips of silk that dangle like a row of men’s ties. Stein noted small knotted tassels hung from some of the streamers—indicating they were offerings by devotees praying for children. Stencils, too, were tucked among the piled manuscripts. Just as woodblock printing enabled mass production, stencils could render multiple images of the Buddha and hasten the accumulation of merit. Examples of stenciled art abound on the walls of the Mogao Caves.

Other uses of paper that emerged from the Library Cave include Buddhist paper flowers. Spanning four inches, the six hand-cut votive flowers probably once decorated the caves of Mogao. Glued to the walls, such flowers adorned the caves in lieu of real flowers that would have struggled in the extremes of the Taklamakan Desert. Stein even found a brush inside the Library Cave that was used to apply glue.

The Library Cave was a source of knowledge about ancient music, too, and Pelliot collected some of China’s oldest surviving musical scores—works from the Tang dynasty (AD 618–907). Some of the music is for the pipa, a pear-shaped stringed instrument that features in the murals of numerous grottoes. The music is still played today. In 1987, twenty-five of the Dunhuang songs were recorded by Beijing’s Central Folk Orchestra and released on compact disc.

Study of the scrolls, silks, and other items in recent decades has resembled piecing together a global jigsaw puzzle as fragments held in different countries are matched up. Some material, even more minute than the scattered fragments, has occupied the attention of scholars. Debris from Stein’s packing crates that once held Library Cave material—stored for a century in two jars—has been the object of recent investigations. “Stein dust,” as the British Library calls it, has undergone chemical analysis for what it might reveal about conditions inside the Library Cave in 1907. But it is the preoccupations of people, rich and poor, that have proved most illuminating. Across the centuries, some aspects of the human condition are unchanging, whether they concern a fascination with the heavens, questions about an afterlife or just the search for the right words after a drunken night on the town.

14

Stormy Debut

After the excitement and freedom of the expedition, Stein, now in London with his cargo, faced a period of what he considered drudgery and servitude. His desert finds needed to be unpacked, sorted, listed, photographed, and published. The task was immense but necessary if scholars were to benefit from the discoveries, and he wanted that work undertaken while the collection was still together, before London and Calcutta divided the spoils.

Stein was relieved when his friend Fred Andrews, whose case Stein had been pushing, was able to work with him on the sorting. The pair previously worked together on the finds from Stein’s first expedition, and the General—as Stein’s friends dubbed him—knew Andrews was the ideal loyal lieutenant. An artist, teacher and, by 1909, head of Battersea Polytechnic’s art school, Andrews was reliable and attentive to detail. While Stein was in the desert, Andrews had dutifully filled every request: for candles, a fountain pen, pince-nez, and far more. “I am afraid you will find that distance is no protection from me,” Stein had once warned Andrews. The requests were undiminished by Stein’s return to Europe, although now they turned more domestic as the explorer asked that his spats be mailed to him and his Khotan rugs be dry-cleaned.

Stein’s antiquities were initially housed at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, then part of the British Museum. They were not destined to stay there long. Instead, space was being made available at the British Museum in Bloomsbury. However, when Stein saw the rooms he had been allocated, he was furious. He and his antiquities—obtained at so high a human cost—were to be consigned to a basement. The space, previously used to store newspaper files, was dark and cramped. In short, it was a cave. The usually measured Stein protested bitterly.

“Neither during my official career in India nor in the course of my explorations have I been called upon to work in what without exaggeration may be designated a sort of cellar,” he wrote.

In the course of my explorations I have been obliged to expose myself to a good deal of physical hardship and I believe that the strain incurred in the interest of my scientific tasks has not failed to affect my constitution to a certain extent. But I may safely assert that I could face these hardships more willingly than daily imprisonment for prolonged hours in a confined room partially below ground and devoid of adequate light and air. I believe that after the sacrifices I have made in the interest of the scientific tasks entrusted to me by Government, I ought not in fairness be called upon to work in conditions which apart from direct physical discomfort would make my tasks during my Deputation here unnecessarily irksome and trying.

He toyed with shifting the collection elsewhere, even out of London. He considered the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His plea to remain in the Natural History Museum was rejected, as was his attempt to relocate to its neighbor, the Victoria and Albert Museum. So seven months after arriving in London, the much-traveled collection was on the move again, across to Bloomsbury and into the British Museum’s basement. Andrews reassured Stein: “The cellar has been made as habitable as such a place can be, with large writing tables, armchairs, writing materials, mats, hand basins, soap & towels, dusters etc. The lock . . . has now been altered so that only our key and the master keys will open it.”

Stein kept a tight rein on who could access the rooms. Although the scrolls and other finds were based at the British Museum, they were not yet part of its collection. This couldn’t occur until his backers agreed on a division—and that would take many acrimonious years. In any case, Stein didn’t spend a great deal of time in the basement cave poring over his finds. With Andrews left to the grinding work of sorting, Stein traveled in Europe, lectured and, in 1910, accepted an offer of rooms at Oxford’s Merton College, where Percy Allen was a research fellow. Stein was happy to do so. He disliked cities in general, London in particular, and the enclave of Bloomsbury most of all. His bay window at Merton College looked out on a meadow that was far different from his alpine vista at Mohand Marg, but his second-floor rooms provided the peace and solitude he needed to write an account of his expedition.