Journeys on the Silk Road by Joyce Morgan Read Free Book Online

Kashgar. They no sooner arrived than Macartney penned a candid sketch from which Stein, still busily making preparations in India, could draw some cheer. “Grünwedel is ill, can’t go on horseback & has to be looked after like a big baby. Pohrt is a young fellow with no experience, and at present finds the Turki girls far more interesting than archaeology . . . The Germans have certainly not shown much despatch in their movements. No doubt had they known that you also were on the war path, they would have dragged Grünwedel off, ill or not, long before now.”
    The latter point would reinforce Stein’s belief in the value of keeping plans secret. But even with the welcome news of the German party’s dithering, Stein could not relax. A French expedition was to get under way in the spring of 1906, around the same time as his own. It would be headed by a precociously brilliant young Sinologist, twenty-seven-year-old Paul Pelliot. Like Stein, he was an accomplished linguist but with a key difference: he was fluent in Chinese. In January 1906, Stein confided his intentions to his friend Percy Allen, writing, “My own plan now is to keep council [sic] to myself & to be on the ground before either Germans or Frenchmen know exactly of my start.”
    Stein hoped Grünwedel’s slow, thorough approach would keep the Germans out of his way in distant parts of the desert. When Grünwedel left Kashgar his progress was even slower than usual. Still too sick to ride, he made an inglorious exit, bumping his way along the oasis’s dusty, rutted road atop a cart filled with hay. Of Pelliot’s movements there was no news. Stein confessed to feeling wicked enough to hope the Frenchman and his party might get stuck in transit. He wasn’t sure how Pelliot would travel to Turkestan. If he came via India, with a word in the right ear Stein could even help engineer a delay. As it turned out, he didn’t need to. Pelliot came via train from Europe and got stuck in Tashkent for two months waiting for his bags to arrive. Ever the acquisitive linguist, Pelliot used the time to learn Turki, the main language of Turkestan. “The true race will be with the Frenchmen,” Stein told Allen.
    Yet the Germans were not simply sipping champagne. Albert von Le Coq had chanced upon a curious piece of information that Stein would not learn until reaching Dunhuang. Had he known, Stein might not have been quite so dismissive of the Germans in the months before he reached Kashgar.

    Chini Bagh, meaning Chinese garden, was a single-story mud-brick home built around three sides of a courtyard. Situated atop a cliff, its terraces overlooked a river where naked boys riding bareback would water their horses and where lengths of cloth were dyed deep red with hollyhock flowers. On clear days, the snow-capped Tian Shan mountains were visible in the distance.
    The Macartneys presided over one of the most hospitable and unconventional houses in Central Asia. Through its gates passed an unusual cast of characters: adventurers, oddballs and journalists, aristocrats and missionaries, Chinese dignitaries in sedan chairs and fleeing refugees. The Macartneys were themselves an unusual couple. George Macartney was the son of a Scottish father, who had served in China, and a Chinese mother. He never spoke of his mother, not even to his children, yet his Chinese heritage was apparent in his features. He was fluent in Chinese, having spent his childhood in Nanjing, and was educated in England. Early in his career, he was the translator for Francis Younghusband, then a young army officer, when the pair arrived at Kashgar in 1890 and the two men moved into Chini Bagh. Younghusband departed the following year and continued his controversial career, most notably leading the British invasion of Tibet in 1904. Macartney, who remained in Kashgar, could hardly have predicted Chini Bagh would be his home for the next twenty-eight years.
    He briefly returned to Britain on leave in 1898. His