Journeys on the Silk Road (6 page)

“There is a piece of news which should interest you,” he wrote with typical British understatement. “A German expedition is now at Turfan. I had a letter from them only this week . . . I don’t know how many Germans there are. But the man who wrote me signed himself Albert von Lecoq [sic]; and he mentions a companion of his under the name of Bartus.” Exactly what they were up to at Turfan, more than 800 miles east of Kashgar, Macartney wasn’t sure; he suspected they might be geologists or intruders on Stein’s archaeological terrain. However, he did know they were heading for Kashgar. And the Germans were not the only ones bringing their buckets and spades to Turkestan. Macartney had learned of “another poacher on your preserves.” An American named Ellsworth Huntington had asked Macartney if he knew anything about old manuscripts discovered in the desert. “The sooner you are on the field, the better,” Macartney warned Stein.

Having been forced to postpone his trip by a year, Stein’s frustration grew the more he learned of these rivals. As his departure day drew closer, the news from Kashgar became increasingly alarming. The two Germans had arrived in Kashgar in October 1905 and were staying under Macartney’s roof. Even as Macartney was enjoying the lively companionship of some new European faces in town—and a gregarious pair at that—he was gleaning information about their plans and quietly passing the news to Stein, along with the confidential reports prepared for his own political masters in India. The Germans represented rival ambitions. Nothing personal, of course.

Albert von Le Coq, two years older than Stein, was an assistant at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum. It was the first time von Le Coq, who studied medicine and languages before joining the museum, had led an expedition or journeyed to Turkestan. He was the wealthy heir to a wine and brewing fortune, and judging by the contents of his baggage he had a very different temperament to the reserved and stoic Stein. Von Le Coq ventured into the desert with twelve bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne, a farewell gift from his sisters. He chilled the bubbly by wrapping the bottles in wet felt and leaving them in a breeze. After a hard day’s digging, he found it a most refreshing drink.

He had set out from Germany with Theodor Bartus, the museum’s knockabout handyman. Bartus had no formal education but knew his way around Turkestan, having accompanied the first German expedition to Turfan three years earlier. In Kashgar, the two men were waiting impatiently for the arrival of their museum boss and Indian scholar Professor Albert Grünwedel. Traveling overland from Europe, the professor had been stuck for more than a month in Russian Turkestan waiting for baggage that had gone astray. Until Grünwedel turned up, von Le Coq’s movements were stymied.

“The absence of the Professor seems to have disconcerted Mr. Lecoq considerably,” Macartney wrote in mid-October. Exactly why would not be known until much later. But Macartney did learn that von Le Coq appeared to have his eye on the very places Stein was aiming for: Lop Nor and Dunhuang. Moreover, Macartney also learned von Le Coq was not looking forward to the arrival of Grünwedel, who would take over as expedition leader. Von Le Coq and Bartus worked well together; they moved quickly and traveled light. Grünwedel, by contrast, was slow and meticulous. Their different methods were not the only reason for disharmony. “There is a good deal of jealousy between Grünwedel & Lecoq, and Lecoq tells me that he is not anxious to work with Grünwedel with whom he is rather afraid of having misunderstandings. Bartus is a splendid man,” Macartney reported three weeks later.

Indeed Bartus was a garrulous sidekick. The former sailor had washed up in Australia at one stage, where he had learned to ride a horse, lost his money in a Melbourne bank collapse and returned to Europe. He was a man with a mischievous sense of humor. When Turkestan officials once asked him to teach them a polite German greeting, he kept a straight face as he instructed them to say: “Good morning, old fat-head.” Bartus taught them well. When Grünwedel returned six years later, that was how he was greeted.

Macartney kept silent about Stein’s plans to his lively German guests. But he suggested that perhaps Stein should write to von Le Coq, whom he found a “pucca” well-read man, and make clear his intentions. After all, Stein’s movements could not remain a secret for much longer. What prompted Macartney’s suggestion isn’t known. Perhaps it was made out of the respect Macartney developed for von Le Coq in the two months the German spent under Chini Bagh’s roof. Or maybe he saw it as a way for Stein to explicitly stake out his territory. But declaring his hand was against Stein’s instincts. He had gone to great lengths to keep his plans secret and did not want his rivals tipped off. “I have never believed in the advantage of grand announcements beforehand,” Stein wrote back.

Meanwhile, Grünwedel and his young offsider, Referendar Pohrt, eventually overcame their problems with the Russian railways and reached Kashgar. They no sooner arrived than Macartney penned a candid sketch from which Stein, still busily making preparations in India, could draw some cheer. “Grünwedel is ill, can’t go on horseback & has to be looked after like a big baby. Pohrt is a young fellow with no experience, and at present finds the Turki girls far more interesting than archaeology . . . The Germans have certainly not shown much despatch in their movements. No doubt had they known that you also were on the war path, they would have dragged Grünwedel off, ill or not, long before now.”

The latter point would reinforce Stein’s belief in the value of keeping plans secret. But even with the welcome news of the German party’s dithering, Stein could not relax. A French expedition was to get under way in the spring of 1906, around the same time as his own. It would be headed by a precociously brilliant young Sinologist, twenty-seven-year-old Paul Pelliot. Like Stein, he was an accomplished linguist but with a key difference: he was fluent in Chinese. In January 1906, Stein confided his intentions to his friend Percy Allen, writing, “My own plan now is to keep council [sic] to myself & to be on the ground before either Germans or Frenchmen know exactly of my start.”

Stein hoped Grünwedel’s slow, thorough approach would keep the Germans out of his way in distant parts of the desert. When Grünwedel left Kashgar his progress was even slower than usual. Still too sick to ride, he made an inglorious exit, bumping his way along the oasis’s dusty, rutted road atop a cart filled with hay. Of Pelliot’s movements there was no news. Stein confessed to feeling wicked enough to hope the Frenchman and his party might get stuck in transit. He wasn’t sure how Pelliot would travel to Turkestan. If he came via India, with a word in the right ear Stein could even help engineer a delay. As it turned out, he didn’t need to. Pelliot came via train from Europe and got stuck in Tashkent for two months waiting for his bags to arrive. Ever the acquisitive linguist, Pelliot used the time to learn Turki, the main language of Turkestan. “The true race will be with the Frenchmen,” Stein told Allen.

Yet the Germans were not simply sipping champagne. Albert von Le Coq had chanced upon a curious piece of information that Stein would not learn until reaching Dunhuang. Had he known, Stein might not have been quite so dismissive of the Germans in the months before he reached Kashgar.

Chini Bagh, meaning Chinese garden, was a single-story mud-brick home built around three sides of a courtyard. Situated atop a cliff, its terraces overlooked a river where naked boys riding bareback would water their horses and where lengths of cloth were dyed deep red with hollyhock flowers. On clear days, the snow-capped Tian Shan mountains were visible in the distance.

The Macartneys presided over one of the most hospitable and unconventional houses in Central Asia. Through its gates passed an unusual cast of characters: adventurers, oddballs and journalists, aristocrats and missionaries, Chinese dignitaries in sedan chairs and fleeing refugees. The Macartneys were themselves an unusual couple. George Macartney was the son of a Scottish father, who had served in China, and a Chinese mother. He never spoke of his mother, not even to his children, yet his Chinese heritage was apparent in his features. He was fluent in Chinese, having spent his childhood in Nanjing, and was educated in England. Early in his career, he was the translator for Francis Younghusband, then a young army officer, when the pair arrived at Kashgar in 1890 and the two men moved into Chini Bagh. Younghusband departed the following year and continued his controversial career, most notably leading the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. Macartney, who remained in Kashgar, could hardly have predicted Chini Bagh would be his home for the next twenty-eight years.

He briefly returned to Britain on leave in 1898. His Scottish fiancée, twenty-one-year-old Catherine Theodora Borland, had not been expecting him when he arrived on her doorstep, but nonetheless married him a week later. Their parents were friends, and the pair had known one another since childhood, but George and Catherine were opposites. He was a man of few words—his talent was for listening. In group photographs he invariably appears off to one side or in the background, as though quietly assessing the scene before him. Mrs. Macartney was a warm, sociable figure. She began her marriage as “the most timid, unenterprising girl in the world . . . and certainly had no qualifications for a pioneer’s life, beyond being able to make a cake.” She soon proved otherwise. Within weeks of her hastily arranged wedding, she cheerfully made the rugged overland trek to Kashgar via Russia on horse and camel, picking up a harmonium along the way to accompany her singing.

Kashgar has long been one of Central Asia’s great crossroads. In Stein’s day, it drew Muslim merchants from Tashkent and Samarkand, Jews from Bokhara, fierce Pashtuns from Afghanistan, and Kashmiris and Ladakhis from across the Himalayas to the south. Remote as it was from Europe’s salons and drawing rooms, few places have been more strategically significant, especially at the height of the Great Game rivalry when the Russian and British empires jostled for influence in Central Asia. Turkestan, like Afghanistan, was seen as a buffer against Russian expansion that might threaten the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, India. As a result, Kashgar was home to two European outposts: Chini Bagh and the Russian consulate. Both were just outside the old Muslim city and a few miles north of the newer Chinese city. The Chinese administered the oasis and raised taxes, but the Muslims had their own leaders. China’s influence had waxed and waned in Turkestan, which has been known by many names. The West has variously called it Chinese or Eastern Turkestan, High Tartary, Kashgaria, and Sinkiang. China has called it the Western Regions and New Dominions. Today it is known as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

When Stein first visited Kashgar, the effects of its shifting fortunes were still apparent. An unlikely Muslim leader named Yakub Beg, a Tajik adventurer and former dancing boy, had seized control of Kashgar and most of Eastern Turkestan and proclaimed himself King of Kashgaria in the 1860s. Yakub Beg claimed descent from the great Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane and was adept at playing off one Great Gamer against another. The Russians shed no tears when, in 1877, the wily despot died, Kashgaria unraveled and China regained control. But Britain had cozied up to Yakub Beg and Macartney felt the aftermath of China’s displeasure. Although China had promptly allowed Russia to establish a consulate in Kashgar in 1882, Britain wasn’t allowed to do so for more than twenty years. Until then, Macartney was outranked by the Russian consul. For much of that time, Russian authority was wielded by the formidable and capricious Nikolai Petrovsky. Relations between Petrovsky and Macartney were cordial for a while. Petrovsky even sent a Cossack guard to escort Macartney and his new bride into Kashgar, and the two representatives of the rival empires celebrated Christmas together. But the mood so chilled at one stage that Petrovsky, who had lent Macartney a pane of window glass—a rare commodity in Kashgar—demanded it back. On another occasion, the Russians diverted Chini Bagh’s water supply. For about three years, including during Stein’s first visit in the summer of 1900, Macartney and Petrovsky did not speak to each other. Perhaps an uneasy relationship was no surprise given their roles. But with just a handful of Europeans in the oasis—missionaries and medics mostly—such a falling-out could only increase Macartney’s sense of isolation in his remote posting.

The social glue in Kashgar was provided by the cheerful Father Hendricks, a Roman Catholic priest welcomed by Chinese and Europeans alike. In his well-worn Chinese coat topped with a black clerical hat, Hendricks was a familiar sight as he scurried around the oasis—he was always in a hurry—collecting and relaying the latest news. So well informed was the entertaining Father Hendricks that Stein dubbed him a “living newspaper.” Hendricks had arrived in 1885, but his past was a mystery. He never spoke of it, and in all his years in Kashgar he never received a letter. In two decades at the oasis, he made few converts, other than a Chinese shoemaker. Yet he celebrated Mass each day alone in his dingy hovel on an altar made from a packing case and covered with a soiled lace cloth. His chief talent, aside from socializing, was turning the abundant supply of local grapes each autumn into wine. Hendricks had no income and survived on charity. The bearded, bespectacled priest lived on scraps of bread and vegetables until Macartney arrived in Kashgar and began sharing his meals with him. Hendricks eventually moved into Chini Bagh, but insisted on moving out when Macartney married, though he remained a frequent visitor.