Read Journeys on the Silk Road for Free Online

take him away from the confines of desk work. Initially, it wasn’t a return to Turkestan that called him but new ground, Tibet. He was keen to join a mission being led by British army officer Francis Younghusband, a man destined to become known as much for his eccentric, free-loving beliefs and a mystical vision in Tibet as for his daring military leadership.
    Stein’s bid to go to Tibet was rejected because he lacked the language skills required. Undeterred, he switched his attention back to Turkestan, where there remained much more he could do. His first expedition had barely scratched the surface. Just think what he might achieve with more time and money. He set about getting both. He wanted to travel beyond Turkestan to the edge of China proper—as the neighboring province of Gansu was thought of—to explore the ancient route between China and the West.
    He presented his masters with his grand plan in September 1904. He began by reminding them of what he had achieved in his first endeavor. The artifacts he had already unearthed in the desert showed how far Indian culture had spread. He also revealed that the area around Khotan had been a previously unknown meeting place between the great ancient civilizations of China, Persia, India, and the classical West. And for those not impressed with scholarship, he drew attention to practical realities: he had done it within the time and budget allotted.
    He wanted to return to Khotan, where he expected the ever-shifting dunes would have surrendered more ruins in the years since his first visit. Then he would strike out across the desert to the Lop Nor region in the Taklamakan’s far east, where Sven Hedin had discovered an ancient settlement called Loulan. Just beyond the desert in Gansu was the oasis of Dunhuang, or Shazhou—the City of Sands. This was the ancient gateway between China and Central Asia through which all Silk Road travelers once passed. Nearby were caves filled with murals and sculptures he wanted to explore. “A great many of the grottos are now filled more or less with drift sand and hence likely to have preserved also other interesting remains,” he wrote with greater prescience than he could have imagined.
    The urgency was obvious. The Bower Manuscript had drawn attention to the riches of the desert’s sands. Local treasure seekers were destroying archaeological evidence, and rival European expeditions were likely. Stein’s successes had already prompted a German team to head to Turkestan and return with forty-four crates of antiquities. And, he noted pointedly, they had three times his budget. The Russians, too, were considering mounting an expedition. The implications would not be lost on the British government. Stein was working against a backdrop of the Great Game, a phrase popularized by Rudyard Kipling to describe the nineteenth-century equivalent of the Cold War.
    Political uncertainties within China were also a factor, he argued. Local Chinese authorities had been helpful so far, but that could change. “It seems scarcely possible to foresee whether . . . political changes may not arise which would close that field to researches from the British side.” Nor could he foresee that when the political winds did change, he would be at their center. Having already applied for British citizenship, he appealed to national and imperial pride. “The wide-spread interest thus awakened makes it doubly desirable that the leading part so far taken in these explorations by British enterprise and from the side of India should be worthily maintained.”
    To add further muscle to his application, he lobbied influential scholars and associates—Stein was a great networker—for their support. He had characteristically argued his case from all directions: scholarship, patriotism, politics, and economics. He knew he needed to if he was to avoid a refusal by the bureaucracy, that “centre of intellectual sunshine,” as he dubbed it.
    The bottom line was he