The starting point of a library is sometimes imponderable. In the year a.d. 336, a Buddhist monk whose name has failed to reach us ventured on a pilgrimage along the Great Silk Road, between the Gobi Desert and the wastes of Taklimakan, in that vast area of Central Asia which, two centuries earlier, had been named the land of the Seres by the Greek geographer Pausanias, after the word for silkworm.183 Here, amid the sand and stones, the monk had a vision of his Lord in a constellation of a thousand points of light (which unbelievers have attempted to explain as the effect of the sun playing on shards of pyrite scattered over the region's mountainside). To honour the vision, the monk hollowed out a cave in the rocks, plastered the walls and painted them with scenes from the life of Buddha.
Over the next thousand years, almost five hundred caves were carved out of the soft stone and embellished with exquisite murals and sophisticated clay statues, giving rise to the celebrated Sanctuary of Mogao in Western China. These images, sculpted and painted by succeeding generations of pious artists, record the metamorphosis of the essentially abstract Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist iconography into a figurative religion that calls for the depiction of fabulous stories involving adventurous gods, ambitious kings, enlightened monks and questing heroes. In time, the sanctuary received various names, among them Mogaoku, or Caves of Unparallelled Height, and Qianfodong, or Site of a Thousand Buddhas.184 Then, sometime in the eleventh century, probably to preserve them from the cupidity of foreign armies, a collection of over fifty thousand invaluable manuscripts and paintings was hidden away and sealed in one of the Mogao caves, transforming the site into the world's "largest and earliest paper archive and only Buddhist library of its time,"185 which was to lie undisturbed for seven centuries.
But this honeycomb of caves at Mogao was not the only precious repository in the region. Not far from the sanctuary rose the ancient city of Dunhuang, founded in the fourth century B.C. and one of the most important central stopping places on the Great Silk Road, which ran from Luoyang on the Yellow River to the east, towards Samarkand and Baghdad to the west. A couple of centuries after its foundation, due to its strategic position on the edge of the Chinese Empire, Dunhuang became a garrison town coveted by many nations: the Tibetans, the Turkic Uigurs, the Khotanese, the Tanguts and eventually the Mongols, who conquered this eminently cosmopolitan area in the early thirteenth century, under the rule of Genghis Khan. An extraordinary mixture of cultures came together at this border between the two great deserts, gathering under one roof (or the several roofs of Dunhuang) the luxurious fashions of Persia and the formal styles of Hellenistic Asia, the multitudinous cultures of India and the conventions of Chinese crafts, the abstractions of Tibetan civilization and the representations of European figurative arts.
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The Dunhuang Caves on the Great Eastern Silk Road.
A vertical fifth-century frieze from Dunhuang, decorated with dancing figures, seems to mimic the movements of a similar frieze discovered in Pompeii; a third-century haut relief in stone, illustrating the story of how Prince Siddhartha learned sixty-four different alphabets from his teacher, Visvamitra, shows the young boy sitting cross-legged with his writing implements in the same position and crowned with the same halo as the Christ Child carved in ivory on a German prayer-book cover from the tenth century, exhibited at the Musee de l'Oeuvre Notre Dame in Strasbourg; a sixth-century ceiling decoration from Dunhuang, representing three hares chasing each other in a circle, echoes that on the thirteenth-century floor tiles of Chester Cathedral in England; tapestries found many miles to the east of Khotan, an oasis visited by Marco Polo in 1274, show images of Roman gladiators; murals from a Buddhist temple in an eighth-century Tibetan fort near the desert of Lop Nor in China depict winged angels reminiscent of those in hundreds of medieval European altars.186
In an empire as vast as China, such cultural intermingling had long been known to be a consequence, good or bad, of expansionist policies, and it was clear to the Chinese that one of the conqueror's prerogatives was not to silence, but to take on and become enriched by, the achievements of the cultures it vanquished. An ancient Chinese chronicle tells how, after conquering the kingdom of Ch'in in 206 B.C., the Chinese leaders Hsiang Yu of Ch'u and Liu Pang of Han fought each other for supremacy. One night, when Hsiang Yu and his troops were besieged by Liu Pang, they heard the songs of their native Ch'u being sung in the enemy camp, "and they finally realized that the land of Ch'u was now completely in the hands of Liu Pang of Han."187
All these different peoples whose tastes and traditions influenced and transformed one another, whether they were passing through or settling for a time in those faraway regions, recorded their transactions and experiences—momentary or transcendent, practical or imagi- native—in the regular course of their lives. Dunhuang thereby became, as well as a trading place for precious manuscripts, a dumping ground for every conceivable kind of doodle and scribble penned by the monks, pilgrims, soldiers and merchants who visited it over two thousand years: administrative papers and private documents, personal and public correspondence, holy writings and secular accountings, casual scrapbooks and ceremonial scrolls. Even after this section of the Silk Road became less frequented and Dunhuang fell out of favour the mass of detritus continued to accumulate, the remains of the daily lives of the people who lived here. For hundreds of years, both the hoard of manuscripts in
Mogao and the scraps and rag-ends left behind in the abandoned dwellings of Dunhuang lay forgotten under the desert sand.
In 1900 a British scholar with the improbable name of Marcus Aurelius (later reduced to Mark Aurel) Stein, born in Hungary and employed in the India Office, became curious about the stories that trickled through concerning a seemingly legendary region. He made his way over thousands of inhospitable kilometres of rock and sand in search of the forgotten sanctuary. In one of his published reports of the adventure, Stein named the area Serindia, echoing Pausanias's nomenclature.188 Stein led four expeditions to Serindia, and in spite of little and belated assistance from the British authorities he amassed an extraordinary cache of manuscripts and objects.
To the government of China, at least, Stein's expeditions seemed like excuses for indiscriminate looting in order to fill the rooms of the British Museum. However, Stein collected not only costly manuscripts and works of art but also the odds and ends left behind as mere rubbish by the inhabitants of the desert cities, which he said, "though it could never tempt treasure-seekers of succeeding ages, has acquired for us exceptional value:"189 a broken mousetrap or a shard from a shattered drinking- cup, a list of instructions on how to preserve grain and a humble apology for having gotten drunk at a party, the first draft of a Buddhist poem and a prayer for the safe recovery of a kidnapped child.
Not all the booty was unearthed by the expeditions. Thousands of the more valuable manuscripts that Stein brought back to England had been sold to him by a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, who had already
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The magnificent Diamond Sutra.
given away many important pieces to secure the favour of local magistrates. Many of Stein's acquisitions were unique: the earliest surviving examples of Chinese painted scrolls, complete with their original silk ties; the earliest cosmological map in existence (which for the Chinese was also a diagram of political administration, since the emperor was believed to be the Celestial Commander); and the celebrated Diamond Sutra, the oldest known printed book in the world. Preserved today among the holdings of the British Museum, they constitute one of the rarest, most important collections of all time.