All posts tagged Zoroaster

A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang @ the British Library

Want to see the oldest printed book which contains its own date of publication (868 AD)? The earliest known atlas of the night sky produce by any civilisation? See a copy of the Diamond Sutra written in the scribe’s own blood? Read an angry letter written by a wife abandoned by her husband 1,400 years ago? Learn about the life of a 10-year-old Buddhist nun?

If all this pulls your daisy, then come to this small but beautifully designed and fascinating exhibition at the British Library.

Scroll in Sanskrit and Khotanese embellished with an opulent silk painting of birds facing each other (943 AD) © British Library

Background history

The Silk Road was a term invented by German explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 1870s to describe the tangle of trade routes stretching across central Asia from China in the East to the Mediterranean in the west. The silk roads went past the Gobi desert, split up to skirt the Taklamakan desert to the north and south, continued on through the Pamir mountains to Kashgar, then on to Samarkand in modern Uzbekistan, through Persia, Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean in the West. At several points offshoots went south into Tibet or India.

The heyday

The network of silk roads began with the expansion of the Han dynasty (202 BC to 220 AD) into Central Asia around 100 BC, and grew and thrived until the tenth century AD. The blockbuster exhibition about them currently on at the British Museum takes its golden age to have been around 500 to 1000 AD.

Silk roads, plural

These days, modern archaeologists and historians refer to the silk roadS very much in the plural 1) in order to take in subsidiary routes, 2) to extend its length eastwards to the coast of China and Korea and westwards to take in Europe, 3) to include the contemporaneous sea routes from China to the Persian Gulf. All this is explained in some length at the British Museum show. However, this exhibition at the British Library focuses more narrowly on the roads’ core zone, from Chang’an in the East to Samarkand in the West.

Map of the silk roads © the British Library

The significance of Dunhuang

As you can see from this map, if you were heading west from China one of the major splits in the route occurred at a place called Dunhuang, where the route split into two roads skirting to the north and south of the uncrossable, huge and ever-shifting Taklamakan Desert.

The way stations along the northern and southern routes consisted of oases created by water in streams and rivers flowing down from the high mountains of the Tien Shan in the north and the Kunlun Shan in the south. According to Peter Hopkirk in his book ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, one of the reasons the silk roads fell into disuse – apart from political turmoil in China and widespread banditry – was because many of these watersources dried up or moved or were filled with sand and silt. As they were abandoned, sand from the great Taklamakan blew over the ruined settlements and buried them for centuries.

Back to Dunhuang, it also was an oasis town, the last one in China (if you were heading west) the first one in China (if you were arriving from the east) and the place where the two major routes round the Taklamakan divided (or rejoined). It was established in 111 BC as a military outpost, fortified with defensive walls and watchtowers.

Buried treasure

Unlike the oasis settlements lining the desert Dunhuang was never abandoned when the roads fell into disuse, but continued to be a populated settlement up to the present day. But over the troubled centuries much of its silk road heritage was lost, forgotten, covered in sand. It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that a stream of explorer-archaeologists realised that there was buried treasure waiting to be dug up in this vast and remote part of central Asia. The story of the scramble for loot between representatives of Western colonial powers who identified and excavated sites right across the region is told in Hopkirk’s book.

Confessional book of the Manichean Uyghurs (ninth to tenth century) © British Library Board

This is one of the most important and complete manuscripts among the Old Uyghur Manichaean texts, the Xuastuanift, a confessional book of Manichaean Uyghurs, on display for the first time. It is a repentance prayer known as the Xuastwanift, which is widely used by the followers of Mani (216 to 277), a Persian prophet. It is around 4.5 metres long, written in Old Turkic in Manichaean script. The scroll demonstrates the eastwards spread of Manichaeism among the Uyghurs, whose West Uyghur Kingdom was tightly connected to Dunhuang.

The Mogao caves

One of the unique things about Dunhuang is the proximity of the astonishing complex of Buddhist caves, the Mogao cave complex, 15 miles to the south-east. We now know that during the silk road era nearly 500 caves were carved into the cliff face here, most of them by Buddhists, many decorated with beautiful multicoloured frescoes and containing artefacts and manuscripts.

The guardian Wang

Aware of a long tradition of Buddhist worship and relics in the region, the local Chinese authorities at the turn of the 20th century had put a Buddhist monk named Wang Yuanlu in charge of sites around the town. As a devout monk Wang earnestly wanted to raise money to regenerate and preserve the caves and regularly toured and examined them.

Photo of the priest, Wang Yuanlu, taken by Aurel Stein and included in his photographic album, 1907 © British Library Board

Wang discovers the Library Cave

One day Wang discovered a false wall at the back of one of these caves, chipped it away and made one of the great archaeological discoveries of all time. For in this cave, subsequently named The Library Cave and now more prosaically referred to as Cave 17, he discovered tens of thousands of ancient scrolls, manuscripts, printed documents, paintings, diagrams, histories, calendars and star charts from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, rolled up and stored higgledy-piggledy.

These scrolls contained an extraordinary range and diversity of documents, on a wide array of subjects, from huge religious scrolls to personal letters, from diplomatic documents to textbooks on astrology, from wills to instructions for the souls of the dead.

They are written in a surprisingly range of contemporary languages, such as Tibetan, Sogdian, Chinese, Old Uyghur, Phags-pa, Tangut and Turkic.

And they attest not only the predominant religion of the region, Buddhism, but many other faiths including Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity which, because of them, we now know thrived in the area.

French archaeologist Paul Pelliot examines manuscripts in the library cave (photo by expedition photographer Charles Nouette, 1908)

Western archaeologists pounce

The western explorers I mentioned above, who made various expeditions throughout the 1890s and early 1900s and whose stories are told in Hopkirk’s book, soon heard rumours about a cave of magical discoveries and made the arduous journey to Dunhuang.

Here the western archaeologists, starting with Marc Aurel Stein, schmoozed the site’s curator, Wang, offering him money, technical assistance, promises to renovate the big painted caves and so on, and talked Wang into parting with thousands and thousands of these priceless scrolls. Crates full of them were dispatched by pony back to Kashgar, by train across Russia and then onto the capitals of Europe. Eventually these priceless manuscripts were scattered across 30 or so collections in 8 or so western nations, chief among them the British Museum in London.

Collectors’ guilt

Two world wars and the decolonisation of most of most of the European empires later, many of these institutions felt guilty about being party to such epic looting of China’s cultural heritage. In 1973 the British Library was founded. In the 1980s the British Museum handed over its hoard of documents from the Library Cave to the British Library.

Founding of the International Dunhuang Programme

In 1994, after much discussion between the various European and American institutions which owned documents from the library cave, the British Library was instrumental in setting up the International Dunhuang Programme (IDP). The IDP is a pioneering international collaboration that brings together online collections from the Eastern Silk Roads and promotes understandings of the history and cultures of the region.

That was 30 years and so this small but beautifully formed exhibition marks the thirtieth birthday of the International Dunhuang Programme. (All this is explained in the final part of the exhibition, which includes a timeline of the events I’ve just summarised.)

The exhibition

The exhibition showcases over 50 manuscripts, printed documents and pictorial works, most though not all, from the ‘Library Cave’ in the cave complex of Mogao and on public display for the first time.

The exhibition is contained in one long room downstairs. The light levels are low to preserve these ancient manuscripts which contributes to the subterranean, treasure-trove vibe.

The show is divided into ten sections, consisting of eight display cases (4 down the middle, 2 embedded in either wall). At the far end there’s a partition cleverly made from shelves piled high with rolled-up paper scrolls, recreating the effect of the original treasure cave. And off to one side there’s a bench seating about 5 people in front of a video projected on the wall which shows general views of the desert, the Mogoao cave complex, and handy maps showing the shifting silk roads and indicating the spread of religious beliefs along them. You can make out most of the elements I’ve listed in the photo below (video on the right, display cases down the middle, the scroll partition is visible at the far left).

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library

Topics and stories

The key thing about the displays is that the curators have had the bright idea of dividing the documents into sections grouped around typical types of profession from medieval central Asian society. Each case is named after one of these characteristic professions of the time, constellates around the story of a specific named individual who we know of from a scroll, and then groups around it half a dozen other manuscripts from the same subject area. Thus the cases are named after:

The Merchant
The Diplomat
The Fortune-Teller
The Artist
The Scribe
The Printer
The Buddhist Nun
The Lay Buddhist

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library showing a typical display case, in this instance scrolls relating to The Lay Buddhist (see below) (photo by the author)

As is my usual practice, all the text which follows in italics is direct quotation from the curators’ wall labels.

The Merchant (unnamed)

As a key trade centre on the Silk Roads, Dunhuang attracted merchants from as far afield as central Asia and India. Among these were the Sogdians, a group of Iranian people who dominated commerce in the region from the 4th to the 8th century. From their motherland near Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan), Sogdian merchants established settlements stretching all the way to China.

Map showing location of Sogdiana © the British Library

This allowed them to act as agents for fellow Sogdians back home and along the trade network. Sogdian merchants sold many prized goods and transmitted religious ideas from their own culture and that of nearby regions.

Earthenware figure from China (7th to 10th century) probably representing a central Asian merchant, possibly of Sogdian origins, as suggested by his large beard and conical hat (photo by the author)

This section focuses on the letter written by an unnamed Sogdian merchant based near Dunhuang, which was addressed to two of his business partners in Samarkand, over 3,000 km to the west. It warns them about the devastating effects of political instability in China. The letter describes the famine that resulted from the sack of several Chinese cities by the Huns, a nomadic people from central Asia.

It also includes a letter from a wife who was abandoned by her husband at Dunhuang and who writes to reproach him in 313 AD. Her name was Miwnay and the letter tells us she moved from Samarkand to Dunhuang with her merchant husband Nanai-dhat. This letter was found in a lost mailbag and complains how, not having not heard from him in three years, Miwnay and her daughter Shayn have become destitute and forced to serve a local Chinese household.

“Behold, I am living wretchedly, and I consider myself dead. […] I obeyed your command and came to Dunhuang and did not observe my mother’s bidding or that of my brothers. Surely the gods were angry with me on the day when I did your bidding! I would rather be a dog’s or a pig’s wife than yours!” (Translated by Nicholas Sims-Williams)

Emphasising the theme of multiculturalism, this section also includes:

one of the oldest surviving Zoroastrian scriptures, consisting of a text about the prophet Zoroaster (born between 1500 and 500 BC) and a transcription of the holy ‘Ashem Vohu’ prayer
a letter from a Christian priest named Sergius to a Turkic government official based at Dunhuang

Dunhuang Limes

I need to digress for a moment about the Dunhuang Limes.

The Dunhuang Limes is a series of military sites spread over a distance of more than 140 miles, and are considered to be parts of the westernmost portion of the Great Wall. The sites begin in Anxi to the east of Dunhuang and extend to the Lop Nor desert to the west, and date back as far as the 2nd century BC [see the map at the top of this review for the line of the Great Wall].

The term limes, usually used to describe Roman military roads and their fortifications, was assigned by Aurel Stein to this series of watchtowers, forts, storehouses, beacon towers, walls, and other defensive structures. The items excavated from the sites reveal much about the daily life and administration of the garrisons stationed at the frontiers of the Chinese Empire. These items include tools, stationery, pottery, arrowheads and textiles, as well as important written documents including the Sogdian ‘ancient letters’.

Hence the shoe:

A shoe made of hemp from Dunhuang Limes © the British Museum

This utilitarian everyday object serves as a poignant reminder of the early settlers who resided along the Dunhuang Limes. These defensive walls and watchtowers, constructed north of the town, protected the territory then ruled by the Chinese Han Empire (206 BC to 220 AD). Doubling as farmers, the soldiers transformed the rugged landscape into cultivated land, while monitoring the desert Silk Roads for potential attacks.

The booklets

Another digression to mention that each of the characters or job types is introduced not only via the usual object labels but in nifty printed booklets (attached to each display case) made of a kind of artificial vellum and decorated with patterns from the period. Some thought and effort went into these and they’re very stylish.

One of the stylish fake-vellum booklets which contain object information in ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library (photo by the author)

The Diplomat: Ca Kima-sana

From the 10th century, the rulers of Dunhuang strengthened their ties with Khotan, a central Asian kingdom located 1,800 km to the west. Sent by their state, Khotanese envoys frequently travelled to the oasis to help maintain close diplomatic relations, especially by seeking marriage alliances.

Map showing location of Khotan © the British Library

Khotanese delegations varied in size and were hosted by the local government. Their members, who spoke an Indo-Iranian dialect, had to operate in a multilingual environment. They were actively engaged in Dunhuang’s Buddhist community as patrons and helped spread medical and geographical knowledge during their visits.

This section is named for two figures: one is Sam Khina Hvam Samgaka, a high-ranking Khotanese official who commissioned a devotional scroll, wishing for a long life and the well-being of his relatives. The manuscript is over 21 metres long and contains six different Buddhist texts. It was embellished with an opulent silk painting.

Scroll in Sanskrit and Khotanese, over 21 metres long, embellished with an opulent silk painting (943 AD) © British Library

The other named figure is the diplomat Ca Kima-sana, also known as Zhang Jinshan. He is represented by a long scroll in which he explains that he led a delegation of over 100 people to secure the hand of a Chinese princess for their king. He also recounts the religious activities he undertook at Dunhuang in exchange for safe return. This section also includes:

a tenth-century Chinese-Khotanese phrasebook
an account of hospitality given to foreign visitors at Dunhuang between 979 and 982
a Khotanese translation of the Siddhasara, a medical text attributed to the ancient Indian physician Ravigupta

The Fortune-Teller: Shenzhi, the Yin and Yang Master

Fortune-tellers, whose practices were regulated by the local administration, helped both the ruling elite and ordinary people navigate daily life. They advised on anything from the best time to start a construction project to the best direction to take on a journey. They also guided people when choosing a life partner, looking for lost things or strategising for battles.

Fortune-tellers produced calendars and other astrological works. These were considered a form of scientific knowledge, normally controlled by China’s imperial court. At the same time, divination traditions from central Asia spread along the Silk Roads and converged at Dunhuang, leading to a unique blend of approaches.

This section includes a striking almanac:

Official almanac showing the 12 spirits of the zodiac animals, portrayed as officials with animals in their hats (978 AD) © British Library Board

An almanac is a yearly publication that typically contains information such as astronomical data and astrological predictions. This incomplete document for the year 978 is a copy of the almanac originally printed by the imperial Chinese Bureau of Astronomy. It shows the 12 spirits of the zodiac animals, portrayed as officials with animals in their hat. They surround the deity Taisui, who is associated with Jupiter and governs people’s destiny in a given year.

This section also contains:

the longest surviving manuscript text in the Old Turkic script, the Irk Bitig or Book of Omens, a 4-metre-long Tibetan divination scroll written in Old Turkic which contains 65 divinations
the oldest star chart from any civilisation which depicts 1,345 stars across 13 maps, dating to the second half of the 7th century
a 4-metre long divination scroll in Tibetan, featuring 12 divination diagrams in the Chinese astrological tradition
eight diagrams linked to a divination form known as the ‘Nine Palaces’ which indicate lucky and unlucky dates and directions for construction work, in a scroll which belonged to Shenzhi,
a Yin and Yang Master and a monk at the Longxing Temple

The Printer: Lei Yanmei, the woodblock carver

Using a method derived from earlier stamping processes, printers chiselled content in reverse into woodblocks. They then inked those blocks and impressed them onto paper. The quality of the prints thus depended on their woodcarving skills. Printing technology emerged in China around the 7th century, about 700 years before appearing in Europe. The work of printers quickly became essential for Buddhists, as a way of enabling the large-scale reproduction of sacred texts and images. As printing spread to East Asia and to central Asia along the Silk Roads, printers set up many local workshops. While some places, like Sichuan, became major printing centres, Dunhuang printers also produced, on a much smaller scale, copies of Buddhist scriptures, prayer sheets and almanacs.

The Diamond Sutra, the world’s earliest printed book with a date, 868 AD

This 5 metre scroll is the oldest complete printed book with a date. Preceding the finely carved text is a depiction of the Buddha preaching to his elder disciple, Subhuti, amid a large assembly. Such sophisticated design attests to a mature printing industry, calling for collaboration between highly skilled artists, scribes and woodcarvers. It is thus possible it came from Chengdu, Sichuan, which was a major printing centre at the time.

This section also includes:

a text containing numerous identical images of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
a woodblock printed prayer sheet with pigments
a booklet of Diamond Sutra translated by Kumarajiva

The Scribe: Ke’u Monley

Between 786 and 848, Dunhuang came under Tibetan rule. It was transformed into a bustling centre for scribes who worked for the Tibetan empire.

The Tibetan Empire in the 8th to 9th centuries © the British Library

Local scribes, some of whom were from mixed Chinese and Tibetan parentage, produced thousands of copies of Buddhist sutras in Tibetan. These works, presented in a range of formats, were even distributed to monastic libraries in central Tibet. The rules of the scriptorium were stringent and scribes had to manage the resources they received carefully for fear of punishment. They were also taught to write in different styles, tailored to their tasks, such as transcribing sacred texts or drafting official documents.

This section includes:

old Tibetan annals giving a year-by-year account for the period 641 to 764, the earliest surviving historical source on the Tibetan empire
a bilingual manuscript which features the Tibetan version of the Lankavatara Sutra in red ink alongside a Chinese commentary in black ink
a large book of Buddhist scripture titled The Perfection of Wisdom Sutra
a document giving information about the scribe Ke’u Monley who belonged to a team of scribes entrusted with copying the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra for the Tibetan prince
along with some original scribal tools, namely a glue brush and a wooden pen

Tibetan woodslip pen (eighth to tenth century) © British Library Board

The artist: Dong Baode

Artists from different regions shaped Dunhuang’s creative landscape. The projects they were commissioned for ranged from adorning the Mogao Caves with breathtaking murals and stucco figures, to crafting portable paintings on silk, hemp and paper. Surviving sketches, preparatory drawings and tools like stencils offer a window into artists’ creative process. While workshops likely existed earlier, a government-supported painting academy emerged in the 10th century, providing official backing for artistic endeavours. Most artists remained anonymous unless they reached a particularly elevated status. They combined visual traditions and techniques from along the Silk Roads, leaving an enduring legacy through their contributions.

Sketch of protective deities (tenth century) © British Library Board

These two figures, depicted on thick paper, stand dynamically on rocks, almost mirroring each other. Precise lines render their flowing scarves, flexed muscles and facial hair. This type of sketch served as a reference for artists and could have been resized as needed to fit across various compositions. Very similar illustrations are found in Dunhuang manuscripts.

This section contains:

a stencil of a Buddha figure
a scroll relating to the master painter named b who other documents tell us managed a local painting guild, controlled and deployed painting resources
a 1.2 metre tall black ink study representing Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion

The Lay Buddhist: the 80-year-old who wrote in blood

Buddhism left the largest imprint at Dunhuang, although faiths such as Daoism, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were also present. With the spread of Buddhism on the Silk Roads, the oasis became a major hub for Buddhist worship and pilgrimage from the 4th century onwards. The worship of images, through portable paintings and other media, held a central place in Buddhism. Copying scriptures was also paramount to Buddhist devotees, as a way of accumulating spiritual benefits. While wealthy patrons could commission elaborately decorated manuscripts, ordinary people wrote sacred texts themselves. Manuscripts served various functions, as reflected by the variety of formats and languages they came in. They could be chanted during ceremonies, worn as talismans and employed in memorial services.

Illustrated Sutra of the Ten Kings (tenth century) © British Library Board

This scripture depicts the purgatory-like period following death. The Ten Kings, shown as magistrates seated at desks, assess the deeds of the departed. The last king spins the wheel of rebirth, deciding how they will be reincarnated. This handscroll is almost 5 metres long. It was likely produced to assist a dead relative in their voyage to the next life and used during memorial services.

This section also contains:

a decorative copy of the Great Parinirvana Sutra
a miniature Tibetan scroll less than 5cm wide, containing verses about the path to liberation from the sufferings of death and rebirth, and a prayer to end the reincarnation cycle
a scroll of the Nilakantha Dharani, dharanis being incantations believed to be protective and to generate spiritual benefits when chanted
a banner painting of a bodhisattva
and three small booklets of the Diamond Sutra in Chinese written by an unknown 80-year-old devotee using his own blood as ink

The Buddhist Nun: Deng Ziyi

Buddhism gradually changed the lives of female devotees by offering them a role beyond those of daughter, mother and wife: they could become nuns. Dunhuang documents give us a glimpse into their experiences, from joining as novices, sometimes before the regulatory age of 12, to embracing the rules of monastic discipline upon being ordained. Between 800 and 1000, there were more nuns than monks living in the town. Censuses provide a sense of the community structure and demographics within nunneries at the time. It was not uncommon for nuns to retain some possessions after embracing monastic life. They could also play a significant role in the local lay community.

Rules of a women’s association (959 AD) © British Library Board

This circular is over 1,000 years old. It defines the objectives, bylaws and structure of a women’s club, established to promote friendship among women. All 15 signatories agreed to these rules by signing a mark under their name. The association was overseen by a nun, underscoring the influential role of nuns within the Dunhuang community.

This section includes:

information about Deng Ziyi who became a nun aged just 10 in 914, including the official permit granting her permission to become a novice
a finely calligraphed scroll copied in 543 by a nun named Xianyu listing the voluntary commitments for fully ordained Buddhist women
a tenth century list of nuns at the Dasheng Temple, the largest of five nunneries at Dunhuang, which had a total of 209 members
a votive painting depicting the 11-headed manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion
the will, written in 865, of the nun Linghui, written in the presence of witnesses, including close relatives and two officials

The caves

As I mentioned, at the far end of the exhibition space is an alcove partitioned off by a floor-to-ceiling stand containing scores of rolled-up paper mimicking the scrolls found in the famous Library Cave.

Installation view of ‘A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang’ at the British Library showing the scroll partition (photo by the author)

This space gives more detail about the caves, namely:

Away from the busy streets of Dunhuang, 25 km southeast of the town, is a large Buddhist site made up of hundreds of richly decorated caves called the Mogao Caves. It is here that, in 1900, the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu found a small room containing tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and other objects dating from the 5th to 11th century. Known as the ‘Library Cave’ or Cave 17, this extraordinary time capsule is one of the world’s greatest archaeological discoveries. It has revolutionised our knowledge of the Silk Roads, offering glimpses of religious and secular everyday life. Many of the objects in the exhibition are from Cave 17. They were acquired by archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein and taken to the UK.

There’s:

a copy of Stein’s photo album open to the photo he took of Wang
a timeline of key events starting at Wang’s discovery of cave 17 in 1900 and continuing up to the opening of this exhibition
more objects including:
- a confessional book of the Manichaean Uyghurs
- three Buddhist ritual objects, being: a paper-cut flower; a carved wooden figure of a Buddha; a Tibetan tantric ritual implement
a small sculpture by modern artist Xie Xiaoze titled ‘Rain of Languages (Buddhist Sutras)’

Rain of Languages (Buddhist Sutras) by Xie Xiaoze (2023) in ‘A Silk Road Oasis’ at the British Library

Most usefully, there was a small monitor showing photos of some of the decorated caves. These are mind blowing, showing beautifully preserved caves decorated from floor-to-ceiling with complicated colourful motifs and often including one or more statues of the Buddha or Boddhisatvas. I think these should have been included in the short film projection on the wall at the start of the exhibition, they’re too stunning and important to be stashed away here, and on a fairly tiny screen, smaller than a laptop screen.

Photo from the slideshow of photos of the interiors of some of the Mogao cave, complete with explanatory text. Courtesy of Dunhuang Academy, Photo by Sun Zhijun

In fact the friend I showed them to said these are stunning, mind-blowing, amazing – they should have been blown up and printed on the walls life-size. Maybe, although space is limited in this little downstairs gallery. But they certainly impress on you the huge culturual importance of the cave complex, the extravagantly beautiful carvings and frescoes, make you realise it’s up there with the Egyptian Valley of the Kings in terms of priceless decorated ancient interiors.

Music

I haven’t yet mentioned that this room packed full of priceless manuscripts also features a mellow and evocative soundscape. This has been created by a Dr Xiaoshi Wei using recordings from the British Library’s vast sound archive and from the China Database for Traditional Music with a view to recreating the sounds of the ancient Silk Road. Birds sing, gongs sound, monks chant, adding to the atmosphere of peace, calm, civilisation and enlightenment.

This is a small-ish exhibition, but full of wonders and revelations.

Related reviews

Silk Roads @ the British Museum (September 2024)

The Journey To The East by Hermann Hesse (1932)

A slender novella, 88 pages in the Picador paperback version, The Journey To The East is a first-person narrative told by a former member of the secretive ‘League’ of poets, writers and seekers who, in their different ways, all undertook journeys to the East in ‘the troubled, confused, yet so fruitful period following the Great War’ (p.5).

What sets it apart, at least to begin with, is that it is nothing like a sensible factual account of a straightforward ‘journey’ such as you might read by traditional travel writers like Robert Byron or Peter Fleming.

Instead it is more like a fairy story, in which the ‘travellers’ encounter legendary figures and mythical beasts, pass through fictional lands from fables and fairy tales, and travel not only in space, but in time – back into the past, penetrating ‘into the heroic and the magical’ (p.7).

One day, when I was still quite a new member, someone suddenly mentioned that the giant Agramant was a guest in our leaders’ tent, and was trying to persuade them to make their way across Africa in order to liberate some League members from Moorish captivity. Another time we saw the Goblin, the pitch-maker, the comforter, and we presumed that we should make our way towards the Blue Pot.

The giant Agramant, the Goblin. It is fairy land.

Despite these imaginative frills, though, the League feels like a Christian monastic order – casual phrases continually remind the reader that Hesse had an intensely pious Christian upbringing, against which he rebelled but whose stern moral seriousness he kept for the rest of his life.

Thus newcomers to the League are ‘novitiates’, must take an ‘oath’ to renounce the world and its temptations, must wear a ring proclaiming their membership of the order. The journey is referred to as a ‘pilgrimage’ and the travellers as ‘pilgrims’. The leader of the narrator’s group talks freely about ‘grace’ and ‘repentance’, both utterly Christian concepts.

But at the same time it is a phantasmagoria of all the cultural greats through the ages:

Our League was in no way an off-shoot of the post-war years, but that it had extended throughout the whole of world history, sometimes, to be sure, under the surface, but in an unbroken line, that even certain phases of the World War were nothing else but stages in the history of our League; further, that Zoroaster, Lao Tse, Plato, Xenophon, Pythagoras, Albertus Magnus, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Novalis and Baudelaire were co-founders and brothers of our League.

This is a kind of greatest hits of world culture. And the way the ‘pilgrims’ travel is both a physical path or itinerary, very much in the style of medieval pilgrims –

And as we moved on, so had once pilgrims, emperors and crusaders moved on to liberate the Saviour’s grave, or to study Arabian magic; Spanish knights had traveled this way, as well as German scholars, Irish monks and French poets.

But also an imaginative one, as they travel through realms of magic and myth, experiencing not only all times, but the real and the imaginary on the same terms.

The core of the experience, the thing which, looking back, the narrator realises brought him the greatest happiness, was:

The freedom to experience everything imaginable simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and Space about like scenes in a theatre.

When you reflect on this, it sounds increasingly like the adventures of someone in their library – with the leisure time to roam freely over time and space, and between factual and imaginative literature.

The plot

The first-person narrator is ‘a violinist and story-teller’ who joined the League with the aim of travelling to the East to meet the princess Fatima and, if possible, to win her love (we learn that all League members have quirky or idiosyncratic goals, one wants to see the coffin of Mohammed, another to learn the Tao).

But the oddest thing about the story is that… they don’t travel to the East. About a third of the way through the text, the narrator tells us that at an early point of the journey, while they were still in Europe, at a place called Morbio Inferiore, a municipality in Switzerland, one of his team’s most loyal servants, Leo, goes missing, so the entire squad sets out to find him, searching up hill and dale.

Not only do they never find him, but his group begins to squabble amongst itself, loses focus. Somehow the journey was abandoned and he never made it to the East. Now, we learn, the narrator is struggling to set it all down in a written account, in a bid to revive the heady joy of those young days.

Now the narrative cuts to ‘the present’, some ten years after the journey. The narrator tells us it is a long time since he was active in the League, he doesn’t know whether it exists any more, he’s not sure it ever existed and these things ever happened to him.

And now the narrator tells us that the episode of missing Leo has given him writer’s block, he doesn’t know how to tell the episode correctly, and can’t manage to get the story past it.

And in an abrupt and surprising switch, the narrative stops being about any journey to the East whatsoever.

Now, surprisingly, the scene cuts back to the narrator’s home town and becomes spectacularly more realistic and mundane. To address his problem of writer’s block, the narrator goes to meet a friend of his who’s a newspaper editor, named Lukas, and who wrote a successful book of war memoirs.

Discussion of the war memoirs gives rise to a consideration of how difficult it is to describe any human experience, at how you need to create eras or characters or plots to even begin to get it down.

Even further than this, how some experiences are so intense or evanescent, that you can’t even be sure you had them. In which case, how do you describe them? Lukas replies that he wrote his book about the war because he simply had to, whether it was any good or not was secondary, the writing itself was vital therapy, which helped him control ‘the nothingness, chaos and suicide’ which would otherwise have overwhelmed him (p.46)

So. This is less a book about a journey anywhere, and a lot more a book about the difficulty of writing a book. Ah.

When the narrator tells Lukas how, in writing his account of the journey to the East, he’s got blocked on this episode of the missing servant, Leo, Lukas promptly looks Leo up in the telephone directory and finds there is a Andreas Leo living at 69a Seilergraben. Maybe it’s the same guy, he says – as if we’re in a 1930s detective novel and not the imaginative phantasmagoria we started out in. ‘Go and see him,’ the editor suggests.

So the narrator does, and finds 69a Seilergraben to be an apartment in an anonymous building in a quiet street. The narrator knocks on the door, questions the neighbours, hangs around, and goes back on successive days. Finally he sees this Leo exit his apartment block and walk quietly to the park where he sits on a bench and eats dried fruit from a tin.

This is not at all the mystical imaginative phantasmagoria I was promised on the back of the book, is it? This is staggeringly mundane.

The narrator approaches Leo, and tries to remind him of their time back in the League and on the great journey East which, the text confirms, happened some 10 years earlier. But Leo is calmly dismissive and walks off, leaving the narrator standing alone in the park as dusk falls, in the rain.

Now he is rejected like this, we learn the narrator is prone to depression, in fact to despair and thoughts of suicide.

I had experienced similar hours in the past. During such periods of despair it seemed to me as if I, a lost pilgrim, had reached the extreme edge of the world, and there was nothing left for me to do but to satisfy my last desire: to let myself fall from the edge of the world into the void — to death. In the course of time this despair returned many times; the compelling suicidal impulse…

In other words, he shows the same bouncing from one to extreme to the other that characterised the Steppenwolf and his moods of suicidal despair. And very like the author himself, a glance at whose biography reveals attempts at suicide, prolonged psychotherapy, and a spell in a mental sanatorium.

The narrator gets home and sits down, still damp from the rain and writes a long letter to Leo, then falls asleep. When he wakes up Leo, is sitting in his living room. Leo reveals he is still a member of the League and says he will take the narrator to see the current President. Leo leads him through the streets of the quiet town by a circuitous route, stopping at various inconsequential locations including a church, to an anonymous building, which is large and labyrinthine on the inside (reminding me of the labyrinthine buildings Franz Kafka’s protagonists stumble through).

The narrator is led into an enormous room full of shelves lined with books which turn out to be the archive the League. Leo suddenly starts singing and, as in movie special effects, the archive recedes into the distance and in the foreground appears a large judgement chamber.

A jury assembles and a ‘Speaker’, who acts like a judge. It has turned into a sort of court-room, which makes the comparison with Kafka feel overwhelming – a confused little man dragged to judgement before a huge, imposing court which he doesn’t understand. The essence of the Kafkaesque.

For the first time the narrator is named as ‘H.H.’. H.H.? So a barely veiled reference to the author himself which, yet again, could barely be more like the Kafka who named his two most famous protagonists K. and Joseph K. with his own initial.

The ‘Speaker’ refers to H.H. as ‘the self-accused’ and asks him:

‘Is your name H.H.? Did you join in the march through Upper Swabia, and in the festival at Bremgarten? Did you desert your colours shortly after Morbio Inferiore? Did you confess that you wanted to write a story of the Journey to the East? Did you consider yourself hampered by your vow of silence about the League’s secrets?’
I answered question after question with ‘Yes’…

So I was expecting H.H. to get hammered, but, surprisingly, he is now given permission to go right ahead and write a full account of the League and all its laws.

He is handed a copy of the manuscript of the Journey he had been working on and which had got bogged down at that moment when Leo left the group. But now, when he rereads it, he feels it is bodged, clumsy, inaccurate and – further – as he tries to amend it, he watches the letters change shape, become patterns and pictures, illegible, the entire manuscript changes form in front of his eyes.

Rather improbably, the Speaker gives him free run of the immense archive to research his book, which leads to a passage where H.H. rummages through the archives to find records about his friends and then himself, but finds the records written in strange languages and arcane scripts. Slowly he realises there isn’t enough time in the world to go through this immense and probably infinite library.

From all sides the unending spaciousness of the archive chamber confronted me eerily. A new thought, a new pain shot threw me like a flash of lightning. I, in my simplicity, wanted to write the story of the League, I, who could not decipher or understand one-thousandth part of those millions of scripts, books, pictures and references in the archives! Humbled, unspeakably foolish, unspeakably ridiculous, not understanding myself, feeling extremely small, I saw myself standing in the midst of this thing with which I had been allowed to play a little in order to make me realize what the League was and what I was myself.

the court magically re-assembles, with the Speaker presiding. Now we learn that this little episode was a further step in H.H.’s trial, to show him how vain and presumptuous his aim of writing a history of the league was. The Speaker asks if he is ready for the verdict on him, and whether he wants it delivered by the Speaker or the President himself.

In a surreal development, the grand figure who emerges from the bloom of the archive hall turns out to be none other than… Leo! The Leo he had followed into the party, who is himself the Leo who was his group’s servant on the Journey and now he comes to think about it, was the same President who initiated him into the League and gave him his ring.

H.H. is covered in shame and confusion. To think that he could write a history of the League. To think that he had imagined the League had ended or had never existed. Now Leo recounts H.H.s sins against the League. Forgetting about its existence. Losing his League ring. Even their long walk through the town had been a test because H.H. should have gone into the church and worshipped, as is fitting, instead of standing outside locked in his impatient egotism. It is his egotism which made him deny the League and sink into a world plagued with depression and despair.

Again, as in so many of Hesse’s books, which you imagine will be about Eastern philosophy, the most eloquent passages are about misery and despair. Leo tells the jury how H.H.s loss of faith in the League led him down into the pit, and delivers some puzzling lines:

‘The defendant did not know until this hour, or could not really believe, that his apostasy and aberration were a test. For a long time he did not give in. He endured it for many years, knowing nothing about the League, remaining alone, and seeing everything in which he believed in ruins. Finally, he could no longer hide and contain himself. His suffering became too great, and you know that as soon as suffering becomes acute enough, one goes forward. Brother H. was led to despair in his test, and despair is the result of each earnest attempt to understand and vindicate human life. Despair is the result of each earnest attempt to go through life with virtue, justice and understanding and to fulfill their requirements. Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. Defendant H. is no longer a child and is not yet fully awakened. He is still in the midst of despair.’

So: Despair is what you enter when you are no longer a child, when you become a questing adult, and before you are initiated or awakened.

Now President Leo initiates H.H. for a second time, giving him a replacement ring and welcoming him back into the ranks of the League.

This really is nothing at all about any literal Journey To The East, is it? It is about adventures of the spirit, or maybe psychological experiences, in a quiet Swiss town.

Now the President leads H.H. to the final test. He is shown the League archives about himself. Specifically, he is shown several other accounts written by members of his group or party on his Journey of ten years ago. Here he is horrified to read that it is he, H.H. that the other members of the group blamed for Leo’s disappearance, for accusing Leo of having taken key documents with him, it was he, H.H. who was blamed by the rest of the group for spreading dissension.

He learns something about trying to write ‘the truth’ (something which is, to be blunt, fairly obvious), which is that everyone has a different account of what happened, and no ‘truth’ can ever be arrived at.

If the memory of this historian was so very confused and inaccurate, although he apparently made the report in all good faith and with the conviction of its complete veracity – what was the value of my own notes? If ten other accounts by other authors were found about Morbio, Leo and myself, they would presumably all contradict and censure each other.

No, our historical efforts were of no use; there was no point in continuing with them and reading them; one could quietly let them be covered with dust in this section of the archives. ..

How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible ?

The final few pages end on an enigmatic moment and symbol. Tucked away in the shelf where his records are stored, he finds a grotesque little statuette, like a pagan idol. Only slowly does he realise it is two-sided, shows two human figures joined at the back. And then slowly makes out that one is a depiction of himself, with blurred features, weak and dying. And as he lights another candle he sees something stirring in the heart of the glass statuette, and realises that some kind of life force is moving from his half of the statuette over into Leo’s

And in the last few sentences of the book he remembers a conversation he had with the servant Leo on the Journey, ten years earlier, amid a wonderful festival early in the journey, where Leo had explained that a pet or writer drains himself in order to give eternal life to his work, just as a mother suckles a baby and gives the babe life, at her own expense. So the poet.

And on this slightly ominous, pregnant image the book ends. The narrator feels very sleepy. He turns to find somewhere to sleep. Maybe enacting exactly the gesture whereby the poet, writer or maker, gives all their spirit and life force to their creation and then expires.

Thoughts

Well, it turns out not to be a literal Journey To The East in the slightest. Anyone expecting a straightforward narrative of a pilgrimage to India will be disappointed and puzzled.

However, anyone familiar with Hesse will be less surprised by its combination of the strangely mundane and the wildly phantasmagorical. This is the same combination as in Steppenwolf, which evolved from being a dull account of a middle-aged boarder in a provincial boarding house into the giddy surrealism of the Magic Theatre.

And Steppenwolf also covered a similar range of emotional or psychological states – to be more precise, it displayed a similar, almost schizophrenic, tendency to jump between extremes of Despair and the giddy heights of ecstatic imaginative delirium.

I had this impression of Hesse as being a lofty propounder of high-minded Eastern philosophy. I wasn’t prepared to encounter so many characters who were so full of despair, self-loathing and so many discussions of suicide.

And I’m still reeling from the way the book is not about a Journey To The East at all; it’s much more about the psychological adventures or journey of a middle-aged man living in a Swiss town. All the key events happen in the narrator’s mind. It is a psychological odyssey.

Building a universe

It’s a small detail, but it’s interesting that Hesse includes among fellow members of the League, not only some of his real-life friends, but characters from his other books.

Thus the character ‘Goldmund’, one of the two leads in Narziss and Goldmund, crops up in his initial memories of the Journey, as does the painter Klingsor, who is the fictional lead of Hesse’s earlier novel Klingsor’s Last Summer.

And when I started reading Hesse’s final novel, The Glass Bead Game, early in the introduction the narrator mentions the League of Journeyers To The East as forerunners of the game. Hesse was quite obviously creating a kind of larger imaginative canon, an imaginarium, in which characters not only from history, not only actual writers and composers, along with mythical and legendary figures, but figures from his own earlier fictions, could meet and mingle on equal terms.

Images of war in The Journey To The East

I am always interested in the social history revealed by older texts. It is striking that Hesse doesn’t just launch straight into his fairy-tale journey, but feels the need to define the times, the era, the period against which his pilgrim is reacting, and that he defines these times by repeated references to the social, economic, cultural and spiritual chaos following Germany’s defeat in the Great War.

Ours have been remarkable times, this period since the World War, troubled and confused, yet, despite this, fertile…

It was shortly after the World War, and the beliefs of the conquered nations were in an extraordinary state of unreality. There was a readiness to believe in things beyond reality…

Have we not just had the experience that a long, horrible, monstrous war has been forgotten, gainsaid, distorted and dismissed by all nations? And now that they have had a short respite, are not the same nations trying to recall by means of exciting war novels what they themselves caused and endured a few years ago?…

At the time that I had the good fortune to join the League – that is, immediately after the end of the World War – our country was full of saviors, prophets, and disciples, of presentiments about the end of the world, or hopes for the dawn of a Third Reich. Shattered by the war, in despair as a result of deprivation and hunger, greatly disillusioned by the seeming futility of all the sacrifices in blood and goods, our people at that time were lured by many phantoms, but there were also many real spiritual advances. There were Bacchanalian dance societies and Anabaptist groups, there was one thing after another that seemed to point to what was wonderful and beyond the veil. There was also at that time a widespread leaning towards Indian, ancient Persian and other Eastern mysteries and religions…

His name is Lukas. He had taken part in the World War and had published a book about it which had a large circulation…

And indeed, from a structural point of view, this editor, Lukas, is included mainly for the discussion he promotes about the struggle he had to write his memoirs of the war, and his eventual conclusion that it was better to write something rather than nothing – even if untrue or less than perfect – if only because the act of writing was so therapeutic and saved him from terrible feelings of despair and suicide.

I’m doing no more than suggest that Hesse, who is generally thought of as a kind of high-minded explorer of timeless values was, in fact, very much a man of his times, and that his thinking was marked and shaped by the great cataclysm which he and his nation lived through just as much as all the other authors of the Weimar period.

Credit

Die Morgenlandfahrt by Hermann Hesse was published in German in 1932. The English translation by Hilda Rosner was published by Peter Owen Ltd in 1956. All references are to the 1995 Picador paperback edition.

20th century German literature

A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)