Journeys on the Silk Road (36 page)

Yet the renown of the world’s oldest dated printed book made it difficult to remove the Diamond Sutra from permanent exhibition, says Dr. Frances Wood, head of the British Library’s Chinese section. The scroll was on permanent display when she joined the library in 1977, but was removed in 1995, around the time the library prepared to move from Bloomsbury to its current purpose-built home at St. Pancras. “It was always something people asked for and it was therefore difficult to take it off display,” she says. “So it had been on display for, we felt, too long.”

Whether the scroll will be reassembled is still to be decided. But Wood does not favor this. “I don’t think we should put it back as a scroll, because the endless rolling and unrolling is what does damage. If we can keep the sheets separate, if you wanted to exhibit it, you could put them back together to look as if it was a scroll.”

In May 2010, after nearly 1,000 hours of conservation work, the sutra was on temporary display as the centerpiece of a British Museum exhibition. The five-month show, The Printed Image in China, covered 1,300 years of the artform’s development. The scroll is unlikely to go on permanent exhibition again. But that does not mean the public can no longer see it. Online ways of viewing the scroll have become available in recent years. These reveal the Diamond Sutra in detail not possible for someone peering at it in subdued light through the glass of a display cabinet. An interactive version allows people to scrutinize the entire document. Viewers can pause at the illustrated frontispiece where, with the click of a mouse, it is possible to zoom in on the downcast eyes of the Buddha and the wrinkles on Subhuti’s neck. Even the creases that have accumulated as the scroll has been wrapped and unwrapped over the centuries are apparent. Along the scroll, the Chinese characters of the Buddha’s teaching and the colophon that gives its date are all visible. This is part of the British Library’s Turning the Pages project, which lets viewers inspect some of the most precious works among the library’s 150 million items. William Blake’s notebook, sketches by Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart’s musical diary, and Lewis Carroll’s original
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
are other gems that can be viewed this way. Just a few years ago, this method of enjoying a literary treasure would have seemed as fanciful as a caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe. For some, it will never replace the experience of viewing the real object. But if the Diamond Sutra’s life is to be extended, it offers a way to appreciate the scroll without causing harm—guiding principles of conservation and Buddhism.

For much of the twentieth century, even experts were unable to readily see the treasures of Dunhuang’s Library Cave. The scattering of the objects posed geographic obstacles. The Cold War and the Iron Curtain posed political ones. Even after China opened its door and
perestroika
thawed Russia, deep pockets were still needed to examine relics as far apart as London and St. Petersburg or New Delhi and Beijing.

Now the contents of the Library Cave are being reunited in cyberspace. The Dunhuang manuscripts, paintings, and other Silk Road discoveries are accessible through a unique digital archive. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP), based at the British Library, was established in 1994 and grew out of the first meeting of conservators from the various international collections. When the specialists gathered, they recognized a common problem, says IDP’s director, Dr. Susan Whitfield. “Everybody in all the collections felt a bit anxious, as if they hadn’t done enough with this material and it wasn’t accessible enough,” she says. “It was quite a cathartic experience for everyone. It was like confession time and now let’s work together.”

Whitfield suggested one way to improve access was by digitizing the material and putting it online. It was a radical suggestion in the mid-1990s with the internet in its infancy. “Everybody looked at me as if I must be mad. ‘There’s no way the web is ever going to do that. There’s too much material. It will be too slow,’” Whitfield said. Nonetheless, the work proceeded. The result is an extensive digital archive, among the largest of its kind in the world.

The website (http://idp.bl.uk) has information on manuscripts, textiles, and paintings as well as historic photographs. By the middle of 2012, the online archive had digitized more than 125,000 of these items and contained more than 350,000 images—all freely available. From Stein’s journeys alone, the website holds everything from his hand-drawn maps of the Mogao Caves to a portrait of the forger Islam Akhun and a mountain panorama taken the day Stein suffered frostbite. There is even information about Stein’s dynasty of dogs named Dash.

The resource, available in seven languages, continues to grow. The aim is to have 90 percent of the Dunhuang collection online by 2015. The search for Silk Road antiquities may have been characterized by international rivalry and hostility, but today there is collaboration between cultural institutions—including the National Library of China, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and the Institute for Oriental Manuscripts in St. Petersburg—to understand, conserve and make the material available to scholars and the public. IDP has received funding from the European Union as well as the Mellon and Ford foundations. But another way of financing the work has not changed since the days of the Diamond Sutra’s merit-making patron Wang Jie. Individuals, or groups, can sponsor a sutra. The sponsored document is copied—through digital photography, not hand-copying—and made available online for free. The woodblock-printed Diamond Sutra is among those that have benefited from this program.

Much of what is known about the Silk Road and Buddhism’s migration along it has its roots in Stein’s epic journeys, his scholarship, and his stamina. He brought tangible evidence of how present-day Muslim Central Asia rests on Buddhist foundations. It is impossible to comprehend contemporary Central Asia—and its increasing importance in world events—without understanding the Silk Road. Stein is the thread that makes that possible.

He uncovered some of the only surviving records of daily life as it was more than a millennium ago—poignant letters by lonely soldiers, an angry missive from an abandoned wife. With his Persian Buddha, hymns to Jesus, and images of Eros, Heracles and Athena, Stein returned from the desert with sacred treasures from possibly the world’s greatest and certainly least-known cultural melting pot. He showed that among the Silk Road’s sands lie a magnificent lost Buddhist civilization, epitomized in the Diamond Sutra. In a world today riven by sectarian conflict, his discoveries remind us of the existence of places where people of different cultures and beliefs once coexisted peacefully and give hope that they may do so again.

Stein’s resourcefulness is beyond doubt. His ability to plan and execute his epic journey over towering mountains and parched deserts and to organize teams of men and supplies is all the more remarkable given it was done without today’s communication lifelines: satellite navigation, the internet, cell phones. At times, he had nothing more than a hand-drawn map to guide him, at others, not even that. But as much as his dedication and determination can be admired, his actions are more problematic. From today’s perspective, the removal of manuscripts and murals is alarming, his treatment of Abbot Wang seems calculating and manipulative. But these were not the standards of his era, and it is facile to judge one era by the values of another. Stein worked in an era when Western powers viewed the cultural objects of others as theirs for the taking and jockeyed for the right to do so. It was a time when the West claimed “superior” knowledge and argued it alone could care for the world’s treasures. Not even the bones of indigenous people were safe, as Australia’s Aboriginal people know.

While the Romantic poet Robert Byron railed against Lord Elgin, who made off with the Parthenon marbles, and writer Victor Hugo against Britain and France’s looting of Beijing’s Summer Palace, few Western voices were raised against Stein in his lifetime. One who did protest was Sinologist Arthur Waley, the translator of the Xuanzang-inspired
Monkey
. Waley asked people to “imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval MSS [manuscripts] at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them, and carry them off to Peking.” His words recalled criticism of Stein made by China’s National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities in the 1930s. Not that Waley had any sympathy for Abbot Wang, the “precious old humbug” as he called him. Stein well knew the Chinese were interested in their remote past, according to Waley. “But I was never able to convince him that the Chinese scholars who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wrote about the geography and antiquities of Central Asia were anything more than what he called ‘arm-chair archaeologists.’”

Waley’s dissenting voice aside, Stein died a hero in the West. But not so in China, where he has long been reviled as the greatest pirate to have crossed the ocean of sand, far worse than France’s Paul Pelliot, America’s Langdon Warner, Russia’s Sergei Oldenburg or Japan’s Count Otani. Of all the material Stein removed, the Dunhuang manuscripts have attracted the most ire. Certainly more than the murals he cut from desert shrines and which arguably caused greater damage and despoiled what remained. Perhaps part of the reason for this anger is because the manuscripts were removed from within the confines of China itself, rather than Turkestan. China continues to feel aggrieved at being deprived of these records of its culture. A recent Chinese government book about the caves describes Stein as a looter and defrauder. Visitors to the Mogao Caves, or Peerless Caves, today receive a brochure that refers to the “theft” of the documents and concludes: “We hope that later generations will learn from this lesson.” But the lesson of the Library Cave is ambiguous and raises questions about what the fate of its scrolls might otherwise have been.

When Abbot Wang broke open the cave, he could elicit little interest from local authorities in its contents. By the time Stein arrived, Wang had already given away some manuscripts to ingratiate himself with local officials. Stein’s fear was that the rest would face a similar fate and be destroyed or lost. Wily and exploitative as Stein undoubtedly was in his treatment of Wang, there is no doubt his aim was to save the scrolls for the future and to better understand the past.

Personal gain and enrichment were never his motives. He lived frugally and his most treasured home was his tent. His appetite for work and his eagerness to reveal the past never dimmed. His will provided for a fund to encourage Central Asian exploration. To see Stein simply as either hero or plunderer is simplistic, the reality is more nuanced. However one views the ethics of his actions, the consequences are that the Diamond Sutra and the other scrolls he took have been well cared for in one of the world’s finest institutions. They have been documented and are increasingly available in ways unimaginable a century ago. Stein removed the scrolls when to do so was not illegal and China had neither laws nor advocates to prevent this. Certainly that had changed by the time Stein pig-headedly persisted three decades later in the face of Chinese protests.

It is possible China may one day seek the return of the Diamond Sutra and other Dunhuang treasures. China was weak and racked by political upheaval when Stein took them. Today it is a global player with the world’s fastest-growing economy. As its power has increased, so has its interest in the fate of cultural treasures removed from its soil. So far this has focused on objects plundered from the Summer Palace. China estimates about 1.5 million items were stolen when French and British troops under the command of Lord Elgin—whose father acquired the Elgin Marbles—sacked and burned the palace in 1860 during the Second Opium War.

In early 2009, China attempted to stop the auction of two bronze heads belonging to the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent that once adorned a fountain at the Summer Palace. The Paris auction by Christie’s went ahead, but then the buyer refused to pay. He later identified himself as Cai Mingchao, an adviser to China’s National Treasures Fund, which seeks to retrieve treasures from abroad. A few months after the auction, China asked the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other institutions in the UK, the United States, and France to allow its teams to document the artifacts looted from the Summer Palace. In 2010, on the 150th anniversary of the sacking of the Summer Palace, Chinese authorities called for the return of the looted artefacts.

These moves come as other countries are increasingly seeking the return of iconic objects, reigniting debate about restitution and the repatriation of cultural treasures. Greece has long demanded that the British Museum return the Elgin Marbles and has built a museum in sight of the Parthenon to house them. Not that this has altered Britain’s resolve to retain the statues. The British Museum argues the sculptures are part of everyone’s heritage and transcend cultural boundaries. More recently Egypt has demanded Nefertiti’s bust from Berlin’s Neues Museum and the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum.