Journeys On The Silk Road Part 6

Eventually an agreement was reached, and today the ma.n.u.scripts are in the British Library; silk paintings, sculptures, and coins in the British Museum; textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and murals and silk paintings in the National Museum in New Delhi.

When he had heard this much and penetrated deeply into its significance, the Venerable Subhuti was moved to tears.

VERSE 14, THE DIAMOND SUTRA.

15.

Treasure Hunters Stein was the first, but by no means the last, foreigner to arrive on Abbot w.a.n.g's doorstep eager to relieve him of treasures. As Stein's caravan desperately searched for the end of the Keriya River in the Taklamakan Desert and he counted cartridges ready to relieve the suffering of his ponies, his arch rival, Frenchman Paul Pelliot, arrived at Dunhuang on February 12, 1908. Pelliot was unaware that Stein had seized the Silk Road's greatest prize.

Pelliot, too, had heard the rumor of a hidden cache of ma.n.u.scripts, when pa.s.sing through the Turkestan capital Urumqi, 600 miles from Dunhuang. Clearly word had spread along the northern Silk Road, which is where Albert von Le Coq heard the tale.

Pelliot, on the cusp of his thirtieth birthday, was joined on his first and, as it turned out, only Turkestan expedition by a photographer, Charles Nouette, and a doctor, Louis Vaillant. Like Stein, Pelliot found no sign of w.a.n.g on his initial visit to the site and discovered the Library Cave was locked. The Frenchman found w.a.n.g in Dunhuang and the pair agreed to meet at the caves. But when they did, a frustrated Pelliot learned that the key had been left behind in Dunhuang. He also learned that Stein had preceded him. But, w.a.n.g a.s.sured Pelliot, Stein had spent only three days at the caves. In fact, Stein stayed twenty-four days.

It was March 3 before the cave was unlocked and Pelliot was allowed inside. When he entered the holy of holies, as he called it, he was dumbfounded. The cave was still crammed with between 15,000 and 20,000 scrolls. Pelliot spent three feverish weeks going through them. He estimated it would take six months to examine every scroll properly. But he was determined to look briefly at each and raced through a thousand a day. Dust in the cramped cave caught in Pelliot's throat and the fragrance of ancient incense still lingered in some of the scrolls. A photograph from the time shows him in a heavy dark coat, hunched over a scroll just inside the Library Cave. The mural of the two trees, before which Hong Bian's statue once stood, is just visible on the rear wall. Pelliot is surrounded by tightly packed bundles. In front of him, the naked flame of his candle is perched alarmingly close to the priceless paper scrolls.

Although beaten to the cave by Stein, Pelliot had one clear advantage. He knew exactly what he was looking at, for he spoke and read Chinese. The Professor of Chinese at the ecole franaise d'Extrme-Orient in Hanoi had no need to rely on an a.s.sistant's scant knowledge of Buddhism. He could cherry-pick the best-and did. He set aside two piles of scrolls: those that he wanted at any cost, and a second pile that he would take if he could. As well as the Chinese scrolls, he picked his way through a range of other doc.u.ments in Tibetan, Uyghur, Khotanese, Sogdian, even Hebrew, and a Nestorian Gospel of St. John. He also examined the silk banners. Among the best were a silk depicting an ancient pilgrim carrying scrolls on his back-an image that evokes Xuanzang-and the painting of demons attempting to distract the Buddha with a fire-lance.

Pelliot learned Stein had paid w.a.n.g for ma.n.u.scripts and resolved to do likewise, and his negotiations with the abbot appear to have been less fraught than Stein's. By the time Pelliot arrived, w.a.n.g had already successfully sold scrolls and other material to a foreigner and was rea.s.sured to realize that no one had discovered his secret deal. Stein had laid the groundwork, and w.a.n.g had begun spending the money on restorations to his caves. But emboldened as he was to enter into a deal with Pelliot, w.a.n.g was not prepared to sell all the cave's remaining contents. Pelliot paid w.a.n.g about 90 for his haul, which included more than 4,000 scrolls in Tibetan, 3,000 in Chinese, thousands of fragments in Sanskrit, and about 230 paintings on silk, cotton, and hemp. The scrolls and ma.n.u.scripts are now in Paris's Bibliotheque nationale de France and the textiles, including the silk banner of the ancient pilgrim, are in the Musee Guimet.

As the antiquities safely steamed to France, Pelliot headed to Beijing. There he showed Chinese scholars some of what he had purchased. The reaction was immediate. Word went back to Dunhuang: everything left in the cave was to be sent to Beijing. Compensation would be paid to w.a.n.g.

w.a.n.g had seen the last of Pelliot, but not the last of the foreign devils. A j.a.panese aristocrat, Count Otani Kozui, head of the Pure Land School of Buddhism, was behind an expedition that arrived late in 1911. He was a mysterious figure-Britain suspected he was a spy-who sent two a.s.sistants to Dunhuang. Over eight weeks, the pair bought ma.n.u.scripts from w.a.n.g and left behind their names in two of the caves.

Seven years after Stein first arrived at Dunhuang-and just as the Diamond Sutra was being readied for its first exhibition in London-he returned. Zahid Beg, the trader who first told Stein about the ma.n.u.scripts, rode out to meet the explorer as he arrived at the oasis on March 24, 1914. His caravan included his new fox terrier-Dash III-and some of his old retainers, although not Chiang, who was still ensconced as Macartney's secretary in Kashgar. Chiang's hearing had improved, but he was no longer fit for harsh desert travel. Stein was less than impressed with the "listless" replacement and dearly missed Chiang's companions.h.i.+p.

Much had changed at Dunhuang in the intervening years. Gone was the magistrate w.a.n.g Ta-lao-ye in whose yamen Stein had nearly frozen while wearing his thin European clothes, and the influential military chief Lin Ta-jen had died. But w.a.n.g was still the guardian of the caves, and the priest welcomed back his former patron. w.a.n.g was "as jovial & benign as ever," Stein told Allen. "He had suffered in no way from the indulgence he showed me in a certain transaction and only regrets now that fear prevented him from letting me have the whole h.o.a.rd in 1907."

It was an opinion shared by w.a.n.g's Dunhuang patrons, Stein claimed-with more than a touch of self-interest-so impressed were they on seeing how the money from Stein and Pelliot had been spent. Outside the caves w.a.n.g had planted an orchard, built stables and a large guesthouse. He had also been busy within the caves. Drift sand had been removed and gaudy new statues installed. But Stein's heart must have sunk when he saw the fate of the murals. Fresh plaster had been applied over some, others w.a.n.g had demolished to allow access through the rock walls to about fifty hard-to-reach grottoes. Stein could see for himself how the money had been used. Nonetheless w.a.n.g insisted Stein inspect a big red book that accounted for each horseshoe of silver.

w.a.n.g complained bitterly that money promised as compensation for the removal of the ma.n.u.scripts to Beijing never arrived. It had been skimmed off at the various yamens along the way. Some of the ma.n.u.scripts bound for Beijing also disappeared. w.a.n.g described how the scrolls had been carelessly bundled onto six carts. The carts were delayed in Dunhuang, during which time some of the ma.n.u.scripts were filched by locals. The pilfering continued during the journey, Stein later wrote. He was convinced many of the ma.n.u.scripts he bought in Gansu and in neighboring Turkestan during this third expedition came from the Library Cave. Although Beijing had ordered the cave be emptied, w.a.n.g, the former soldier, had not exactly followed orders. "Honest w.a.n.g, the priest, has been acute enough to keep back abundant souvenirs of the great h.o.a.rd," Stein confided to Allen.

w.a.n.g's former quarters were now a storeroom, and from them he produced boxes crammed with ma.n.u.scripts. Stein knew Pelliot had since selected the best of the scrolls and so did not realistically hope for important finds among w.a.n.g's secret cache. Nonetheless, he filled four cases with nearly 600 rolls. The ma.n.u.scripts w.a.n.g apparently squirreled away after the cave was emptied raise questions for scholars today. Were they really from the Library Cave? If not, where have they come from? Could some be forgeries? The jury is still out.

Four months after Stein's caravan pulled out of Dunhuang in April 1914, a Russian expedition arrived. Its leader, Sergei Oldenburg, also bought ma.n.u.scripts. Then, for a decade, the foreign explorers vanished from Dunhuang. Even so, Stein's thoughts at least were never far from the City of Sands. He worked on a five-volume scholarly account of his second expedition, Serindia. On the evening he finished it on Mohand Marg in 1918, he celebrated by lighting a bonfire, signaling the event to the Kashmiri mountains and to Andrews, who could see it fifteen miles down the valley in Srinagar. It was a fitting way to signpost a work that included his discovery of the beacon watchtowers from which ancient Chinese soldiers lit fires to signal to their comrades far across the desert.

The last of the foreign explorers to arrive in Dunhuang was American Langdon Warner in 1924. Warner knew the cave had been emptied, but his interest was in murals not ma.n.u.scripts, in the visual image rather than the written word. In spite of that, he too claimed to have bought ma.n.u.scripts that had "strayed," as he put it, from the Library Cave to nearby oases. Warner-purportedly a model for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones-was an art historian with Boston's Fogg Museum. Like those who preceded him, Warner was overwhelmed by what he saw: "There was nothing to do but gasp," he wrote.

But he did far more than gasp. Warner stripped murals from the walls with the conviction that, like Stein before him, he was "rescuing" the artworks. In the years between Stein's departure and Warner's arrival, other foreigners had reached the caves. In the early 1920s, about 400 Russian soldiers fleeing the revolution across the border were interned at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Camped there for six months, the White Russians left their marks. Magnificent murals were blackened by soot from their fires. Others were deliberately defaced. Warner was appalled: "Across some of these lovely faces are scribbled the numbers of a Russian regiment, and from the mouth of the Buddha where he sits to deliver the Lotus Law flows some Slav obscenity."

Damage by other visitors was accidental and thoughtless, but no less destructive. Warner recorded how wors.h.i.+ppers put greasy palms on delicate murals or leaned against them. And he saw how sheepskin-clad visitors had brushed so often against a row of saintly figures in a narrow entrance that part of the painting had rubbed away. "My job is to break my neck to rescue and preserve anything and everything I can from this quick ruin. It has been stable enough for centuries, but the end is in sight now." He had no reservations about his actions. "As for the morals of such vandalism I would strip the place bare without a flicker. Who knows when Chinese troops may be quartered here as the Russians were? And worse still, how long before the Mohameddan rebellion that everyone expects? In twenty years this place won't be worth a visit."

By the time of Warner's arrival, w.a.n.g's secret stash of ma.n.u.scripts had been depleted. What Stein, Pelliot, and others failed to take had been souvenired by visiting magistrates, Warner believed. "Each one visits the caves at the end of his term and carries off as many of the precious rolls as the priest admits are remaining. These rolls avert fire and flood and bring luck. They make splendid gifts to higher officials and sell for several hundreds of taels each."

Warner's determination to strip the wall paintings was no snap decision. He arrived at the caves equipped to remove murals. Despite the January cold that froze the chemical fixative, he nonetheless removed about a dozen murals as well as a three-foot-tall kneeling Tang dynasty figure which he broke from its pedestal, wrapped in his woolen underwear and sent back to Harvard. "No vandal hand but mine had disturbed it for eleven hundred years," he wrote.

Within a year, Warner returned for more. But by then the mood had changed. His party arrived just as news swept China that a British police officer had shot dead a dozen protesting Chinese students in Shanghai in May 1925, sparking antiforeigner campaigns across the country. Anger at events in Shanghai was not all that turned the tide against Warner. Foreign explorers who were once welcomed were now shunned. The backlash focused on Stein and Pelliot, "neither of whom could ever come back and live," Warner wrote.

Warner's men were forbidden to camp at the caves and were threatened by angry locals who gathered nightly outside their Dunhuang inn. Warner had been so demonized that he was accused of blasting entire hillsides to remove chapels. He had even been blamed for causing a local drought and famine, he told Stein in a letter. Nor did Abbot w.a.n.g escape the s.h.i.+ft in local public opinion. The modest amount of money Warner had paid w.a.n.g on his first visit had ballooned to a vast sum around the oasis rumor mill. There were demands that w.a.n.g share his nonexistent fortune. When he failed to produce it, he was threatened with death. He saved himself by feigning madness.

Despite Warner's cautionary letter, and well aware of the changed political climate, Stein decided to mount a fourth expedition, funded by Harvard. Stein was sixty-seven years old and retired from the Indian civil service. If he hoped for a final victory lap of Turkestan, those dreams could not have been more misplaced. The expedition ended in a humiliating retreat.

The signs were ominous. Just as he was about to set off, he learned his good friend Thomas "the Saint" Arnold had died. Arnold's one-word telegram-"Rejoice"-had elated Stein in 1905. Now the loss of the friend he had known since his Lah.o.r.e days left him grief-stricken. Still, he departed from Kashmir in August 1930. Even before reaching Turkestan, one of his surveyors fell ill and abandoned the journey. And soon after Stein arrived in Kashgar, his dog Dash V died.

China's att.i.tude toward his work had changed dramatically. Its National Commission for the Preservation of Antiquities strenuously opposed his expedition. The commission regarded Stein's stated aim-to explore ancient trade routes and the path taken by Xuanzang-as cover for his true purposes: to excavate archaeological sites in Chinese Turkestan and to export artworks. The commission made its views clear in a 1,000-word doc.u.ment that reached the British Museum in early 1931.

The commission argued that the export of archaeological objects could be justified only when the objects were obtained legally, their removal caused no damage and if no one in the country of origin was sufficiently competent or interested in studying them or in their safekeeping. "Otherwise it is no longer scientific archaeology, but commercial vandalism. Sir Aurel Stein's conduct during his previous journeys in Chinese Turkistan verges dangerously on the latter." The commission was scathing of Stein's treatment of Abbot w.a.n.g: Sir Aurel Stein, taking advantage of the ignorance and cupidity of the priest in charge, persuaded the latter to sell to him at a pittance what he considered the pick of the collection which, needless to say, did not in any way belong to the seller. It would be the same if some Chinese traveller pretending to be merely a student of religious history goes to Canterbury and buys up the valuable relics from the cathedral care-taker.

The doc.u.ment, signed by nineteen scholars and the heads of Chinese cultural inst.i.tutions, lamented that the collection lay scattered and unstudied between London, Paris, and Tokyo, while "their rightful owners, the Chinese, who are the most competent scholars for their study, are deprived of their opportunity as well as their owners.h.i.+p."

The Times weighed in, spirited in its defense of Stein and withering in its att.i.tude to China, where people were "still in the stage of grinding down fossils in the belief that these are dragon bones with special medicinal properties." By the middle of 1931, Stein's pa.s.sport had been cancelled and he had retreated to Kashmir. He would never see Turkestan again.

16.

Hangman's Hill On a January morning in 1934, high above the quiet Welsh seaside town of Aberystwyth, a letter arrived on the desk of William Llewellyn Davies, head of the National Library of Wales. The imposing granite and stone building, with its sweeping view to the west over tranquil Cardigan Bay, faced away from the political storm clouds gathering over mainland Europe.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler had come to power a year earlier. Meanwhile, in London, thoughts turned to protecting the nation's cultural treasures in the event of another war. The chiefs of the nation's museums, libraries, and art galleries had met a few weeks earlier to discuss finding safe havens for their valuable works. The letter to Davies touched on that very question. It was from the British Museum and wanted to know if the National Library of Wales could offer shelter for some of the museum's treasures, including books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings. It would not be the first time the library had done so.

The library, which opened in 1916, was the realization of the dream of a young Welshman, a politician named Thomas Edward Ellis who, like Stein, had been inspired since boyhood by ancient civilizations. As a result, he looked for a way to preserve his own culture and envisioned a repository of Welsh treasures. His vision became reality with the aid of local quarrymen and coalminers, who chipped in part of their meager wages to help pay for it.

By early 1918, the library, built on a humpbacked hill known locally as Grogythan, or Hangman's Hill, was housing more than Welsh treasures. In the closing months of World War I, the British Museum sent prized items for temporary shelter. Although only a small number went from London to Wales-most objects were protected on site, including in vaults in the Bloomsbury bas.e.m.e.nt-it was a dress rehearsal for what was to come.

Tensions across Europe escalated throughout the 1930s. As the n.a.z.i regime became increasingly aggressive, war seemed inevitable, especially after the major European powers signed the Munich Agreement of September 1938. It was an act of appeas.e.m.e.nt that allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland on its border with Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to rea.s.sure a nation and deliver his famous "peace for our time" speech. Many rightly believed Chamberlain's agreement with Hitler would deliver no such thing. However, it did deliver breathing s.p.a.ce to prepare-as much as possible-for another conflict. A new war with Germany would be vastly different from the Great War. This time the conflict would be fought not in trenches but in the air above cities, and inevitably London would be targeted.

Air attack was rare in World War I. Nonetheless, the damage inflicted was high. London was bombed twenty-five times between May 1915, when the first German Zeppelin airs.h.i.+p attacked, and May 1918. Almost 600 people were killed and 174 buildings destroyed. The British Museum escaped unscathed-the nearest bomb exploded about 450 feet away-but a new war might have vastly different consequences.

Within the British Museum, lists were drawn up of portable treasures to be evacuated, based on existing inventories of what to rescue in case of a fire. The twelfth-century Lewis Chessmen carved from walrus tusks and the Sutton Hoo treasures from a medieval Anglo-Saxon s.h.i.+p burial were among the top priorities. A month after the Munich Agreement was signed, the Oriental Department of the British Museum had its list ready. Stein's ma.n.u.scripts were among those singled out for rescue. From the King's Library, six Oriental treasures on exhibition were earmarked for evacuation. Among them was the Diamond Sutra.

In March 1939, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. In May, the n.a.z.is forged an alliance with Italy. With each pa.s.sing month, Germany's aggressive intentions toward Poland became more apparent. On August 23, 1939-a week before World War II began-late-night calls went out to staff at the British Museum. Others received telegrams. Some were told to prepare for an early start next morning; others were ordered to pack a suitcase. Behind the scenes, word had come from the Home Office: war was inevitable. It was time to move the nation's treasures.

Long before normal opening hours on August 24, vans drew into the museum's forecourt and people began arriving at the building. Thousands of folding plywood cases the museum had ama.s.sed in its bas.e.m.e.nt over the previous year were brought out of storage and packing began soon after 7 a.m. Members of the public arriving to use the Reading Room-it remained open that day-may have been puzzled to see box after box being carried out of the building and into waiting vans. However, anyone who had read The Times that morning knew Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a non-aggression pact, paving the way for the invasion of Poland, and may have guessed what was happening.

The destination of each box was initialed in chalk on the side. An initial "T" meant the tube. Many large sculptures and objects that would be unharmed by damp made the short trip to a disused section of the Aldwych tunnel, part of London's Underground. The advantage of the tube-where the Elgin Marbles were stored-was its proximity to the museum. But there was a risk: if an airstrike hit one of the tunnels beneath the nearby River Thames, the entire network could be flooded.

Most material went to safe areas outside London. "Safe" meant at least two miles from towns, factories, and aerodromes. Coins, medals, and small, portable antiquities were bound for more salubrious surrounds than the tube. They went to two stately homes, Boughton House and Drayton House, about seventy miles away in Northamptons.h.i.+re. Books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings were destined for a 250-mile journey to Aberystwyth.

For months, museum staff had been preparing for wartime, refining the lists to determine which among the hundreds of thousands of objects were most precious and practicing fire drills in case of an air raid. Now museum personnel were positioned at seven loading points around the building: one for material bound for the nearby Aldwych tunnel, and six for material destined for the railways. At the front of the museum's colonnaded building, they filled vans with books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, and drawings to be loaded onto trains and transported to the National Library of Wales.

Late that day, a Great Western Railway train left London's Paddington Station for Aberystwyth. The railway was dubbed the holiday line and since the mid-nineteenth century trains had brought vacationers to the seaside town to spend a week promenading along Cardigan Bay. But some of the pa.s.sengers who alighted with their suitcases at Aberystwyth station were not embarking on a late summer break, and at least one would spend most of the war years there. They were part of a team of British Museum staff sent to receive the first of the irreplaceable cargo. For the next twelve days, consignments arrived, each accompanied by a museum escort and a railway inspector. They arrived by the ton. By the time Britain declared war on September 3, 1939, about a hundred tons had already arrived in Aberystwyth, including 12,000 books and the same number of ma.n.u.scripts, and three-quarters of the museum's most prized prints and drawings.

The volume of the works was breathtaking. So was their rarity. The gems of the collection went to Wales. These included the Magna Carta, quartos and folios of Shakespeare, Milton's Paradise Lost, early books printed by William Caxton, and two Gutenberg Bibles. There were letters and doc.u.ments written by England's kings and queens, by Oliver Cromwell, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake. There were prints and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael as well as by British artists J.M.W. Turner and William Blake. The jewels of Western culture were not all that went. So did 171 cases containing 6,000 Oriental books and ma.n.u.scripts in more than fifty languages, including illuminated ma.n.u.scripts in Persian and Hebrew as well as the Dunhuang scrolls.

Even today, Aberystwyth on the mid-Wales coast is remote-if not by Gobi Desert standards then at least by British standards. In 1939 it was considered an unlikely target for military attack, which is why its library was chosen for safe storage. Many other inst.i.tutions also sought refuge within it for their treasures. Some of the National Gallery's smaller paintings went to Aberystwyth. Its larger ones-too big to pa.s.s through the doors or windows of the library-went elsewhere. Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Portrait and John Constable's The Hay Wain were among those sent to Penrhyn Castle in north Wales. (That was not without problems; there were fears its habitually drunken owner might topple into the masterpieces.) Pictures in the Royal Collection arrived at Aberystwyth as did works from St. Paul's Cathedral, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Corpus Christi College Cambridge and, curiously, from the New South Wales Government in Australia.

Cardigan Bay along the Welsh coast had little to attract enemy bombers. But the National Library of Wales, prominent and almost impossible to camouflage, could serve as a landmark for aircraft en route to attack British cities, including the key port city of Liverpool, just 100 miles northeast. The main fear in Aberystwyth during the early days of the war was of a stray bomb rather than deliberate attack.

Air raid precautions were established at the Welsh library. Buckets of water and sand were placed throughout the building, along with stirrup pumps, hoes, shovels, and other fire-fighting equipment. Scholars whose pre-war days were spent scrutinizing ancient Hebrew script or early European printed books became familiar instead with steel helmets, respirators, and asbestos cloths. Twenty-four-hour rosters were organized so the collections were never unattended. Each night two armed constables patrolled the premises.

Room had to be found for the ma.s.sive influx of books, ma.n.u.scripts, prints, paintings, and people. Carpenters erected shelves, and rooms were a.s.signed for the collections and staff. Every bit of s.p.a.ce was needed. Even ancient papyri found a temporary home in a disused elevator shaft.

Overseeing Stein's Chinese scrolls and other non-European treasures was Jacob Leveen, the British Museum's deputy keeper of the Department of Oriental Printed Books and Ma.n.u.scripts. He was a Hebrew scholar who spent much of the war in Wales. Air-attack aside, his biggest worry was theft, and he feared the Oriental collection was the most vulnerable. Unlike the material of other departments that went to Aberystwyth, the Oriental ma.n.u.scripts were not isolated from the public but were housed in the Readers' Room. Locks on the fifty-five latticed ma.n.u.script cases were flimsy. He wanted chains and padlocks. The most secure option of all, however, was being secretly constructed only a few minutes' walk from the library. When finished, it would create a place in which Stein's collection would be strangely familiar. For tucked into Hangman's Hill, just 200 yards below the National Library of Wales, a manmade tunnel was being carved. During the war years, it was surrounded with every bit as much secrecy as Abbott w.a.n.g's grotto, and guarded far more closely.

Even before World War II began, thought had been given to creating underground storage for Welsh cultural treasures. A tunnel was first suggested in late 1937. Work began in August 1938, by which time the British Museum had agreed to pay half the cost of the bomb-proof cave in return for half of the s.p.a.ce. The horseshoe-shaped tunnel-six-and-a-half feet wide, ten feet high, and eighty feet long-was dug into the grey slate hillside. The tunnel hit geological snags and was still being built when war broke out and the first trains carrying the British Museum treasures arrived in Aberystwyth.

The site was referred to as the Air Raid Precaution tunnel-a name even more prosaic than Dunhuang's Cave 17-and construction of the 7,000 secret project was finished by October 1939. But before any of the fragile works on vellum, papyri, and paper could be placed inside, atmospheric testing was undertaken. This damp cave in the Welsh hillside lacked the natural climatic advantages of Abbot w.a.n.g's grotto in the arid desert. But it did benefit from cutting-edge technology. It was the United Kingdom's first experiment in air-conditioned underground storage. Electricity, heating, and ventilation were installed. In case the local power station failed, a hand-operated ventilation system was fitted. After several months of tests, the tunnel was ready to serve its secret purpose.

Printed books and ma.n.u.scripts were packed into millboard boxes and on August 2, 1940, the first treasures were discreetly carried down Hangman's Hill and into the tunnel. For nearly three weeks through the long summer days and short nights of that month, material was taken down what is now a track between fields where sheep graze. After nearly a millennium hidden in the Gobi Desert, Stein's precious ma.n.u.scripts were once again in a manmade cave.

German troops marched down the Champs Elysees, Hitler stood before the Eiffel Tower and France fell by June 1940. The n.a.z.is had reached Britain's doorstep and the threat of invasion loomed. Nowhere was considered safe, at least nowhere above ground. Not even the library at Aberystwyth. The tunnel was considered bomb-proof, but anything that could not be housed underground needed to be moved.

The British Museum looked at alternatives. It needed something bigger than the little Welsh tunnel. Eventually a disused stone quarry in Wilts.h.i.+re (then being used to grow mushrooms) was selected. Boxes and boxes of material were sent from Aberystwyth and elsewhere to Westwood Quarry in 1942. The National Gallery sent its paintings to a former slate mine, Manod Quarry, on a mountain above the town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. There, a road under a railway bridge was lowered to allow Anthony van Dyck's large Equestrian Portrait of Charles I to pa.s.s underneath without the monarch losing his head-as he did in life. Meanwhile, the s.p.a.ce freed up in the Aberystwyth tunnel was quickly filled with additional material from the British Museum. Leveen updated his boss in June 1942 about what had gone to Westwood Quarry and what was still to be removed. He also listed some doc.u.ments that were to remain in Aberystwyth. These included Hebrew and Arabic scrolls, mostly illuminated ma.n.u.scripts, that Leveen planned to work on. But also listed to stay in Wales were Aurel Stein's scrolls.

Back in London, the British Museum's galleries had been emptied of their greatest treasures. But when the air raids that had been antic.i.p.ated failed to materialize, a small show was mounted in August 1940 comprising duplicate antiquities, casts, and models that had been left behind. Staff dubbed it the "suicide exhibition." But within a month, the intense bombing of London-the Blitz-began. The British capital was targeted for nearly sixty consecutive nights. More than 43,000 people died across Britain in the Luftwaffe air strikes. The Houses of Parliament, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster Abbey all took hits. So, too, did the British Museum.

The museum's first direct hit, on September 18, 1940, pierced the roof and went through four concrete floors before lodging in a sub-floor. The 2,200-pound bomb was enough to destroy the entire building. Fortunately, it did not explode. Four days later, a smaller bomb hit with uncanny precision; it plummeted through the same hole-again, incredibly, without exploding.

Then devastation arrived. On September 23, at 5:38 a.m., a bomb pa.s.sed through the roof and floor of the Ethnographic Gallery and exploded in the King's Library, the room where the Diamond Sutra had been on display. The King's Library bomb destroyed thirty feet of bookcases and set fire to others. More than 400 volumes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair.

Just a month later, on October 16, an oil bomb hit the building's magnificent domed Reading Room. Once again the museum was fortunate. Most of the burning oil spilled across the roof's copper sheeting. Of all the attacks, though, none was more destructive than that on the night of May 10, 1941, when dozens of incendiaries struck the building. Fire spread through many rooms, and more than 200,000 volumes were lost, either destroyed in the flames or damaged by water from fire hoses. By then, the wisdom of removing not just the Diamond Sutra but all the treasures was apparent.

Bombing in World War II, of course, was not one-sided. Berlin alone was subjected to hundreds of air raids. The city's Ethnological Museum-which held many of the Silk Road objects Albert von Le Coq returned with-was among the buildings damaged in bombing runs launched by the Allies. Some of the largest of Bezeklik's magnificent murals, which had been permanently attached to the museum's walls, were reduced to rubble.

Not all the wall paintings the Germans brought from the Silk Road were destroyed. After Berlin fell in 1945, the Russians carried off some of what survived. The fate of the paintings was little known until 2008 when the Hermitage in St. Petersburg displayed a number of them as part of a Silk Road exhibition. The exhibition catalogue obliquely acknowledged that part of the German collection "found itself in the Soviet Union" after World War II.

In the UK, when the war ended, the treasures that had been stored in the Hangman's Hill tunnel returned to the British Museum and elsewhere. The last load left the tunnel on May 23, 1945, and power was switched off the next day. Today vines tumble over the tunnel's brick entranceway. Behind its locked metal door, damp has seeped through the arched brick ceiling from which disconnected electrical wires dangle. Long abandoned, the tunnel has been largely forgotten.

Soon after the scrolls he had removed from a manmade cave in the Gobi Desert found refuge in a manmade tunnel in the Welsh hillside, Stein was back in India. Retired from the civil service, he continued to camp in his tent on Mohand Marg during the warm Kashmiri summers. There he enjoyed the solitude to write and walk amid the alpine scenery with the latest Dash by his side. He left, reluctantly, when duty called or the autumn chill arrived. He never ceased his intrepid travels and explorations, including through Swat Valley, coastal Baluchistan, and the Middle East. In his later years, on a tour through the mountainous North-West Frontier region of present-day Pakistan, he was accompanied by a hardy young Pashtun soldier. At the end of the trip, the exhausted man reported on his experience to his military superior: "Stein Sahib is some kind of supernatural being, not human; he walked me off my legs on the mountains; I could not keep up with him. Please do not send me to him again, Sir." Even in his sixties Stein could tire men half his age. He ventured into Iran four times and, in his mid-seventies, took to the air to survey Iraq.

In the summer of 1943 as war raged in Europe, eighty-year-old Stein was about to fulfill a boyhood dream: to visit Afghanistan. His desire to see the land where Gandharan civilization once flourished and Alexander the Great left his mark had shaped Stein's life. It was why he took up Oriental studies, why he went to England and why he then went to India. In 1906, he briefly stepped on Afghan soil as he crossed its slender northeast finger on his way to Dunhuang, but repeated attempts to return had been thwarted by bureaucracy and politics over four decades, until an unexpected invitation arrived.

In late September 1943, he left Mohand Marg and stayed a few days in Srinagar with his friend Dr. Ernest Neve, whose late brother had treated Stein's injured foot decades earlier. On his last evening with Dr. and Mrs. Neve, Stein fainted but had sufficiently recovered by the next morning to leave by truck for Peshawar, near the Afghan border. In Peshawar, once a center of Buddhist learning, he visited a longstanding friend. Without a trace of irony Stein confided to his diary that his friend appeared alert "but his age of 60 shows." Stein traveled by car from Peshawar to the Afghan capital, Kabul, arriving on Tuesday, October 19. He stayed at the US Legation, hosted by another friend, Cornelius Engert, America's representative in Kabul. Stein wanted to spend the winter in Helmand Valley, where Alexander the Great had pa.s.sed, but within days of arriving in Kabul, he caught a chill. He cancelled a trip to the cinema to watch Desert Victory-not about the Taklamakan, but World War II and the battle for North Africa. His condition worsened by Sunday evening and he had a stroke. He knew he would not recover and requested a Church of England funeral.

He approached his death without regret. "I have had a wonderful life, and it could not have been concluded more happily than in Afghanistan, which I had wanted to visit for sixty years," he told Engert. Stein died on the afternoon of October 26, a week after he arrived in Kabul and exactly a month short of his eighty-first birthday.

He was buried in the Christian graveyard in Kabul. Within the mud walls and wooden gate of the cemetery, his grave and those of other foreigners-nineteenth-century soldiers, sixties-era hippies, aid workers and other victims of more recent conflict-have so far survived the ravages of the past decades. His gravestone reads: "A man greatly beloved." Above it is engraved: "He enlarged the bounds of knowledge."

His death prompted effusive tributes. One obiturist compared Stein to his great Venetian hero: "As Marco Polo is regarded as the greatest traveller of medieval times, so Marc Aurel Stein is likely to be considered . . . the greatest traveller and explorer of modern times." Another described him as "the last of the great student-explorers who have written Finis on the exploration of the world." The same writer noted that the discovery closest to Stein's heart was not the hidden Library Cave but a fortress a.s.sociated with Alexander the Great in Swat Valley, the once-Buddhist valley where more recently the Taliban have battled for control. Said The Times: He brought to light a vast realm of buried and forgotten history. His excavations in the arid and deserted s.p.a.ces of Central Asia drew aside the veil from conditions which existed hundreds and even thousands of years ago . . . He had a genius for unearthing ancient remains and for reconstructing from them a picture of the past, piling up detail on detail with c.u.mulative effect. He was a little man, but st.u.r.dy and hard as nails.

The most eloquent tribute came not in death, but in life. Following Stein's return from his second Turkestan expedition, his friend at the British Museum Lionel Barnett compared him to ancient Greece's great traveler. "Like Odysseus, Dr Stein has travelled wisely and well, and has seen the cities of many men, and learned their thoughts, and like Odysseus, he has also gone below the face of the Earth and questioned the mighty dead."

Indestructible as Stein appeared in life, in death his name has not been so enduring. He has sunk from memory as quietly and almost as thoroughly as one of his sand-buried cities. Many factors have contributed to this. At the time of his death, the world's attention was focused elsewhere, convulsed by the Second World War. His death was hardly a dramatic, untimely explorer's demise, even if he was poised to embark on a journey few octogenarians would contemplate today. He was not murdered on a Hawaiian beach like Captain James Cook or frozen in the Antarctic like Robert Scott. He remained a reserved, conservative, scholarly man and his writings reflect that. Even his "popular" accounts are largely devoid of the colorful adventures and anecdotes of Albert von Le Coq or Sven Hedin. There is no image of Stein posing in "exotic" local costume, resplendent in turban and flowing robe, as there are of other explorers of the era.

Stein worked in the twilight years of the great age of exploration and archaeological discovery. Even then, the public was far more dazzled by the discoveries of others than by what Stein found. Agamemnon's mask has immortalized Heinrich Schliemann's name; Tutankhamen's tomb Howard Carter's. Stein did not return with gold, jewels or richly decorated sarcophagi. His greatest finds were scrolls. He died just as the sun set on colonialism, imperialism, and the British Empire, which left their own troublesome legacy. The Great Game ended, India became independent, China and Russia locked their doors and Central Asia was off-limits to the West. Stein died barely a decade before the s.p.a.ce race dawned, bringing a new field for scientific exploration. And for the popular imagination, the prospect of life on Mars was bound to seem more enticing than the nature of life long ago in a little-known desert.

In the British Museum, a key beneficiary of his travels, hardly any of the objects from Stein's expeditions are on show. In that sense, little has changed since author Peter Hopkirk lamented in 1980: "One cannot help feeling that he merely dug them up in China only to see them buried again in Bloomsbury." Still, no large museum or gallery can display its entire collection, and the material from Stein's expeditions could easily fill a museum of its own. His finds, once the centerpiece of the British Museum's new wing, now occupy only a few gla.s.s cases in the museum's Joseph E. Hotung Gallery of Oriental Antiquities, sharing the long gallery with other objects from China, India, and South Asia. In 1914, when thunderstorms darkened the gallery for the King's visit, Stein's objects filled the room. Today, visitors can see little more than a carved wooden bal.u.s.trade from Loulan, leather armor from Miran, a handful of coins, and a few stucco busts of the Buddha as proof of Stein's arduous journeys through the unforgiving deserts of Central Asia.

The happiness of one who writes this sutra down, receives, recites, and explains it to others cannot be compared.

VERSE 15, THE DIAMOND SUTRA.

17.

Facets of a Jewel Stein's name barely registers today and the treasures he found are rarely on view, but the philosophy his work drew attention to has captured popular imagination. Once the preserve of specialist bookstores, today even ma.s.s-market chains are likely to stock works on Buddhism. In music, the Buddha's name and image have been appropriated by the popular Buddha Bar series of chill-out CDs. Arthouse directors such as Werner Herzog and Bernardo Bertolucci have made films on the subject, while Buddhism's impact on such Hollywood films as I Heart Huckabees and The Matrix has been widely discussed in popular reviews and the blogosphere. The religion's leap from the rarefied scholarly world to mainstream Western culture has come in just over a century. Oddly, it began with a poem.

The Light of Asia, an epic in blank verse published in 1879, recounted the life of the Buddha. It was a best seller. More than a million copies were snapped up, and it was read aloud in Victorian parlors across Britain as well as in America. Perhaps the time was right. The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 questioned long-held religious beliefs. Across the Atlantic, in an America still reeling from the Civil War of the 1860s, it is not hard to imagine why a popular account of a non-violent philosophy may have found fertile ground.

The poem's author was English journalist Edwin Arnold, the editor of London's Daily Telegraph. Arnold noted that a generation before he penned his poem, little or nothing was known in Europe of the faith then followed by nearly 500 million people. "Most other creeds are youthful compared with this venerable religion," Arnold wrote in his introduction. Not everyone was pleased with Arnold's poem, which began: The Scripture of the Saviour of the World, Lord Buddha-Prince Siddartha styled on earth- In Earth and Heavens and h.e.l.ls Incomparable, All-honoured, Wisest, Best, most Pitiful; The Teacher of Nirvana and the Law.

Thus came he to be born again for men.

Devout Christians balked at his parallels between Jesus and the Buddha, and scholars quibbled over aspects of his interpretation. But the public loved it. The work even sp.a.w.ned a Broadway show in 1928, with leading US actor Walter Hampden as the Buddha. The adaptation was less than successful, though, and the show was panned as "amateurish and shallow slop."

By then the life of the Buddha had gone well beyond the cloistered world of Western scholars into the popular and artistic imagination. The German composer Richard Wagner attempted an opera on the subject. He read widely on Buddhism and drafted Die Sieger, or The Conquerors, about an incident in the life of the Buddha. He never completed the work he toyed with for two decades, although some of its ideas fed into his other operas, especially Parsifal.

The Theosophists, an influential and at times eccentric group of thinkers and mystics, took an interest in the world's religions, including Buddhism. But the great popularizer of Buddhism in the West during the first half of the twentieth century was a j.a.panese layman, D.T. Suzuki. He first arrived in America at the turn of the century, and he taught in universities there and in j.a.pan throughout his life. He espoused Zen Buddhism-a form of Buddhism in which the Diamond Sutra is esteemed. He did so especially after he studied Pelliot's Dunhuang ma.n.u.scripts in Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Suzuki was a bridge between East and West, between an ancient tradition and a modern phenomenon. He was a prolific and accessible writer who had studied the Christian mystics of the past, including Emanuel Swedenborg and Meister Eckhardt. He was also in tune with the times and engaged with the emerging discipline of psychology. Carl Jung, the influential Swiss a.n.a.lytical psychologist, was among those who admired Suzuki's work. Suzuki's Zen and j.a.panese Culture sp.a.w.ned a series of Zen-related books in the West. Soon the Zen name was linked to everything from flower arranging to motorcycle maintenance.

In the 1950s, less than a decade after Stein died, the words of the Diamond Sutra made an impact in an unlikely place: amid a group of post-war American artists who looked toward Buddhism for inspiration. The Beat Generation was hardly a monastic order, but a radical, hedonistic group of writers and poets. They shook the literary scene in the 1950s and laid a path for sixties counter-culture. The writings of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder in particular alerted a young generation to spiritual traditions of the East.

As a young man, Snyder was drawn to Chinese and j.a.panese landscape painting and poetry. He had already begun his inquiries into Buddhism when, in about 1950, he came across a book that contained the Diamond Sutra. "I read it as poetry. I was taken with that particular kind of logic: x is not x, therefore we call it x," says the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet. "It's not philosophy, it's not normal poetry. It's a very special kind of literature. It's a strange kind of literature. It's a wonderful, magical, poetic text that you're not sure if you understand or not."

Snyder packed a copy of the sutra in his rucksack when, in the early 1950s, he spent a summer as a fire lookout on a mountain on the Canadian border. It was a short translation contained in D.T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism. Soon after, he went to j.a.pan for a decade to study Zen Buddhism, which he continues to practice. His teachers there advised against intellectually a.n.a.lyzing the Diamond Sutra and its teaching on emptiness. "They told me, 'Don't read that, you'll get the wrong ideas. Emptiness cannot be understood that way.' So they make you stay away from trying to philosophically grasp something like the Prajnaparamita sutras, except to just chant them. The tradition I am in does not debate or discuss something like the Diamond Sutra or the Heart Sutra-not until you are very, very far along in your practice."

None of the Beat poets was as affected by the Diamond Sutra as Snyder's friend Jack Kerouac. From the time he borrowed-and never returned-an anthology of Buddhist writing from San Jose Public Library in 1952, the Diamond Sutra became Kerouac's favorite Buddhist text. He studied the sutra almost daily for several years, and few writings influenced him more.

Kerouac also spent two months alone as a fire lookout, at Desolation Peak on the Canadian border in 1956. He studied one verse of the Diamond Sutra each day and gathered his thoughts for his spiritual odyssey, The Dharma b.u.ms. The novel, in which Snyder appears as central character j.a.phy Ryder, refers repeatedly to the Diamond Sutra and echoes its paradoxical language-including in its opening pages which find the narrator sleeping rough on a California beach and contemplating, Subhuti-like, the grains of sand.

On his mountain lookout, Kerouac, dissatisfied with the ponderous rendition of the Diamond Sutra he had with him, began writing a more accessible version. He was also unhappy with the sutra's English name. He knew "Diamond Sutra" was a shorthand and considered it inaccurate. But "The Diamond Cutter of G.o.d's Wisdom" and "The Diamond Cutter of the Wise Vow," alternative names he toyed with, are considerably less catchy than another phrase he coined: "Beat Generation."

As Kerouac was publis.h.i.+ng The Dharma b.u.ms, British author Aldous Huxley was also drawing on the Diamond Sutra, alluding to it in his final novel, Island, in which a cynical journalist is s.h.i.+pwrecked on a utopian island inhabited by Buddhists. It was the favored reading matter of characters in J.D. Salinger's 1961 novel Franny and Zooey. More recently, the sutra has inspired other artists. In 1999, German artist Thomas Kilpper incorporated aspects of it in a 4,300-square-foot woodblock carved into the parquet flooring of an abandoned building in London's Blackfriars. The building, since demolished, was the former home of the British Library's Oriental and India section, guardian of Stein's printed Diamond Sutra. In 2009, an avant garde opera t.i.tled Ah!, based on the Diamond Sutra, was performed in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in Los Angeles.