The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures

THE COMPENSATIONS OF PLUNDER

JAMES A. MILLWARD, SERIES EDITOR

The Silk Roads series is made possible by the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation’s Asia Program. Founded in 1936, the Luce Foundation is a not-for-profit philanthropic organization devoted to promoting innovation in academic, policy, religious, and art communities. The Asia Program aims to foster cultural and intellectual exchange between the United States and the countries of East and Southeast Asia, and to create scholarly and public resources for improved understanding of Asia in the United States.

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THE COMPENSATIONS OF PLUNDER

How China Lost Its Treasures

JUSTIN M. JACOBS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71196-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71201-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-71215-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226712154.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jacobs, Justin, 1980– author.

Title: The compensations of plunder : how China lost its treasures / Justin M. Jacobs.

Other titles: Silk roads (Chicago, Ill.)

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Series: Silk roads | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019049554 | ISBN 9780226711966 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226712017 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226712154 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Excavations (Archaeology)—China, Northwest—History—20th century. | Excavations (Archaeology)—China—Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu—History—20th century. | Archaeologists—Europe. | Lost works of art—China, Northwest—History—20th century. | Lost works of art—China—Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu—History—20th century. | Archaeology and state—China—History—20th century. | China, Northwest—Antiquities. | Xinjiang Uygur Zizhiqu (China)—Antiquities.

Classification: LCC DS793.N6 J33 2020 | DDC 951/.600909—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049554

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FOR HAN HAN FROM HAN HAN

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.  Sahibs in the Desert

2.  Accumulating Culture

3.  Gentlemen of Empire

4.  The Priceless Nation

5.  Rise of the Apprentices

6.  Foreign Devils Begone

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Glossary of Chinese Characters

Notes

Bibliography

Index

INTRODUCTION

On April 1, 1901, the British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein paid the fourth of five visits to Han Yaoguang, the district magistrate of Keriya. Over the past three months, this dusty oasis, perched on the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in the far northwestern province of Xinjiang along the fringes of the Qing Empire, had served as the launch point for Stein’s forays into the nearby sands in search of buried antiquities. Now, however, it was time to go home. After attending to his luggage and men, Stein mounted his horse and set off toward the yamen, where he found Magistrate Han awaiting his arrival. In his field diary, Stein noted their long friendly talk & hope for a future meeting, along with his own sorrow at having to part from this kind friend. In Sand-Buried Ruins of Khotan (1903), the published narrative of his first expedition to Xinjiang, Stein again professed to be pained by the thought of how scanty the hope was of ever seeing his kindly face again. Only when Han rode out to Stein’s campsite for a final farewell was Stein able to conclude that the magistrate fully understood the lasting gratitude I should retain for him and my sincere regret at the parting.¹

The feeling, apparently, was mutual. Though Han Yaoguang did not bequeath to posterity as rich a textual record as did Stein, an alternative account of Han’s time with Stein can be found in the Chinese-language report the magistrate was obliged to lodge with his superiors in the Qing bureaucracy after Stein’s departure from his district. These files, typically bland, reveal an administrative obsession with the logistical minutiae of the expeditions of Western archaeologists: where they slept, what they ate, with whom they talked, where they went, how much money they spent, and so on. Much like the sand-covered ruins of Khotan to which Stein had set himself the task of uncovering, however, buried amid the tedium of bureaucratic rubble is the rare archival gem. In this case, the gem is Magistrate Han’s decision to include his own glowing opinion of Stein in his file: He is an outstanding person, of much culture and refinement (wei ren wenwen jinya, yi shi jiezhe).²

Clearly, Stein had made an impression. Even the governor of Xinjiang, Rao Yingqi, took note. The very next year, just a few months after Stein published his Preliminary Report on a Journey of Archaeological and Topographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan (1901), Governor Rao obtained a copy and commissioned a translation into Chinese. In a commentary appended to the end of the translation, Wan Rong, the governor’s translator, reveals the high esteem in which most Qing officials in Xinjiang of the day held Stein. In an echo of Magistrate Han’s assessment the previous year, Wan calls Stein a highly refined gentleman (boya junzi). At one time, Wan tells his readers, scholars fond of antiquities competed with each other for copying the Chinese translation of Stein’s report, eager to enjoy the privilege of reading it first. As for Governor Rao himself, he was said to have highly praised Stein’s work.³

In 1906, when Stein returned to Xinjiang for a second expedition, he found himself bombarded by the effusive tributes of local Qing officials. Zhu Ruichi (figure 1), the prefect of Guma, confessed his admiration for Stein’s stern fortitude and valiant resolve (zhi zhi jian, xin zhi rui). He then continued (figure 2): Everywhere you set your foot, dear Sir, becomes famous, from the luster you confer on the sands of the Gobi to the distinction you confer on the peaks of the Kunlun. Xie Weixing, the magistrate of Khotan, declared himself to have been in continual receipt of Stein’s enlightened teachings. Pan Zhen, the magistrate of Aksu, called Stein a man of profound and extensive learning and described his accomplishments as truly worthy of an admiration that knows no bounds (lingren qinyang wuji). These breathless paeans culminated in 1913, when Stein returned yet again for a third expedition. Dai Chengmo, the magistrate of Keriya, claimed to have never met another foreigner as distinguished as Stein. In years gone by, I travelled through such countries as Russia, Germany, and Austria, as well as to the Caspian, Black, and Mediterranean Seas, through whose various ports I passed, Dai wrote (see figure 18). I made the acquaintance of a great many exceptional people, yet the English Minister for Education Aurel Stein . . . would be the most excellent of them all: proper of character, refined of learning, versed in the ancient, familiar with the modern. My admiration for him, having viewed the collection of books he has authored and annotated, is deep indeed. Not to be outdone, Li Shurong (see figure 17), the magistrate of Barikol, called Stein a man of outstanding character and broad mind, unsurpassed in elegance and refinement. For Magistrate Li, seven meetings over six days in the autumn of 1914 were apparently not enough to satisfy his hunger for Stein’s presence. Standing in deep admiration of your formidable mind and wishing to partake of its bounty, he wrote Stein in a farewell letter, I detest the late hour of our gathering.⁴

Figure 1. A Surprising Bond. Stein (right) met longtime Qing official Zhu Ruichi (center) on three of his four expeditions to Xinjiang. This photo was taken on May 20, 1915, near the end of Stein’s third expedition, when Zhu was the circuit intendant (daotai) of Aksu. According to Stein, he was welcomed into Zhu’s jurisdiction as an old friend (lao pengyou). Also pictured on the left is the district magistrate of Aksu. © The British Library Board, Stein Photograph 392/28(794) Recto.

Figure 2. Epistolary Admiration. In 1908, Zhu Ruichi (figure 1), then the magistrate of Guma (Pishan) in southern Xinjiang, wrote a letter to Stein filled with praise for his archaeological work, only one of many such missives Stein would receive from Qing officials in Xinjiang. After expressing his admiration for Stein’s stern fortitude and valiant resolve, Zhu declares that everywhere you set your foot, dear Sir, becomes famous, from the luster you confer on the sands of the Gobi to the distinction you confer on the peaks of the Kunlun. Stein Papers, Bodleian Library, MS 341–42. Reprinted with the kind permission of the British Academy.

And then the Great War broke out. As funding for archaeological expeditions dried up among the European empires, newly flush American institutions began to step into the breach. By 1930, when the now sixty-eight-year-old Stein returned to Xinjiang for a fourth and final expedition, it was Harvard who footed the bill. This time, however, the fawning praise of yore was somewhat harder to find. In Nanjing, Cai Yuanpei, the president of a prestigious government-funded research organization, publicly announced that Stein’s first three expeditions to Xinjiang had resulted in the theft and destruction of China’s national treasures. From the perspective of the Chinese, Cai continued, Stein’s accomplishments were little more than the plunder of our cultural artifacts and contempt for our national sovereignty. Wu Jinding, a colleague of Cai in the Department of Archaeology, went on to characterize all of Stein’s previous exploits in Xinjiang as the fruits of imperialist deceit and domestic instability. Come on, Mr. Stein! Wu wrote in a broadly disseminated polemic. Are you really going to use an old lie that once worked to deceive the Chinese of twenty years ago to try and deceive the Chinese of today? Proclaiming that his government had already killed off the corrupt officials of the old regime, Wu insisted that the Chinese of his generation would adamantly resist to the end Stein-style archaeology: walk ten thousand miles, steal ten thousand manuscripts, and write ten thousand boring articles.⁵

Thirty years earlier, Stein had been the toast of nearly every oasis in Xinjiang. Now, however, he was the subject of scathing vitriol throughout China. How can we account for such a dramatic transformation?

FROM EMPIRE TO SPADE

In a short span of just over two decades, from the early 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War, tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts and works of art were taken from the desert sands and mountain caves of northwestern China and deposited in museums and libraries abroad. The agents of this exodus were a diverse group of scholars and politicians whose loyalties lay with the most powerful empires of the day: British, French, German, Russian, and Japanese. Today, the names of these explorers and archaeologists are just as infamous within China as they are famous abroad: Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Albert von Le Coq, Albert Grünwedel, Sven Hedin, S. F. Oldenburg, Gustav Mannerheim, Ellsworth Huntington, Ōtani Kōzui, and Zuicho Tachibana.⁶ Though some of these men were more interested in scientific and political surveys than the collection of antiquities, collectively, their expeditions resulted in the first systematic removal of art and antiquities from China to occur outside of a military looting operation. In the modern era, the military looting category includes two scandalous depredations of note: the sacking of the Old Summer Palace by British and French soldiers in the wake of the Second Opium War in 1860, and the despoliation of the Forbidden City by a coalition of eight foreign armies during the Boxer War of 1901.

Compared to other parts of the world, the targeting of China’s treasures by Western archaeologists and art collectors—as opposed to soldiers—came rather late in the game. In 1793, more than one hundred years before the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin would prove the feasibility of a taking a caravan into the waterless dunes of the Taklamakan Desert, the Louvre opened its doors to the French public for the first time. As the institutional embodiment of an avowed commitment to the Enlightenment discourse of science, preservation, and education, the Louvre served to legitimize the subsequent appropriation of art and antiquities from throughout Europe and Egypt by a team of savants trailing in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. The British Museum, though less eager to embrace the illiterate multitude, played a similar role for resourceful Brits abroad. In 1801, Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin then serving as London’s ambassador to Constantinople, seized on Ottoman gratitude for the return of its Egyptian province from the French to obtain permission to remove over a hundred tons of marble from the facade of the Parthenon in Athens.⁷

These early acquisitions for the new museums in Paris and London ushered in more than a century of largely unregulated Western archaeological expeditions and excavations throughout the world. In 1816, the Italian hydrologist and circus performer Giovanni Belzoni, operating under British patronage, managed to dislodge the seven-ton granite head of Ramses II from its millennia-long perch on the western bank of the Nile River at Luxor and float it upstream to Alexandria. From there it proceeded onward to London, where it remains to this day. In 1839, the American scholar and diplomat John Lloyd Stephens, accompanied by British artist Frederick Catherwood, undertook the first systematic survey of Mayan ruins in Mesoamerica, bringing numerous artifacts back to New York, where they later perished in a fire. By 1873, the year in which German American tycoon Heinrich Schliemann uncovered Priam’s Treasure at the fabled site of Troy, Western scholars and diplomats enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the collection, preservation, and interpretation of the cultural heritage of much of the globe. Even when local elites from the non-Western world began to build their own museums and pass their own antiquities preservation laws, still the Westerners played an outsized role in their development; for nearly one hundred years, both the Bulaq Museum in Cairo and the Egyptian Antiquities Service were managed and led by French scholars, an arrangement replicated in one form or another throughout the Ottoman Empire and its eventual successor states.⁸

From this perch of imperialist privilege the Western scholars promoted their own preferred version of the past. Generally speaking, these narratives favored the inclusion of peoples, places, and events that could somehow be interpreted through the cultural and linguistic prisms of the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin literary canons. This point is evident in the way in which the mysterious identity of the granite head of Ramses II was discussed in European scholarly circles during Belzoni’s time. Initially portrayed as the one and only specimen of fine art to have been produced during the Pharaonic era, the head of Ramses II was repeatedly identified as that of young Memnon, a legendary Ethiopian king mentioned in Greek epic poetry as having played a role in the siege of Troy. And since the British imagined themselves to be the most worthy stewards of the Greek legacy, Young Memnon himself was said to be smiling at Belzoni at the thought of being taken to England. A half century later, this ideological slant was explicitly adopted by Heinrich Schliemann, whose excavations in the Troad were motivated almost entirely by his desire to uncover ruins and artifacts associated with events and people mentioned in Homer’s Iliad.⁹

Although the acceptable parameters of archaeological inquiry could and did expand, they usually did so in a way that continued to reinforce the primacy of the Greco-Roman and Hebraic past. Beginning in 1823, the year the Egyptian hieroglyphs were first unlocked by French polymath Jean-François Champollion, the exploits of all the pharaohs—not just those of Memnon—were gradually incorporated into the rhetorical folds of Western civilization. This process, however, was expedited by the propensity of the hieroglyphs to speak to the concerns of biblical and Greek historiography. For example, the first exhibitions of Egyptian antiquities to be held in the British Museum after Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphs were justified on the grounds that the artifacts on display represented the source from which the arts of Sculpture and of Painting, and perhaps even the Sciences, were handed to the Greeks—[and] from the Greeks to us. In fact, throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Western archaeologists continued to evince the remarkable ability to cast their gaze out over mostly Muslim lands and see nothing but various incarnations of Greeks, Romans, and Jews. This gaze was further adopted by the first generation of Westernized Ottoman collectors and archaeologists to work along their side: the staff of the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Istanbul did not produce a single exhibit on Islamic artifacts until 1889, more than forty years after the founding of the museum. In 1935, a visitor to the national museum in Baghdad expressed his astonishment at not finding Arab or Islamic antiquities in the museum of a city that was once the Abbasid capital.¹⁰

These ideological biases followed Western archaeologists well beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire. In Mesoamerica, the ruins of what would eventually be identified as those of the Mayan civilization were variously interpreted by Spanish, French, and North American travelers as having been built by Greek refugees from Atlantis, a lost tribe of Israelites, or the survivors of a Roman or Egyptian shipwreck. In the 1840s, when John Lloyd Stephens put forth a bold theory of indigenous creation—thereby rejecting transatlantic theories of Mayan genesis—he was motivated to do so in order to support US claims on the lands and peoples of Mexico and Central America. The historian R. Tripp Evans has even gone so far as to characterize Stephens’s efforts as a cultural manifestation of the Monroe Doctrine, designed to exclude the Europeans from a newfound American sphere of geopolitical interest. In nineteenth-century India, British archaeologists such as Alexander Cunningham concentrated their efforts almost entirely on the Buddhist ruins of the northern and northwestern frontiers, paying little heed to Hindu and Muslim works. The reason, according to Cunningham, was that these regions afforded the best possibility of identifying those famous peoples and cities whose names have become familiar to the whole world through the expedition of Alexander the Great.¹¹

It was this particular Greek (or, to be more precise, Macedon) figure that would bring Western explorers and archaeologists into the northwestern frontier of the Qing Empire. Much like their predecessors in the Middle East, Mesoamerica, and India, men such as Stein, Le Coq, Grünwedel, and, to a lesser extent Pelliot were most interested in recovering the material remains of peoples whom they could somehow place within their preferred lineage of Western civilization. The fourth century BC conquests of Alexander the Great brought Greek culture, language, and administrative models to the lands and peoples of present-day India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The resulting fusion of Greek, Indian, and Buddhist cultures led to the production of what would eventually become known as Gandharan art. That these archaeologists were mostly interested in the Western side of Gandharan art is suggested by their scholarly backgrounds; most were Indologists by training, inclined to see in monotheistic Buddhism and the earliest Sanskrit canon linguistic and cultural traces of the ancient Indo-European (or Aryan) race that was widely believed to have conquered the supposedly inferior races of Asia. This intellectual agenda can be most clearly glimpsed in the judgment passed by German archaeologist Albert von Le Coq in 1928 regarding a specimen of Gandharan sculpture in his collection (figure 3). The drapery falls in noble lines, Le Coq wrote of a Buddhist torso found near Turfan, not yet degraded by Eastern Asiatic misunderstanding of classic forms.¹²

Figure 3. The Appeal of Gandharan Art. Western archaeologists were initially drawn to Xinjiang by the prospect of finding material traces of Greek and Indian cultural influence in the deserts of Central Asia, be it in the form of early Indo-European languages or works of what became known as Gandharan art. That they were more interested in the Western aspects of such traces than in their Eastern aspects is evident in the appraisal of German archaeologist Albert von Le Coq, who said of the Hellenistic Buddha torso pictured here that its drapery falls in noble lines, not yet degraded by Eastern Asiatic misunderstanding of classic forms. Albert von Le Coq, Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkistan, Berichte und Abenteuer der II. und III. deutschen Turfan-Expedition von Dr. Albert von Le Coq (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1926), plate 10.

The degree to which these idealized Greek or Aryan races had degraded on contact with the inferior peoples of Asia was measured in precise terms through the once respectable science of anthropometry (figure 4). The personal archives of nearly every single explorer or archaeologist who ventured into northwestern China include at least a few folders or boxes filled with mug shots and data sheets recording anatomical measurements procured from the local population, usually in exchange for various material incentives. In 1906, for instance, Stein bemoaned the resistance of local hillmen in Xinjiang to his scientific entreaties, just as if real live heads were to have been taken instead of mere measurements and photographs with perfectly harmless instruments. The sheer scale and extent of their labors on this front is breathtaking, as suggested by one of Stein’s diary entries in 1907. Finished head measur[ement]s. to No. 400 during morning.¹³

Figure 4. Searching for Aryans. In order to determine in precise scientific terms just when and where the idealized Aryan race had degraded on contact with the supposedly inferior races of Asia, Western archaeologists collected enormous amounts of anthropometrical data from the people whom they encountered during their expeditions. Though the German participants of the Nazi expedition to Tibet in 1938–39 (pictured here) may have gone the furthest in developing a sophisticated racist theory of human evolution in Asia, nearly all of the Western archaeologists and explorers featured in this book were enthusiastic promoters of anthropometry and its ideological underpinnings. Bundesarchiv, Bild 135-KB-15–083 / Krause, Ernst / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Such data, when combined with ethnographic observations of local customs, sometimes prompted the Western archaeologist to note, with obvious delight, faint traces of various imagined Greek, Roman, or Aryan traits. On his fourth expedition in 1930, Stein took note of his measuring of many fine specimens of this interesting ethnic relict, the Burush race of Hunza. His degree of interest hinged in large part on determining the precise amount of Greek blood that was believed to flow in their veins. Clarmont Skrine, an avid traveler through the mountains of Central Asia who also served two years as the British consul in Kashgar, revealed something of the excitement such determinations were capable of arousing in the minds of these Western archaeologists. While passing through the same Himalayan valleys that Stein would later regard as populated by interesting ethnic relicts, Skrine concluded that the Nagaris seem to look more to their remote Greek ancestry than the people of Hunza. In Nagar you see more of the Greek type of features, modified by a liberal infusion of the Pathan nose, than in Hunza. Such observations were not complete without a romantic association with the Greeks of yore. I tell you, Skrine continued, when I saw those fellows tearing down on the mark, bow in hand, their hair & shirts fluttering in the wind, I could hardly believe I wasn’t back in B.C. and looking at the Parthians or Alexander’s Macedonians doing archery practice, for it’s exactly what they did in those days.¹⁴

As Heather Pringle has shown, as late as 1938, a Nazi expedition to Tibet, led by zoologist Ernst Schäfer on behalf of Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe outfit, was inspired by the desire to uncover similar traces of ancient Aryan migrations into other remote parts of Asia. Yet the Nazi propensity for drawing on scientific theories regarding race to justify contemporary political agendas was unique only by degree. For most of its existence, the modern Western archaeological enterprise has been deeply implicated in the idea that civilizations are built and governed by superior racial groups. As a result, when faced with the material ruins of such civilizations, Western archaeologists tended to attribute their decline to the influx of an inferior racial stock. This was certainly the case with the ancient monuments and races of Egypt and the Near East. As Elliott Colla and Donald Malcolm Reid have demonstrated, the once noble races of biblical lore were said to have degenerated following their subjugation to the Ottoman Turks. Across the Atlantic, the French explorer Désiré Charnay made a name for himself by promoting the thesis that Mayan civilization had been built by the Toltecs, whom he identified as the light-skinned ancestors of an Aryan migration from Asia, a race later brought low by intermixing with the supposedly inferior indigenes of the Americas.¹⁵

The Western archaeologists who undertook expeditions to northwestern China in the first several decades of the twentieth century were fully conversant with these racist scholarly discourses. Such prejudices are on open display in their letters and field diaries, where the peoples of Central, South, and East Asia are often referred to in subhuman terms. In 1908, Stein described the indefatigable labors of a Muslim courier tasked with delivering his letters as the result of the same canine devotion & calmness whether distance before him 1000 or 100 miles. Three years earlier, the Yale climatologist Ellsworth Huntington said of his Muslim servant Da’ud that he sticks to me like a dog if I begin to question the route followed by the guide. In 1906, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot expressed concern in his diary about the visible racism of his travel companion, the Finnish intelligence agent Gustav Mannerheim. Not long thereafter, however, Pelliot himself indulged in a racist tirade against his Muslim workers, describing them as a vile population and beasts over the market. Stein once went so far as to place his pet dog Dash, along with his Chinese secretary Jiang Xiaowan, higher up in the social hierarchy than his Indian servants (see figure 9). He [Jiang] and eager little Dash are always pleasant companions, Stein once wrote to his friend Percy Allen. With the rest one is again & again reminded that one is dealing with mercenaries. Upon the failure of Harvard art historian Langdon Warner’s expedition to Dunhuang in 1925, his wife Lorraine assured her husband’s financial backers that the expedition would have succeeded if only the Chinese had acted as white men instead of like swine. When Stein’s fourth expedition ended in failure in 1931, his good friend Carl Keller comforted him with the observation that somehow the Chinese people make me think of masses of objectionable insects, like aphids, or corn borers, or army worms.¹⁶

Whether such racist attitudes were voiced by the archaeologists and explorers themselves or by their close associates, they were all marshaled in support of an ostensibly scientific expedition that was nonetheless steeped in racist discourses and agendas. Nowhere is this clearer than in the expedition of Ellsworth Huntington. In 1905–6, Huntington traveled through the deserts of northwestern China in search of geological and archaeological evidence of historical fluctuations in the climate and ecology of the region. Ten years later, he would publish the results of this and other fact-finding expeditions throughout the world in Civilization and Climate (1915), a hugely influential book that was widely adopted as a textbook in American classrooms during the first half of the twentieth century. In it, Huntington proclaimed that the mental capacities, civilizational aptitude, and social characteristics of the different races of the earth had evolved in response to different environmental factors at various times and places. Huntington’s conclusion, formulated in part from the results of his expedition to Xinjiang, pointed to an ineradicable racial difference in mentality. Just as the plum differs from the apple, he continued, so the negro seems to differ from the white man not only in feature and complexion, but in the workings of the mind. No amount of training can eradicate the difference. For his part, Stein was very much a believer in Huntington’s theories of climatic determinism. I entirely agree with you in your opinion about the effect of such a climate on the mentality of races which have suffered from it for untold generations, Stein wrote to his good friend Reginald Schomberg in 1940, while discussing the history of India. Of course, those who have inherited the result cannot be blamed for it. But it is a pity that they are not plainly told of what their shortcomings are and what these are due to it.¹⁷

BEHIND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CURTAIN

Above all else, it was the revelation of Indic languages and Gandharan art—and the racist assumptions that underlay their evolution—that brought Western archaeological expeditions into Central Asia and China. Though northern and northwestern India preserved a few traces of Gandharan art, most of it had been ravaged by the elements or repurposed at the hands of Hindu and Muslim successors. For British and Russian officials posted to the Raj in India or czarist protectorates in Turkestan, the revelation that Indic scripts and Gandharan art could be found within the geopolitical buffer zone separating their two empires was most welcome news indeed. The most coveted destination was Afghanistan, where the archaeological legacy of Alexander the Great was thought to be most bountiful. The emir of Afghanistan, however, repeatedly refused to grant permission for the scientific reconnaissance of his realm. It appears that three Viceroys, including Lord Curzon and Lord Hardinge, had taken a personal interest in [Stein’s] proposed explorations in Afghanistan, wrote Paul Alling, the division chief of Near Eastern Affairs in the US Department of State, soon after Stein’s death in 1943, but had never been able to convince the Afghan Government that no ‘political motive’ was back of them!¹⁸

The emir was right to be suspicious—for it was the rare expedition that set forth without a hidden geopolitical agenda. In fact, Stein found little support among his imperial colleagues in the Raj for his proposed expeditions into Xinjiang until he drew explicit attention to the geopolitical advantages and intelligence such a reconnaissance might be expected to yield. Foremost among such advantages were detailed maps of rival imperial lands. In 1907, Stein told his friend Fred Andrews that from the time we left this place in June until my arrival at Kanchou, some 24,000 square miles of mountainous ground were mapped in detail. The expedition of French sinologist Paul Pelliot in 1906–8 was sponsored almost entirely by the Russians, who forced Pelliot to take along a less welcome companion—the Finnish intelligence agent Gustav Mannerheim. Not surprisingly, during his time with Pelliot, Mannerheim took copious notes on the obstacles that might confront an armed expedition into Xinjiang one day in the future. One more valley that crept up to within about 300 paces of the fortress and might some day afford welcome protection to an advancing enemy, he wrote in 1906, and we crossed an easily destructible bridge over the moat, about 35 feet wide, into the typically Chinese frontier fortress and town of Yangi-hissar. Upon their return home, men like Stein and Mannerheim invariably handed such data over to their military colleagues. Though much of the intelligence accrued over the course of these expeditions would never be used, those who were involved in its collection knew that anything was possible. I’ve got a good deal of stuff which has been duly communicated to Gov’t, wrote Clarmont Skrine, the British consul in Kashgar, in 1924, as one of several consuls who had done everything in their power to facilitate the expeditions of Western archaeologists in Xinjiang. Who knows? Perhaps one day. . . . What a job, Governor of British Turkestan!¹⁹

Xinjiang never became British. Nor, despite a few close calls, did it ever fall into the hands of the Russians. It was, and occasionally still is, referred to in Western circles as Chinese Turkestan or Eastern Turkestan. Nevertheless, from 1895 to 1915, a revolving door of Western explorers and archaeologists undertook expeditions into Xinjiang, where the arid climate of the Taklamakan Desert had managed to preserve the ruins of ancient migrants from India, Iran, and Central Asia in conditions unparalleled anywhere else in the world outside of Egypt (figure 5). Nearly all of these expeditions proceeded under the diplomatic cloak of the Russian and British Empires, which maintained the only foreign consulates in the region and whose colonial dependencies offered the quickest, safest, and most strategically fruitful routes into Xinjiang. After a comfortable trip by rail from Saint Petersburg to Russian Turkestan or a somewhat more harrowing trek over the Himalayas from British India, most explorers and archaeologists found themselves in Kashgar. There, depending on political loyalties, they liaisoned with either the Russian or the British consul, who would in turn introduce them to the local Qing officials and help smooth the way into the field. With his caravan and paperwork all in order, the archaeologist then began his trek eastward around the northern or southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert, from whence he could strike into the desert in search of ruins. Though some excavations, like those of the Germans, ended up focusing on one or two sites in close proximity to a modern oasis, most were true expeditions, covering hundreds and even thousands of miles en route to the neighboring provinces of Gansu and Inner Mongolia.

Figure 5. Silk Road Expeditions in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia. During the first wave of expeditions (1895–1915), Western archaeologists, depending on their political loyalties, entered Xinjiang through one of two routes: Russian Turkestan or British India. All of them, however, eventually ended up in Kashgar, where the British or Russian consuls helped facilitate arrangements with local Qing officials. From Kashgar, they would then set out on either the northern or southern circuit of the Taklamakan Desert, making side forays to promising sites along the way. The two circuits would eventually reconnect at Dunhuang, from which point one could continue on into inner China or return back to Kashgar along a different circuit. Cartography by Debbie Newell.

Nearly all of the lands through which these expeditions passed had experienced major political upheavals and massive loss of life within living memory. Beginning in 1862, a series of Muslim rebellions broke out in Gansu and quickly spread to Xinjiang. The resulting instability in Xinjiang, a loosely held colonial dependency of the Qing state since its conquest one century earlier, opened the door to military incursions from Central Asia. For a little over a decade, the southern half of Xinjiang was ruled by an independent Khoqandi warlord named Yaqub Beg (also known as Bedaulat). At a village near Hami in 1907, a village elder told Stein all about the political drama and daily suffering he had witnessed thirty years before:

Q.[azi] tells me of sufferings of Hami & these roadside vill.[ages] during Muh.[ommaden] rebellion. Hami first taken by Bedaulat’s men from Kucha & Aksu. Then Chin.[ese] returned from Anshi, to be driven out & slaughtered by Tungans from Urumchi way. Almost the whole population fled to west & villager town fell into ruin. Hami finally retaken when Chin.[ese] had collected at head of desert route 2000–2500 strong. The vill.[ages] were reoccupied by former owners who returned from West. Greatest losses in life ascribed to Tungans.²⁰

In 1884, following the reconquest of the region by Qing armies, Beijing opted to turn Xinjiang into a province. This decision signaled an administrative revolution. The exclusive club of Manchu and Mongol military officials who had once ruled the region before the rebellion were now joined by a substantial cadre of Han civil officials drawn from the inner provinces. Most came from Hunan, prompting one Chinese observer to regard the Qing administration in Xinjiang during these years as a Little Hunan. With them also came a host of new geographic designations, most of which derived from ancient toponyms first imposed on the region during the Han and Tang dynasties more than a millennium prior.²¹ (As a result, many of the places discussed in this book tend to be known by more than one name, variants of which are noted on the map in figure 5.)

It was these newly arrived officials—Manchu, Mongol, but mostly Han—who greeted Western explorers and archaeologists at every oasis in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia. And, more than anyone else, it was these officials who bore direct responsibility for the logistical success or failure of Western expeditions in northwestern China. No matter how much money, training, or determination the racist imperialist may have had, he would not have been able to organize a single excavation or expedition anywhere in Xinjiang if the local Qing officials did not allow him to do so. Stein, who spent more time in Xinjiang and took away far more antiquities than any other explorer, openly admitted as much. In Ancient Khotan (1907), an account of his first expedition in 1900–1901, Stein made it clear that he could not have overcome the many logistical obstacles in his path without the active co-operation of the Chinese administrators of the districts upon which I depended for whatever was needed during the winter campaign in the desert. Twenty years later, while preparing for his fourth expedition, Stein reiterated in a letter to a colleague that his latest enterprise will largely if not mainly depend on the good will of the local authorities. Without that good will, Stein continued, the tracing and surveying of ancient routes and remains, etc., in the now waterless desert areas towards which my operations are primarily to be directed, would in any case be practically impossible.²²

It is clear that Stein, along with nearly every other foreign archaeologist to pass through northwestern China, possessed such good will in spades. But how did they get it? After all, the Chinese were not fools. They knew all about the maps of their newly recovered and weakly integrated province that men like Stein, Pelliot, Hedin, and Mannerheim routinely compiled behind their backs. I may mention here that not a soul in Uch Turfan, from the Amban and the O.C. downwards, wrote Clarmont Skrine, the British consul of Kashgar, in 1923, believes my story of going up into the Tian Shan to shoot ibex; it is taken for granted that I am reconnoitering the Russian frontier. As a result, whenever one of the archaeologists failed to follow Skrine’s lead in devising a suitable cover story for the routine gathering of sensitive intelligence, Qing officials were quick to turn him away. On his first expedition, Stein found that his application for permission to use the ramparts of the Yangi Shahr for theodolite observations was refused by the Military Commandant of Khotan.²³

The Qing officials of Xinjiang were not only aware of the sensitive intelligence collected under their watch. They were also aware of just how much of a diplomatic liability Western archaeologists could present to them. After all, Western expeditions in Xinjiang were intimately associated with the British and Russian consulates that aided and abetted them. And the consulates that aided and abetted them were the institutional embodiments of two of the most powerful empires on the planet, both of which were heavily invested in the geopolitical and economic fate of Xinjiang. In 1926, Zhu Ruichi, the circuit intendant of Aksu and author of one of the sugary letters to Stein previously quoted, described the five Russian consulates in Xinjiang as headed by Russian ‘consuls’ in name (qi ming ze wei E lingshi), but who were in fact merely the agents of a forcibly imposed Russian economic monopoly on the ground (qishi ji wei longduan zhi suo).²⁴

The archaeologists who lodged, dined, and fraternized with these consuls were not merely hollow emblems of their diplomatic hosts. They also carried out substantive political duties entrusted to them by the consul himself. Such duties often took the form of the adjudication of disputes arising from the mostly Turkic-, Hindi-, and Urdu-speaking Russian and British expatriate communities of southern Xinjiang. Though some of these were strictly internal affairs, a fair number involved financial and property disputes between British or Russian expatriates and the Muslim subjects of the Qing. In such cases, the Western traveler temporarily assumed the duties of an honorary consul and was expected to spar with the local Qing official in a makeshift court on behalf of the Russian or British subjects claimed—often in spurious and opportunistic fashion—by his consular host. In 1905, the American climatologist Ellsworth Huntington, having reached the oases of southern Xinjiang by way of India, was entrusted by George Macartney, the British consul in Kashgar, with confronting the Qing magistrate of Keriya on behalf of loosely affiliated British subjects:

Abdullah Khan, an old Afghan merchant from Kabul and hence a British subject has just come to me with a petition. A large sum of money is due him from various people who won’t pay unless compelled to. The Amban won’t make them pay because Abdullah is not a Chinese subject. Mr. Macartney wrote to the Amban asking him to see that the money was paid. Now the Afghan, an attractive old man has twice petitioned the Amban in vain. I am going to ask the Amban to do his duty with the threat, well sugared, of telling his chief in Kashgar of his discourtesy to me, and of his failure to perform his work.²⁵

Two years later, Stein found that two dozen Hindu moneylenders had assembled to greet him at Yangi-hissar, so as to offer attention to an officer of the ‘Sirkar’ which protects them in this land of highly profitable exile. Despite the comfort of their hospitality, even Stein confessed to a sense of alarm at all the mischief resulting from these hardy Shikarpuris being allowed to fasten themselves on Turkestan soil and leech-like to suck by their usury the substance of its cultivators.²⁶

Faced with the powerful threats and influence of a Western archaeologist-cum-diplomat, it is little wonder that some Qing officials were relieved to see their guest depart. The French sinologist Paul Pelliot certainly came to this conclusion. But, in spite of everything, he proclaimed at a public lecture in Paris in 1909, a European can always, with the best intentions of the world, be for the Chinese functionary a cause of complications. Should an incident occur, the Qing official could be transferred, demoted, or even cashiered, Pelliot rightly observed. To illustrate his point, Pelliot recounted for his audience his own long-delayed departure two years earlier from the oasis of Kucha, where the local Qing prefect was said to have breathed a big sigh of relief. Pelliot’s assessment echoes the language found on the Chinese-language passports issued by the Qing Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Waiwubu) in Beijing for these expeditions. On the passport issued to Stein in 1905 for his second expedition (figure 6), a short description of his background and proposed activities is followed by a terse order to the Qing officials in Xinjiang and Gansu who were charged with receiving him. Whenever Stein, with passport in hand, passes through the jurisdiction of local officials, the document reads, "he is to be immediately inspected, released, and afforded protection in accordance with the treaties [zhaoyue tuowei baohu]. If he is detained or obstructed [liunan zuzhi], such actions will be cause for investigation and prosecution [zhigan chajiu]." Two years later, Pelliot’s passport would contain exactly