Journeys on the Silk Road by Joyce Morgan Page A

pay for them? Once again he was reminded that things were done differently in China, even in the far-flung western province of Gansu. As expected, no one would accept the coins of neighboring Turkestan, and the only silver bullion he had was in the form of horseshoes. Finding a blacksmith who could cut some silver into small change didn’t occur to him the first day. Meanwhile, the daily market had closed and it took hours for supplies to arrive. The mood of his men darkened, frustrated by the delays in finding shelter and then food. Already apprehensive of venturing onto foreign soil, it seemed their worst fears of China’s strange customs had been realized. All except Chiang, who instantly made friends with the widow’s children, were on unfamiliar turf. Frustrating as his arrival in Dunhuang was, Stein later saw its absurdity, writing: “It amused me to think what our experiences would have been, had our caravan suddenly pitched camp in Hyde Park, and expected to raise supplies promptly in the neighbourhood without producing coin of the realm!” He quickly grew alert to the tricks of the money-exchange trade—silver pieces loaded with lead, and the way merchants used different scales depending on whether the customer was buying, selling or exchanging silver.
    His men could at last rest the next day, fed and sheltered. Wrapped in their furs, they dozed in front of their fires. But, typically, Stein was not about to rest. He sent his last piece of yellow Liberty brocade to the local yamen as a gift for the magistrate. By midday he had swapped his travel-stained furs for his best European clothes—black coat, pith helmet, and patent leather boots—to pay his official visit. There the reason for the absence of a welcome became apparent. A new magistrate, Wang Ta-lao-ye, had himself only just arrived in Dunhuang—so recently that a fire had not been lit nor furniture installed in the bare reception hall. Stein felt the day’s chill in his spiffy but all-too-thin clothes. The new magistrate had only just found his predecessor’s documents about the impending arrival of this important visitor, and he was suitably impressed, even over-awed, by what he discovered in the papers. Whether through bureaucratic incompetence or clever mistranslation, Stein’s travel document had elevated him to Prime Minister of Education of Great Britain.
    Protocol required a return visit, and it came more quickly than Stein expected. No sooner had he arrived back at his tent and swapped his thin footwear for fur boots than the magistrate arrived. Seated on a thick felt rug and with a charcoal fire to warm them, Stein showed off some of the ancient Chinese records he had uncovered in recent months, and he found an appreciative audience in the learned man. “I instinctively felt that a kindly official providence had brought to Tun-huang [Dunhuang] just the right man to help me,” Stein wrote. He soon called on the influential local military commander, the bluff and burly Lin Ta-jen, who provided a camp guard.
    But it was a meeting with a group of Turkestan traders in the oasis that would prove most fortuitous. Unlike the magistrate, the traders knew the area well from living many years in the province. Among them was Zahid Beg, who, like many of the traders in town, was on the run from his Turkestan creditors. Zahid Beg told Stein of various half-buried ruins he claimed to have seen north of Dunhuang. His information was vague, rumors perhaps, but at least he was more forthcoming than the local Chinese, who greeted Stein’s inquiries about ancient ruins in the area with steely silence. And Zahid Beg conveyed a tantalizing snippet, one that could not fail to ignite Stein’s imagination. A huge cache of manuscripts was said to have been discovered a few years earlier, hidden in one of the painted grottoes at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. And, so the rumor went, the manuscripts were still there.

6
    City of Sands
    On the edge of the Gobi