The British Museum knew how to treat the hundreds of ancient Chinese paintings Stein brought back, but the vast haul -Tibetan pothi (loosely bound paper strips, their form copied from ancient Indian books written on palm leaves), documents both sacred and secular, legal and playful, in languages ranging from Sogdian to Kuchan, Khotanese and Sanskrit, Chinese scrolls and soft thread-bound books was, simply, "entirely different from anything that British Museum curators had seen before . . . . They had little experience of the variety of Chinese paper types made from hemp and mulberry, many dyed yellow, most of very fine paper, some burnished until the paper made a crisp crackling sound when touched".
Stein's own team took charge of the initial inventory -in a cramped, ill-lit basement which, Stein indignantly complained, was "unfit for serious work"; but repairs and storage fell to craftsmen who were highly skilled in repairing and rebinding Western manuscripts, using techniques wholly unsuited to this material.
They made inappropriate use of stiff Kraft and manila paper as backings for gossamer-thin scrolls and fragments, compounding the problems thus created by liberal applications of paste. Mercifully, following the first public exhibition of the Stein manuscripts in 1914, the disruptions of war, coupled perhaps with the daunting volume of the task, caused the pace of work to slacken, so that the main (Chinese) collection "was to some extent neglected" -curator-speak for "packed off to the basements" -and left there for half a century.
The British Library's International Dunhuang Project is now making exemplary amends, not only by removing unsuitable backings and ensuring stable conditions for the manuscripts' long-term preservation, but by collaborating with all holders of Dunhuang manuscripts to put the entire archive online and thus available for virtual study worldwide, via a multilingual website (http://idp.bl.uk) complete with photographs, site plans and bibliographies.
But it is one thing to open this trove to scholars, quite another to bring the story -or stories, rather -of the eastern Silk Road alive for lay readers.
Stein thought the way to do it was to group his discoveries not by theme, but by archaeological site, advice that was ignored by the organizers of that first, 1914, exhibition but largely followed in the layout of the recent British Library exhibition. For clarity of exposition, place is important, and not the least of this book's strengths is the way it conveys the distinct identities of Samarkand and its ubiquitous Sogdian merchants, the desert kingdoms of Khotan, Kroraina and Gaochang, and the cosmopolitanism of Dunhuang and of imperial China at its most open and confident. But, as the "trade, travel, war and faith" subtitle suggests, as a world the Silk Road is best explored through the great themes that ran through peoples' lives. For this purpose a catalogue has, inevitably, advantages over an exhibition, be it ever so well designed. After the marvellously evocative Whitfield introduction, this particular catalogue is best perused backwards, starting with the richly illustrated "place" chapters before turning to essays on topics ranging from the uses of money and barter to the allure of jade.
Strangely -to us, if not to the Chinese -one of the most revealing chapters about these lands and peoples floats above them all.
Among Stein's most remarkable discoveries at Dunhuang was the world's earliest map of the stars. In an absorbing analysis, the French astronomers Francoise Paderie and Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaut observe that, because of the Chinese conviction that the ruler's "mandate" -Tien Ming, literally the Command of Heaven -required demonstrable harmony between celestial and terrestrial events, astronomy in ancient China was serious "political science". Those who charted and interpreted the movements of the heavens were as important as any general to the stability of the Chinese State. Thus developed an original science with no counterpart in the rest of the world . . . . Not only eclipses but comets, sunspots, novae and supernovae were first discovered and fully documented by the ancient Chinese astronomers, in fact so precisely that their ancient texts are sometimes used nowadays, in modern astronomy, to constrain and understand better the nature of these different phenomena.
