Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road The Dunhuang Cave and its Paintings PART II

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road: The Dunhuang Caves

Part II

The Dunhuang Caves excavated by Sir Aurel Stein was the site of an ancient Buddhist Monastery dating back to the Tang Period which housed a secret ante chamber containing a wealth of manuscripts, silk scrolls, paintings and books. It is estimated that atleast 50,000 manuscripts and other culturally significant artefacts were removed from the cave by Aurel Stein and the British Museum together with the Victoria and Albert Museum contain these treasures. 

We have illustrated a typical painting here. The Dunhuang Cave itself was a spectacular creation which reminded Stein of the Ajanta Caves and he saw a remarkable similarity in the style employed in the paintings found in these tow places. The caves located at the very edge of the Gobi desert were patronized by the merchants who traded with the societies that lived along the oases and the Silk Road. Rich deposits of coins found amidst the ruins scattered all along the desert are testimonies to the commercial artery  that linked the Orient with the West. Dunhuang itself was at the intersection of the road from Tibet and throughout the Tang dynasty a strong military presence was maintained here. The presence of letters written in Tibetan discovered in a watch tower, a letter from a Tibetan soldier complaining about the harsh conditions in which the garrison lived, showed that for some time the Tibetans had ousted the Chinese. 

Throughout his explorations both in Kashgar and Khotan Stein found evidence of a rich culture which demonstrated the hold India exercised on the imagination of the ancient world. Aurel Stein coined the term Serndia to characterize the culture, Indian in origin and expressed in Greek and Chinese idiom. In fact in his monumental work on his Second Expedition he has traced this culture to the Kushanas, who though of Central Asian origin, adopted Indian culture and played an important role in transmitting it along the Silk Road to Central Asia and beyond.  Stein collected documents written on birch bark and paper making his collection the earliest known use of rag paper in history. The scripts derived from Ashokan Brahmi or Kharoshti are of course vital clues to the positive impact India has had on the region. 

Sir Aural Stein was the first archaeologist to cross the Taklimakan Desert and explore the Tarim Basin. Miran was a site in which Stein collected hundreds of Tibetan documents along with wooden tablets on which writing was present. From the large number of documents recovered he concluded that an entire archive located ion one of the higher floors had decayed and its collection of documents fell below, and the dry arid atmosphere of the desert had preserved them for over 2000 years. Serindia then covered the entire region from Kashgar across the Hindu Kush to the Tarim Basin.

The Dunhuang site was littered with the remains of statues of Buddha and Stein identified the Rawak Stupa as one of the oldest structures of the region which bore distinct resemblance to its Indian counterparts in Sarnath and Sanchi. 

We have illustrated one of the many manuscripts taken by Sir Aurel Stein.  The rich harvest of manuscripts from the region was not without its share of academic controversy. Knowing that manuscripts were in great demand, some enterprising Uighurs/Turks began forging books which they passed off as ancient  manuscripts. An eminent Orientalist in Calcutta was a victim of this hoax and it fell upon the shoulders of Aurel Stein to expose it.

The exquisite silk scrolls found by Stein during the course of his Second and Third expeditions are now in United Kingdom. The region from which these exquisite pieces of art came from falls under the political  jurisdiction of the People's Republic of China. Turkestan itself was hotly contested through much of its history between Russia, China and Tibet. For nearly seven hundred years the Turks ruled over the region putting an end to the Buddhist and 

other religions lie Christianity that once flourished here. Hence given the complex history of the region a simplistic national origin argument to justify a Chinese claim over the treasures of Central Asia cannot be realistically entertained. India has a far more tangible claim over the treasures as they were inspired by Indian cultural interactions and influence.  Aurel Stein himself recognized the extent of Indian cultural influence in this region when he coined the term, SerIndia.

Over the century and a quarter since Stein's expeditions to Central Asia a huge controversy has erupted over his legacy. That the expeditions to Central Asia were part of the Great Game is clear from the fact that throughout his travels he mapped surveyed and made detailed topographical and geographically based maps and in this task he was ably assisted by Ram Singh a surveyor sent by the Survey of India to assist him. The Chinese authorities were quite aware of what Sir Aurel Stein was doing but given the turbulent nature of China after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, there was little China could do. And with the Russians breathing down heavily with the construction of the trans Caspian Railway, the Chinese felt that they had to keep the English in good humour and that was the same attitude that they displayed in Lhasa in 1911 when the Traety was signed with Sir Francis Younghusband. 

Basil Davidson in his book Turkestan Alive has recollected the numerous instances during his travels in the region when he heard Aurel Stein denounced as a "bandit" "thief" "vandal". True Sir Aurel Stein took possession of vast culturally significant treasure. However in hind sight we can safely say that but for his intervention much of the heritage may have been detroyed in the endemic civil wars that too palce during the Nationalist Period and during the Cultural Revolution. And in anycasr Turkestan is predominantly Muslim and so the Buddhist heritage has become alien to the region.

Aurel Stein is still remembered as a explorer and an intrepid adventurer following the footsteps of Alexander, a seventh century Buddhist monk and Marco Polo.

Sir Aurel Stein and the Treasures of the Silk Road: Can Communist China reclaim the Buddhist Artefacts Manuscripts and Scrolls

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Sir Aurel Stein and the Great Game 

Part I

Sir Aurel Stein (1862 - 1943) is  not a name that will ring too many bells today. But in his day he was regarded as an explorer extraordinaire and an archaeologist in a league all by himself. His prodigious output in terms of scholarly studies like Serindia, Ancient Khotan, Ruins of Desert Cathay and his On the Tracks of Alexander were all regarded as classics in his day. Though a citizen of Hungary, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was ranged against Britain during World War I, Aural Stein rose to become one of the most respected figures of the imperial British establishment both in India and England. Like Mortimer Durand and Percy Sykes, Aurel Stein too was a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire, a decoration specially created to honor those who rendered service to the Empire. What exactly did that service consist of?

The late nineteenth century witnessed the rivalry between the Russian Empire and the British Empire, a rivalry in which India was sucked in due to its proximity to Central Asia and Afghanistan in which Russia had begun to take active interest. The main theatre of this rivalry was actually the Straits of Bosporusa and the Straits of Dardanelles both in Ottoman territory. The Crimean War was fought only to preserve the Ottoman Empire as none of the other European powers could agree about what its territorial gains would be should the Ottoman Empire be partitioned. Indeed all three major European powers had conflicting and divergent interests and so the status quo was the only solution. On the Asian frontier the situation  was quite complicated, a bundle of political and military skirmishes, high and low level intrigue, arming tribal groups of whom the Afriddis are the most notorious, using nomadic peasants as information suppliers, to which Arthur Connoly  in an inspired moment called the Great Game. And Great Game it was as both Russia and India under the Raj believed that the Chinese part of Turkestan the Sinkiang of today, the Uighur territory, was open for political and economic hegemony. The British had supported a warlord, Yakub Beg, for a few years towards the close of the nineteenth century, but the Russians were not far behind.

The Great Game had one unexpected participant: Aurel Stein. He was born of Jewish parents but given the anti s Semitism of the Austro Hungarian Empire his family thought it prudent to have him baptized. Aurel Stein converted to the Anglican Religion as he lay dying in Kabul in 1943. In 1883, Stein took his PhD in Oriental languages and he was trained in both Sanskrit and Persian. After his doctorate he came to India and soon found  employment in the Punjab where he served as the Registrar of Punjab University. The first major academic project undertaken by Aurel Stein was the translation of Kalhana's Rajatarangini into English. With the help of a Kashmiri pundit, Govind Kaul, managed to appropriate a manuscript written in the Sharada script which formed the basis of the Three volume Translation of the Rajatarangini. Impressed by his erudite lecture in Sanskrit the Maharaja of Kashmir retained Aurel Stein to catalogue the Sanskrit Manuscripts preserved in the Temple attached to the Royal Court. 

 To be continued

Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer Spy Diplomat Persia and the Great Game

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes Explorer Soldier Spy

Anthony Wynn

Sir Percy Molesworth Sykes was a personality straight from the pages of a Rudyard Kipling novel. He combined the life of adventure for which T E Lawrence is famous for and a love for adventure which made Sir Richard Burton the cynosure of Victorian society. He traveled widely in Persia, Baluchistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia and as he traveled he explored the terrain  and sent detailed maps of the region to the Indian Army Intelligence Headquarters at Shimla. He lived and worked in dangerous times. Persia, an unstable patchwork of tribes and sectarian associations, was stirring intellectually to a new kind of political awakening. A movement aimed at transforming Persia into a Constitutional State was gathering momentum and by the first decade of the twentieth century had virtually rendered the Qajar Dynasty both powerless and seriously undermined. Percy Sykes was the Consul posted at Mashhad at a critical juncture and his long standing friendship with the Crown Prince made him a valuable source of political information for the English.

Percy Sykes was born in 1867 in Yorkshire and died in 1945. Educated in the well known Rugby School, Sykes joined the Sandhurst Military Academy and was posted in India. He was based in Sialkot with the 16th Lancers. Along with Francis Younghusband, Syskes too was seconded to the Indian Army and its Intelligence wing. And in this, Sykes was eminently successful as he was able to explore little known mountain passes, traverse the inhospitable Lut Desert, explore the migratory routes of Turkoman nomads as they crossed from Central Asia into Afghanistan and thence into Persia. As he wrote in his History of Exploration his guides in his exploration were the accounts of Alexander's conquests, particularly that of Arrian and the travels of Marco Polo. Sykes was a protégé of Sir Mortimer Durand whose biography he wrote in which he expressed admiration for the tireless manner in which he pursued British interests in Afghanistan which till today is institutionalised in the form of the Durand Line, the boundary between Afghanistan and India, now of course, the line dividing Pakistan from the Pashtun heartland of Afghanistan. Percy Sykes was well trained in Persian and so was able to acquire impressive intelligence.

Persia in the late nineteenth century was the target of two powerful and expansionist Empires: Britain and Russia. The Great Game as Rudyard Kipling called it was played out from the Pamirs, across the Taklamakan Desert, the snow capped peaks of the Hindu Kush to Tehran and Shriaz. An the Consul in Mashhad  and Kerman, Sykes kept a close watch on Russia. The construction of the Trans Caspian Railway had made it easier for the Russians to move its military rapidly and the tribes inhabiting the border areas were constantly in a state of what Ibn haldun called fitna, a state of political unrest. negotiations with tribal leaders on behalf of the Indian Government meant also dealing with the regime in Persia whose writ barely extended as far east as the Baluchi border. The increasing old of Russia over Tashkent meant that Indian trading interests suffered.

During his years of service, Sykes explored 3000 miles in the Himalayas and discovered no less than 40 passes that had strategic value. His detailed Reports which he submitted to the Legation in Tehran eventually found their way from the Foreign Office to the Royal Geographical Society. The task of communication was still filled with difficulties as the engineers sent to man the British Persian Telegraph Company were killed sometimes within days of reaching their posts.

Sir Percy Sykes was a keen observer of the landscape he surveyed. He noticed that the qanats that supplied water to the fields on the border between Baluchistan and Persia had been destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century and agriculture had not quite recovered since. He also was intrigued by the spectacular structures he saw in the region adjoining Persia and Baluchistan. 

The windmills that harnessed the violent desert winds were described vividly by Sykes and they were still functioning when he wrote about them. Huge parallel wall made of mud capture the wind and funnels it towards giant sails that drive timber shafts to which are attached grinding stones. Some of these structures are still extant and are now recognised as UNESCO world heritage sites.

The discovery of Oil in Persia and the transition from coal burning engines to oil powered ships in the Royal Navy added another element in the tense relationship between Persia and the British. With Germany beginning to take an interest in the region in order to use political Islam as an ideology to motivate anti British feeling among Muslims all over Asia men like Sykes had their hands full. At Kashgar Sykes helped Sir Aurel Stein smuggle 146 cartons and boxes of antiquities into India and till this day the Chinese have neither forgotten nor forgiven this vandalism of their cultural heritage.

This book is well written and is based o the personal papers correspondence and Reports of Percy Sykes. In 1915 he was knighted for his services, receiving the KCIE. He died in 1945.