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Poya Features

Buddhist treasures along the Silk Road
By Charles Carlson
One morning in late October 1943, a procession consisting of representatives of the king of Afghanistan, his foreign minister, British, American, and Iraqi ministers, and the Iranian ambassador, moved slowly toward the outskirts of Kabul carrying the remains of Sir Aurel Stein, whom one newspaper described as "the greatest explorer of our time" to his final resting place.

A large marble slab covers the grave, noting that there is buried Aurel Stein, a Hungarian by birth who became a British citizen and one of the legendary figures of Central Asian exploration.

At an early age Stein became fascinated with the travels of the Buddhist pilgrim Hsuan-Tsang, between 627-643 and whose account provides the first reliable information on the countries along the Silk Road. The Silk Road was a collection of routes across Central Asia which connected China and the Far East with the Mediterranean and the Far West. It opened in the 2nd century BC under the Han Dynasty.

During a career that spanned almost six decades, Stein pioneered the Silk Road and made three separate expeditions to Chinese Turkestan and other parts of Central Asia and Afghanistan.

Accompanied only by a small fox terrier named Dash -- a total of seven fox terriers, all named Dash, served him over the years -- Stein travelled 25,000 miles, over freezing Himalayan passes and across scorching deserts. With the support of the British and Indian governments, he traced the ancient caravan routes, supervised the excavation of numerous archaeological sites and documented the spread of Buddhism from India to China.

In his first expedition in 1900, Stein travelled through the Taklamakan desert, uncovering Buddhist paintings and sculptures and Sanskrit texts. As a result of this trip, other countries recognized the wealth of the Silk Road and the race for ancient Buddhist treasures started. The artefacts that he excavated found their way to more than 30 museums across Europe, America, Russia and East Asia.

Stein's second expedition charted the sites of Lou-lan, identified earlier by Sven Hedin, and Tun-huang. Outside of Tun-huang, Stein excavated in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and brought out thousands of manuscripts written in Chinese, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Runic Turkic, and Uighur. Among those was the oldest example of a printed book, a copy of the Buddhist work, the Diamond Sutra from 863 AD, which is now one of the British Library's prized possessions.

In his final expedition, Stein revisited Tun-huang and took more documents from the cave of the temples. He also uncovered a cemetery in the Turfan region, and unearthed some of the silks encasing the corpses. These as well as the earliest known printed book are artefacts that Stein brought back and are now part of a collection at the British Museum.

The historian Owen Lattimore described Stein as "the most prodigious combination of scholar, explorer, archaeologist and geographer" of his era. Professor Daniel Waugh, a specialist on medieval Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus at the University of Washington in Seattle, agrees with Lattimore's characterization.

"Aurel Stein was many things. He was a mapper, although he himself didn't do the mapping. His Indian assistants were actually the ones who did the mapping. However, the maps that his expeditions compiled, contributed very much to the survey of India mapping project which extended beyond India up into Central Asia," Waugh said.
Concerning Stein's archaeological pursuits, Waugh said: "Stein is most important as an archaeologist, and I think that his archaeological contributions were immense."

But the Chinese thought differently. To them, Stein was an imperialist villain who systematically robbed them of their history. "He has been very much criticized by the Chinese for stealing their archaeological treasures, including a great horde of manuscripts and paintings from the famous Buddhist cave site at Tun-huang in western China. But I think one can argue that had Stein not taken them away for safekeeping in London and Delhi, probably many of them would not have survived to this day," Waugh said.

The Chinese denied any further excavations of their ancient, treasure-laden sites, although Stein's expeditions were praised by both the British and Indian governments. In the eyes of the Chinese, Stein and other foreign archaeologists robbed China of its history.

When asked whether there have been requests from the Chinese to return any of the materials, British Museum curator Carol Michaelson answered: "We have had no formal requests from the Chinese government to return any of the Tun-huang material. What we have been requested to do and we would very much like to do is to send a loan exhibition of some of the Tun-huang paintings to China, and that is under consideration at the moment." Buddhist News Network

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