London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
What if I told you one quiet, scholarly Londoner is still helping to shape relations between Britain and China more than eighty years after his death?
Not Churchill.
Not Gordon of Khartoum.
Not one of the Viceroys.
A bespectacled archaeologist with a walrus moustache, a pipe, a notebook and an almost supernatural capacity for hardship.
His name was Sir Aurel Stein.
Never heard of him?
You’re in very good company.
Outside a small circle of specialists, hardly anybody has.
And yet millions of people have seen the fruits of his life’s work.
They’re sitting quietly in the British Museum.
I used to walk straight past them.
No longer.
Now I make a beeline.
Because now I know the story.
And that’s the magic, isn’t it? Give us the story and suddenly the objects begin to speak. The people behind them step out of the shadows. History comes alive.
Our guide on this journey is the wonderful Peter Hopkirk. If Indiana Jones had gone to Oxford and become a first-rate historian, he might have written like Hopkirk. Peter Hopkirk had a rare gift. He could take painstaking scholarship and make it read like an adventure novel. His Foreign Devils on the Silk Road is one of those books that changes the way you look at a museum forever.
And as for Stein himself,
he wasn’t English.
He wasn’t even British.
He was born in Budapest in 1862, the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant. As a schoolboy he fell under the spell of Alexander the Great. He mastered languages with astonishing ease, including Sanskrit. Eventually he became a British citizen, was knighted by King George V, made London his home and worked closely with the British Museum.
Then he set off on one of history’s greatest treasure hunts.
Picture it.
The Silk Road.
The Taklamakan Desert.
Camel caravans.
Sandstorms.
Bandits.
Temperatures that could roast you by day and freeze you by night.
Buried beneath those deserts lay forgotten kingdoms. Lost cities. Magnificent cave temples. Libraries sealed for a thousand years. Wall paintings so vivid they seemed to have been finished yesterday.
Stein couldn’t resist.
Neither, for that matter, could a remarkable cast of rivals.
There was the indomitable Swede Sven Hedin.
The brilliant French scholar Paul Pelliot.
Germany’s Albert von Le Coq.
America’s Langdon Warner.
Japan’s mysterious Count Otani.
The Chinese had a name for these Western explorers.
‘The Foreign Devils.’
Peter Hopkirk borrowed the phrase for the title of his wonderful book.”
And you can be sure there was another Chinese term of opprobrium for them.
Grave robbers.
Between them they removed literally tons of manuscripts, sculptures and wall paintings from Chinese Central Asia.
Today those treasures are scattered through museums in Britain, France, Germany, Russia, India, Japan, America and half a dozen other countries.
Stein was the greatest collector of them all.
Now here’s where it gets really interesting.
Was he a thief?
Or was he a rescuer?
There isn’t an easy answer.
Hopkirk tells of later visitors being shown magnificent Buddhist caves where the paintings had been sliced cleanly from the walls. Their Chinese guide simply pointed at the empty spaces and said one word.
“Stolen.”
Then pointed to the next.
“Stolen.”
Again.
And again.
To many Chinese, Stein didn’t merely remove works of art.
He carried away part of China’s memory.
One leading Chinese archaeologist told Hopkirk that Stein was unquestionably the most villainous of all the foreign explorers.
Think about that.
A man dead for more than eighty years still inspires anger.
But then comes the complication.
Other eyewitnesses described local farmers pulling down ancient buildings to enrich their fields with the old earth.
Temple beams became firewood.
Irrigation schemes dissolved priceless murals.
Earthquakes flattened ancient sites.
Religious zealots slashed the faces from Buddhist images because they regarded them as idols.
Treasure hunters dug up manuscripts.
During the Second World War, Allied bombing destroyed huge collections of Central Asian art in Berlin.
So here’s the uncomfortable question.
If Stein had left everything exactly where he found it…
…how much of it would still exist today?
Nobody knows.
What nobody disputes is Stein’s courage.
He crossed deserts where travellers simply disappeared.
He negotiated with suspicious officials.
He travelled by camel for months.
He endured thirst, disease and bitter cold.
Most treasure hunters dream of chests of gold.
Stein dreamt of mouldy manuscripts.
Nothing excited him more than ancient writing.
Which brings us to perhaps his greatest discovery.
The Cave of the Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang.
Behind a sealed doorway lay one of history’s greatest libraries.
Some forty thousand manuscripts.
Many over a thousand years old.
Maps.
Letters.
Official documents.
Buddhist scriptures.
The written memory of a civilisation.
Stein persuaded the monk who guarded them to let him acquire thousands.
The price?
A few hundred pounds.
The consequences?
They echo to this day.
Hopkirk makes the point that what particularly outrages the Chinese isn’t simply the removal of paintings and sculptures.
It’s the manuscripts.
The written evidence of their own past.
As Sir Eric Teichman put it, they still “boil with indignation.”
And perhaps they always will.
What fascinates me is the moral ambiguity.
History usually likes heroes and villains.
Stein stubbornly refuses to fit either category.
He was brave.
He was scholarly.
He was tireless.
He loved the civilisation whose treasures he carried away.
He also deprived that civilisation of part of its heritage.
Both things can be true.
And perhaps that’s why he’s so compelling.
The story doesn’t end with the British Museum.
It ends in Afghanistan.
In 1943, at the age of eighty, while most men would have been content with an armchair and a fireside, Stein was still planning expeditions.
Still chasing the Silk Road.
Still following ancient caravan routes.
He died in Kabul.
He’s buried there, in the British Cemetery.
His epitaph comes from the Rig Veda.
“The workman is born to work.”
Perfect.
But somehow I don’t really think of him as lying in Kabul.
In my mind he’s somewhere else.
He’s riding through eternity across the Taklamakan on a camel.
Notebook in hand.
Pipe clenched between his teeth.
Scanning the horizon for one more ruined city beyond the next dune.
And here’s my suggestion.
Next time you’re in the British Museum, don’t make straight for the Rosetta Stone.
Turn instead towards the little-visited Central Asian galleries.
Stand there for five minutes.
Look closely at those faded manuscripts and weathered sculptures.
Remember the extraordinary man who brought them to London.
Remember Peter Hopkirk’s unforgettable story.
And then ask yourself the question that still divides historians, archaeologists and governments.
Was Aurel Stein one of history’s greatest rescuers?
Or one of its greatest thieves?
Whichever answer you come to, I promise you this.
You’ll never look at those exhibits in quite the same way again.
See you tomorrow.