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A review by guojing
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Treasures of Chinese Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk
5.0
This is one hell of a book. The adventures described herein are mind-bogglingly awe-inspiring, while the savagery is heart-breaking.
The beginning of the book gives a very odd perspective which is not duplicated in the body of the text; that is, I was expecting a mildly moralistic tale against the deprivations and thievery of the "foreign devils" - the Europeans and, in the case of Langdon Warner, American - who saved the archaeological heritage of the Silk Road. The Chinese consider these people - Aurel Stein, Albert von le Coq, Albert Grünwedel, Pelliot, etc. - to be treacherous thieves, robbing them of their heritage. However, as the rest of the book makes perfectly clear, these archaeologists actually saved this heritage. As a single example, on one of his expeditions, I believe it was Aurel Stein (so many different people described back and forth between chapters) who found something like 92 large Buddha statues under the sands of one of the lost towns, far too large to bring back. When he returned seven years later, they were each of them smashed to pieces! This was a typical scenario.
From locals who thought that the frescoes came to life at night and so the faces had to be scratched out, to military personnel lodged in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and causing all sorts of carnage, were it not for these brave and indomitable archaeologists, nothing would be known about the artistic heritage of the Silk Road, dating back in some cases to the 300s AD! They are heroes of archaeology, yet China considers them the most villainous of Occidentals.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring of the stories - for myself at least, being as I am so fanatically enamored of words, scripts, and languages - is the discovery of the library of Tun-Huang. I first learnt about this maybe a decade ago, in my early teens; indeed, I was so amazed by the online digitized library that I made up my mind to learn Khotanese or Sanskrit or any of the other languages in which they were written so that I might contribute (two months of Sanskrit taught me that that was too much work than a 15 year old was willing to devote, but I did manage to irk the kids in my class by writing my notes in English though in the Devanagari script, so whenever they asked to copy I'd hand it over and say, "if you can").
This book is a favorite, and I am so saddened to see it end. I shall desperately search out any more by Peter Hopkirk or on this topic in the future.
The beginning of the book gives a very odd perspective which is not duplicated in the body of the text; that is, I was expecting a mildly moralistic tale against the deprivations and thievery of the "foreign devils" - the Europeans and, in the case of Langdon Warner, American - who saved the archaeological heritage of the Silk Road. The Chinese consider these people - Aurel Stein, Albert von le Coq, Albert Grünwedel, Pelliot, etc. - to be treacherous thieves, robbing them of their heritage. However, as the rest of the book makes perfectly clear, these archaeologists actually saved this heritage. As a single example, on one of his expeditions, I believe it was Aurel Stein (so many different people described back and forth between chapters) who found something like 92 large Buddha statues under the sands of one of the lost towns, far too large to bring back. When he returned seven years later, they were each of them smashed to pieces! This was a typical scenario.
From locals who thought that the frescoes came to life at night and so the faces had to be scratched out, to military personnel lodged in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and causing all sorts of carnage, were it not for these brave and indomitable archaeologists, nothing would be known about the artistic heritage of the Silk Road, dating back in some cases to the 300s AD! They are heroes of archaeology, yet China considers them the most villainous of Occidentals.
Perhaps the most awe-inspiring of the stories - for myself at least, being as I am so fanatically enamored of words, scripts, and languages - is the discovery of the library of Tun-Huang. I first learnt about this maybe a decade ago, in my early teens; indeed, I was so amazed by the online digitized library that I made up my mind to learn Khotanese or Sanskrit or any of the other languages in which they were written so that I might contribute (two months of Sanskrit taught me that that was too much work than a 15 year old was willing to devote, but I did manage to irk the kids in my class by writing my notes in English though in the Devanagari script, so whenever they asked to copy I'd hand it over and say, "if you can").
This book is a favorite, and I am so saddened to see it end. I shall desperately search out any more by Peter Hopkirk or on this topic in the future.