Here merchants and travellers from as far as Syria and southern India would check into one of many caravanserais inside the city. After a wash and a meal, they would inspect their pack animals to see if they needed to change them for healthy, rested ones, or simply to trade in one type of animal for another more suitable for the next stage of the journey – Bactrian camels were the favourite for this stretch of the Silk Road: they could sniff out subterranean springs and predict sandstorms; if they bunched together and buried their mouths in the sand, you knew one was coming. In the bustling bazaars the travellers would sell their goods, buy local specialities and stock up on food and supplies. If they had completed a profitable deal, they could go into one of the many taverns. Gorgeous women from Kucha, the next oasis, and even from as far away as Samarkand, entertained them with whirlwind dances and melodious songs, as they filled their glasses with the delicious Gaochang wine made from ‘mare’s teat’ grapes.
Gaochang, like all oasis kingdoms on the Silk Road, depended on levies from the caravans passing through. On entering the city gate, everyone was asked to show their passes issued in their country of origin. Then the merchants would be charged on the spot by their animal loads and then again when they sold their goods in the bazaars. A camel could carry an average of three hundred pounds, and a horse or a donkey half of that. Caravans could be as small as a dozen travellers or as big as several thousands – the bigger, the safer because the merchants could afford to pay for protection. An annual customs report of Gaochang from Xuanzang’s time recorded buoyant trade in large quantities: a man selling five hundred and seventy-two pounds of spices, another eighty pounds of raw silk and a third eight pounds of silver. The list goes on, giving us the most direct evidence of how the oasis kingdoms like Gaochang earned their income. The wealth of Gaochang was such that when China conquered it in the first century BC, its annual revenues could finance the defence and running costs of the entire Western Region.
After lunch we set out for Bezeklik. ‘The locals call it “the place with paintings”,’ Fat Ma said. It is one of the biggest Buddhist cave complexes in the Western Region, dating from the fifth century to the thirteenth century when Islam became the dominant religion in the area. Originally built by monks for meditating in a quiet valley, it soon became a famous centre of worship for lay followers, and the travellers of the Silk Road, who would pray for a safe journey by making offerings to the images of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Xuanzang did not mention it in his record but Fat Ma was absolutely certain that he visited it. ‘It was just over twenty kilometres from Gaochang city,’ he said, ‘and it would have taken only an hour or two on horseback. The king was so keen to impress Xuanzang, I’m sure he would grab any opportunity to persuade the monk to stay. Judging from the pictures of the murals, it must have been a splendid place.’
I also had seen pictures of the Bezeklik murals and they looked spectacular. Larger than life-size, they were painted in meticulous detail and exuberant colours and seemed as if they had been finished yesterday. Kings and queens, princes and princesses, Indian monks, Persian and Roman traders stood piously in their best costumes on the side walls, facing the altar where the image of the Buddha would be. Their names were written by their heads: they were the donors who had paid for the caves and the splendid paintings. Those murals were mostly painted after Xuanzang’s time, but a Tang dynasty record of Gaochang gives us a vivid account of Bezeklik, which it called Ningrong Cave Monastery. This is undoubtedly the Bezeklik Xuanzang would have seen. ‘Everywhere you look, there are mountains. Long, open corridors connect the monastery and the caves, with a clear stream running rapidly down below. Tall trees, morning mist and clouds make them invisible at first sight. This monastery has been known for a long time.’
We reached the valley quickly. The mountain is stark, barren and bald. I could hear the sound of water gushing at the bottom of the gully although I could not see it. We were picking our way over a rocky road more suitable for goats than cars when suddenly it opened up to a wide space where half a dozen cars were parked. I rushed to get out; Fat Ma made no move.
‘I think I’ll wait for you here,’ he said. ‘The thing with Bezeklik is: if you don’t see it, you will regret it; after you’ve seen it, you’ll regret it even more. Go and find out for yourself.’
The caves were indeed a terrible letdown, even with Fat Ma’s warning. Gone were the fantastic murals, the pictures of which I so loved. The majority of the fifty-odd caves were barred over, like a zoo without animals; the ‘good’ ones were virtually bare, just here and there a faint trace of a mural, a featureless Buddha, or a broken flower petal. All I could see clearly were the chisel marks made by the German explorer Albert von Le Coq and his colleagues as they divested the caves of their treasures to take them back to Europe.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century Bezeklik and other treasures of Xinjiang became the target of frenzied international exploration. This was the age of adventure. As one scholar put it, ‘No heroes stood taller in the Victorian pantheon than explorers. These explorers were the dashing film stars of the imperial era. Tinting unknown lands on a nation’s map became the embodiment of cultural virility. Plants, animals, falls, rivers, and even entire mountain ranges were named for these peerless travellers. Museums and galleries vied to display their collections. Readers never seemed to have enough books about these far-flung places.’
In Xinjiang, it all started as part of a broader geo-political rivalry between the British in India and Russia’s ambitions to the east. But no big power wanted to be left out of the glory, so for almost half a century, adventurers and explorers – Russian, British, Swedish, German, French, Japanese and American – raced against each other to unearth the antiquities of a lost and immensely rich civilization, buried under the sands of the Taklamakan Desert and untouched for more than a millennium. The chase, often with Xuanzang’s record as their guide, was all the more intense because of the Greco-Roman origins of many of the treasures – almost as if that made them theirs to despoil. And they were not disappointed. Their finds, measured in tons and thousands of camel loads, have filled major museums around the world and reveal the glorious past of Buddhist history.
The Germans carved out Turfan, Karashar, Kucha and Tumshuq, the major oases on the northern route of the Silk Road, as their sphere of influence. Their man was Albert von Le Coq, who spoke several oriental languages and worked for the Berlin Ethnographic Museum. He and his assistant spent two years from 1904 to 1906 combing through all the ancient sites of Turfan, which were mostly ruins or buried by sand. They heard about Bezeklik from a shepherd and found the caves filled to the ceiling with sand. They were overcome by the murals once they removed the sand: ‘If we could secure these pictures,’ Le Coq wrote in Buried Treasures of Chinese Turkestan, the record of his explorations, ‘the success of the expedition was assured.’ With a hammer, a chisel, a knife and a fox-tail saw, he and his assistant managed to remove all the best-preserved murals of Bezeklik, which filled 103 huge trunks, each weighing well over a hundred kilograms. After twenty months of travelling they arrived safely in Berlin, where they occupied an entire room of the museum. ‘This is one of the few temples whose sum-total of paintings has been brought to Berlin,’ he wrote with a great deal of satisfaction. Moreover, he thought he was doing the Chinese a favour by his crude archaeological theft. ‘It cannot be too often emphasized that it is solely due to European archaeologists that any of the Buddhist treasures of Turkestan have been saved.’ He would never have suspected the Berlin Ethnographic Museum would be the graveyard for these precious objects. After surviving for more than 1,500 years in the desert, most of the murals were reduced to ashes in the bombing of Berlin in 1945. Only photographs remain.
I was in and out of the caves in twenty minutes. I was not the only unhappy visitor. A woman in high-heeled shoes and a long black velvet dress was blaming her partner loudly: ‘I’m baking hot. It’s all your fault. I told you we should have gone to the bazaar …’ When I got back to the car, I was complaining to Fat Ma about the destruction by the barbarians.
‘It wasn’t just the Germans,’ he said, ‘a friend of mine did his bit too.’
‘What? Your friends helped the Germans?’
‘No, it is a different story.’
There