How to Negotiate in a Stealing Sort of Way

You might not have heard of Aurel Stein.

Aurel Stein, the man himself.

Photograph by Thompson, The Grosvenor Studios, 1909. Photograph © Wellcome Collection, V 27218

The British Museum’s recent and much-lauded exhibition ‘Silk Roads’ wouldn’t have been possible without his contribution, but Stein is neither an eminent benefactor of central Asian artefacts nor is he one of the museum’s senior curators, in fact he was all but ignored and at times actively erased from the record after his death in 1943. That takes some doing.

Aurel Stein is today largely credited with bringing to light the Silk Road, the network of trade routes spanning Central Asia and the key connection between East and West from the 2nd to the 15th century. German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the term ‘Silk Road’ in 1877, deriving the name from, shocker, the trade of silks manufactured in China, but these routes trafficked all manner of items, from paper, to horses and from spices to precious stones.

They are why you could find porcelain in Portsmouth, dates in Dunhuang and Clydesdales in Constantinople.

Famously Marco Polo used the Silk Road to travel into Asia, where he became the first Westerner to go to certain parts of China, Burma, and India after travelling into Asia at the age of just seventeen with his father, a Venetian merchant. Marco stayed for twenty four years, seventeen just in China, during which period Marco allegedly met Ghengis Khan but neglected to notice the Great Wall. The extended vacay only ended when the reigning Mongol king Kublai Khan was nearing death and the Polo family, living on his favour, grew worried about what would happen to them when he finally died.

When they returned to Italy in 1295, Marco wrote about his travels in the maybe-accurate memoir The Travels of Marco Polo, a volume which catapulted him to fame, though his dying words proclaimed what he wrote was only half of what he actually saw on his travels, so maybe he did see the wall after all. Now Marco Polo is most broadly memorialised by having his name co-opted for that game kids play where they dick around in a pool with their eyes closed. History will do that to you.

Sketch of animals on the Silk Road, 966 AD.

© The Trustees of the British Museum

Regardless, it cannot be overstated how significant the Silk Road was as an envoy of culture for ancient civilisations, shaping culture and changing the world, the world over. As well as goods, ideas were exchanged between travelers along the epic trade routes, shaping religious beliefs, artistic ideas and scientific thinking. The Silk Road is credited with spreading Buddhism from India east to China, where it became an official religion, reshaping societal architecture from the first centuries CE.

Unfortunately, the network also traded in death, and I don’t refer to the gunpowder hoisted by camels from China across the Eurasian Steppe. The super-highway was a major contributor to the spread of black death, which was carried from central Asia to Europe where it went ahead and killed roughly 50 million people between 1346 and 1352.

But this was all in the past long before Stein entered the picture.

The Silk Road was majorly stymied by those buzzkills, the Ottoman Empire, who blocked trade into the West in the 15th century and eclipsed this era of part-global commerce. It was only in the second half of the 19th century the world woke up to the cross-cultural influence on ancient artefacts that indicated the meetings of East and West many centuries before. Stein was a major contributor of the decisive evidence that showed how trade impacted civilisations thousands of miles apart.

Now, despite Stein’s rediscovery of such a significant developmental instrument for the world, which remade our understanding of the ancient world and is kept in the eminent collections of The V&A, The British Museum, The British Library, and The National Museum in New Delhi, India, he is far from prolific.

Why is this?

Stein was born in Budapest in 1862, more than four centuries after the Silk Road ceased to trade. He was sent to study in Germany, where he developed a transfixation with Alexander the Great, ancient king of Macedonia who is now known primarily for one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders, expanding his kingdom to the ends of the known world to the east and naming cities after himself before dying at only 32 years of age in 323 BC. Consequently, upon further education in Budapest Stein dedicated himself to learning the ancient Eastern languages, including Sanskrit and Old Persian. At 21 he moved to London, with a PhD already under his belt.

For a young man obsessed with Eastern cultures, London in the late 19th century was where it was at. The British Empire’s interests in India and Central Asia made it a hotbed of intellectual activity for these culture’s, second-only to the countries themselves. It was in this culture that the ‘gentlemen archaeologist’ thrived.

You see, at this time young men with means and an academic interest in antiquity could scoop up a doctorate with relative ease and head to the edges of the earth, safe in the knowledge that with Europe and the heady might of its imperial interests behind them, they could have it all their own way. The world was opening up as old regimes began to crumble in the East, leaving governments weakened and amenable to granting travel visas and aid to these men with an appetite for adventure and the glory of discovery, both personal and national. Ancient stories of advanced societies and fantastical cities stoked inspiration to find if there was truth to the rumours. These explorers wanted it bad, and some even died for it; for every Hiram Bingham, who ‘discovered’ (it was never actually lost) Machu Picchu in Peru, there was a Percy Fawcett, who disappeared searching for the ancient Lost City of Z (existence unconfirmed) in Brazil.

Stein, for all his many faults, was one of the first true archaeologists, following the practice of typology (sorting findings in classifications) meticulously during fieldwork in the style developed by pioneering archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers in the 1880’s while working on Stonehenge in Wiltshire. Stein’s personal hero however was another father of archaeology, W. M. Flinders Petrie, excavator of the Great Pyramid of Giza, whose worldview is reflected in Stein’s own morals throughout his misadventures. Petrie believed the justification for archaeology lay in the future, not the past, with the ultimate aim of betterment through education. Fuelling this was the competition between European countries over who would be the first to ‘claim’ certain areas of the globe, turning an intellectual pursuit into a nationalist endeavour.

Stein’s scrolls from the library cave on display in the British Museum in 1914.

Photograph © Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

If this all sounds familiar it is because this is broadly the worldview still adopted by many museums to this day. For example, the British Museum advertises itself as a museum of the world, for the world - as long as they can pay for a return flight to London.

Petrie’s vision however came at any cost, the country of origin’s current incumbents were of no consequence, only the excavator had moral justification to dig up and remove objects because only he (and it’s always a he isn’t it) had the true understanding to appreciate and care for these objects. A little known superpower granted by a PhD, I believe.

This view is clearly rooted in imperialism. Petrie believed the present only offers destruction as objects would be dug up only for profit by locals, in order to give them the resources to emulate the West and ruin their ‘pristine’ past by farming or some crap like that. In other words, progress breeds greed.

Unfortunately, this morality is in some sense still very much alive and well; think of the objects kept in the care of Western museums under the reasoning that their countries of origin do not have the resources or political climate to care for them properly. The foundation of many Western museum collections operate on this fundamentally colonial principle; in its own way the possession over these foreign artefacts can teach as much about European history as the objects themselves can tell us about their own country of origin.

Much of early archaeology is probably best described as treasure hunting (stealing), less about the scientific method than about the allure of ancient artefacts. Think of Giovanni Battista Belzoni’s whose early 19th century looting of Egypt brought the bust of Ramesses II to the British Museum. In this climate, fakes created for profit proliferated, only bolstering views like Petrie that ancient material culture is unsafe in any hands but Western ones. Stein saw his work as a rescue mission and his intentions noble. The history would be preserved for everyone, just preserved elsewhere. Scientific method or not, archaeology in this era was a colonialist vehicle.

Meanwhile, back in London Stein was rubbing shoulders with his peers, and one of them, Henry Yule, who had translated Marco Polo’s possibly true account of his travels, recommended Stein for a job in India on the basis of his language skills. He became Principal of the Oriental College and Registrar of Punjab University, Lahore, in 1887 at only 25 years old.

It really is who you know.

Thus began a lifetime's habit for Stein: doing just barely enough work on his actual job to get by while stretching his annual leave to its very limit to ensure maximum time spent on indulging his own interests of exploration and archaeological discovery.

By 1898 Stein was able to use a 7th century Chinese-Buddhist monk’s account of his travels to successfully identify an ancient lost temple in the mountains of Lahore, got himself a fox-terrier named Dash and cemented his status as a true 19th century gentleman explorer. It just so happened that he was perfectly situated in skill, education, connection and location to apply himself to studying the ancient meeting of Eastern and Western cultures further, which drew him inevitably to the exotic charm of the long-eroded Silk Road.

So Stein looked North East, where study into the Silk Roads was hampered by the obstacles of the intimidating Himalayas, a mountain range encompassing the borders of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and China and containing ten of the tallest mountains in the world, and the brutal Taklamakan Desert, whose location between the Himalayas and Siberia meant it was unbelievably cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer.

Taklamakan is the second largest sand desert in the world (desert refers to a place where little precipitation occurs and as such does not just indicate sandy dunes; the Arctic and Antarctic are both classified as polar deserts) and its’ name in local etymology translates to ‘the place of no return’. Not very inviting.

Previous study had concluded that the Silk Roads skirted Taklamakan, hopping between oasis communities before arriving at the Dunhuang jade gate, which symbolised entry to the kingdom of China. Moreover, the conditions of the desert lent themselves perfectly to the preservation of artefacts like paper, fabric or wood, which would have otherwise decomposed centuries beforehand. There was clearly treasure to be found here, but the inhospitality of the landscape meant no one had yet been brave (foolish) enough to look. Stein decided he would be the first.

The Dig at Dandān-Uiliq.

© International Dunhuang Project

Stein’s was a British expedition, this was a time after all characterized by great explorations fuelled by individual nations' competition with others to be the first into the last great unknowns. Expeditions to the North Pole and Mount Everest were among other sojourns to which Britain threw its gauntlet, to varying degrees of success. And sure enough in 1900, Stein arrived at Khotan, an oasis community, and began digging a few miles outside of town at Dandān-Uiliq, an abandoned historic community discovered in 1896 by Swedish explorer Sven Hedin.

Stein and his team discovered fourteen new buildings, and sure enough treasures that would have not survived elsewhere made themselves known. We’re talking painted murals, painted wood bowls, painted wood plaques, even fabric shoes, the works. Most extraordinarily there was paper with writing still legible and intact, one dating from 781 BCE was a late fee for an unreturned donkey.

Stein was meticulous in his technique, unlike other archaeologists we won't mention. Upon arrival at a dig site, he would survey the site and the area to create a clear plan of major remains. Each section was then excavated in turn, with Stein noting the layers at which objects were discovered, a technique pioneered by his hero Petrie. The artefacts were assigned a unique set of characters as soon as they were pulled from the sand that linked to their exact location, kind of an archaeological What3Words.

At another site, Niya, Stein found something to confirm what everyone was already thinking. Roman coins and a series of clay seals with impressions of the Greek gods Athena and Eros, and legendary hero Heracles. Proof of trade between East and West, the Olympian gods buried in the sands at the end of their known world.

Other finds included documents dating from the 2nd century Han dynasty, an ancient mouse trap, a walking stick, part of a guitar, a bow in working order, a carved stool, an elaborately-designed rug and household objects such as elaborate carved wooden furniture, pottery and Chinese lacquer ware. This laundry list of incredibly well-preserved artefacts is comparable to finds at sites such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, where conditions of preservation met its extreme when metres of ash from Vesuvius’s eruption protected the artefacts of ordinary life from the centuries. All was duly delivered to the British Museum, where it still remains.

Stein surveying his dig in the Taklamakan in the company of Dash.

© The British Library

Upon his return to the West, as he was writing his soon-to-be bestseller account of his travels: Ancient Khotan: Detailed Report of Archaeological Explorations in Chinese Turkestan, Stein was able to ruminate on the consequences of removing forever artefacts from the country that had been so obliging to his requests to explore and dig in Taklamakan oasis communities. He pondered the Chinese amban (high officials) who ‘had been so inquisitive about the object of my excavations and who undoubtedly would wish to hear of their results’. Ever the philanthropist, he resolved to send them a copy of his book.

Stein’s appetite for discovery (and notoriety) was duly whetted, and soon his second trip into China in 1906 took him even further across the Taklamakan, joined by Dash II, his new canine companion. It was on this voyage that he ventured to Dunhuang and first encountered Mogao, or the Thousand Buddha Caves. This trip would prove to be the acme of his career as well as one of the most controversial archaeological expeditions in history, and believe me that is a very difficult list to top.

Stein had first heard of Mogao from a colleague and fellow explorer Louis de Loczy in 1897. Inhabited since the 4th century, the caves had begun as natural indents in the rock face, as caves tend to be, before being artificially enlarged over the years. Buddhist temples had been built in the caves to serve the inhabiting monks and as the assembly grew, as did the number of temples, sprawling inside the rock like a highly decorated ant hill. But Stein was not here to ogle at the murals, A rumour had been swirling around the exploration community, and he had his eye on its source: the complex’s collection of ancient manuscripts, cared for by the Buddhist monks who still occupied the caves. The manuscripts were kept in a walled off section of the cave system, dubbed the ‘library cave’, and only one man had authorisation to grant access: a monk named Wang Yuanlu. Stein wanted in.

It is clear that Stein, driven by possible competition from simultaneous French and German rival expeditions, was prepared to go as far as it took to gain access to this deposit, but in true European fashion, the first strategy was diplomacy. Stein sent his Chinese translator to make subtle hints of a large donation (bribe) in return for seeing the manuscripts in situ to assess their contents and date the collection. This in itself is stunning in its audacity. However, this sacrilege only permitted Stein the privilege of seeing a couple of the documents, and not even in their special secret room. When his translator, Chiang, made the suggestion of taking a couple away, it was met with a strong, almost hysterical refusal from the Abbot.

Stein needed a new way in, and luckily ethical standards were already looking low. He was happy to learn that the collection, which had been excavated nearby and brought to the cave recently, had never been properly inventoried, allowing him a possible excuse to get up close and personal by generously offering his services. The bad news was that this unfinished inventory was made by the Chinese government, who had already laid an official claim to the library. This made Stein’s actions now both religiously and politically prohibited. But in the race to the bottom never count a 19th century Western archaeologist out.

First came the charm offensive with a generous side of patronisation. Stein gave up on money as motive and instead showered Wang Yuanlu with compliments on his restorative efforts of the cave's frescos and noted in his field journal how the ‘delightfully credulous cicerone’ graciously gave him a private tour of the complex. He was also able to bond by enthusing endlessly about Wang’s and his own personal hero, the monk Xuanzang, who brought Buddhism to China and whose 7th century travel memoir was what had led Stein to uncover that ancient temple all those years ago.

The manuscripts Stein was studying in his private room at Mogao.

After Aurel Stein, Serindia: Detailed report of explorations in Central Asia and westernmost China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), vol. 2, fig. 200.

The sucking up over cave interior design and seventh century Buddhist monks makes the skin crawl, but it worked. Several days later the monk secretly delivered a collection of manuscripts to Stein in the dead of night. By coincidence these manuscripts had been authored by the pair's mutual idol, Xuanzang. This was taken by the explorer and his team as a divine symbol of approval, and Wang agreed; the door to the library cave was duly flung wide. Stein was assigned a room nearby as a study and Wang bought him manuscripts to peruse at his leisure.

The documents revealed key Buddhist texts in Chinese and Tibetan among other languages, and not only writing, ancient silk banners and paintings were also pulled out by Wang for his new friend to examine. Significantly, among the piles was a printed copy of the Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest discovered printed text, dating to AD 868, whose discovery pushed the development of printing technology back a full 700 years. Stein collected some of the more significant documents into its own pile, which he aimed to take for ‘closer examination’. It was clear to all that the removal would have to be in the strictest secrecy, always a good sign of a legitimate transaction. Stein once again employed his flattery in order to soothe Wang’s misgivings and persuade him to part with the manuscripts, invoking everyone's favourite 7th century monk yet again to a man who was clearly in the dark of the true value of the artefacts entrusted to him.

Stein waxed poetic about the great religious service it would be to allow common access of these works to a Western audience, and his coercion was unrelenting. Only Stein, Wang, and the team’s Chinese translator knew when, in the dead of night, several ancient manuscripts were removed from the cave’s and placed in Stein’s field tent. The next night a new set of manuscripts followed the same route, and so on until the group reached a set of manuscripts deemed too important to be let go without a substantial donation to the cave complex’s upkeep. All in Stein left lighter on silver but heavier to the tune of twenty four cases of manuscripts, the true origin of which would be shrouded in mystery on their arrival in the Western world.

It all looks a bit dodgy. If not stealing then certainly prolonged coercion. The money the expedition team parted with only amounted to £130, and the secrecy of the transaction is proof enough that Stein’s actions would have been at least unpopular and at most scandalous if revealed at the time. It also bred copycats. A French team following Stein’s footsteps secured even more documents from Wang in the same way, and the authorities, finally noticing that the room looked substantially sparser than on their previous visit, duly wrenched the few remaining manuscripts away for safekeeping in Beijing. Stein was and is not popular in China, dubbed a burglar in public and is undoubtedly called worse behind closed doors.

Wang Yuanlu, photographed by Stein.

© International Dunhuang Project

Despite this, at the time Stein was able to wangle yet another expedition to Taklamakan in 1912, working now under the Republic of China, who had taken over from the Imperial Dynasty following the Chinese Revolution in 1911. He circumvented any problems that may have arisen from this change in leadership by entering China through the loosely regulated region of Xinjiang. Stein then spent three years excavating, accompanied by another new dog - Dash III. He even visited his old friend Wang Yuanlu, who had incredibly managed to keep his job. His findings this time however were overshadowed by the outbreak of World War One, and the conflict meant all the spoils had to remain in India, where they still reside.

It was clear that luck was up. The Republic of China had been formed partly in reaction to the liberties allowed to foreign entities by the old Imperial Dynasty. Travesties like the sacking of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 by the French and British armies during the Opium Wars, one of the most devastating singular cultural theft events in history, had made China understandably wary of their material culture’s safety. They began to assume responsibility for their own cultural identity in direct response to expeditions like Stein’s. Ouch.

The golden era for the gentlemen archaeologist was over. Stein didn’t get the memo though, and he was in for a nasty surprise when he returned to China in 1929 after a fourteen year sabbatical. Partly this was self-inflicted, and it certainly didn't help that he chose to travel with Langdon Warner of Harvard's Fogg Museum, who himself had dropped by the Thousand Buddha Caves in Dunhuang to steal several frescoes and a statue a few years prior. The men’s overinflated self-importance for their expedition was quickly popped by the attitude of the new Republic regime. Despite Stein’s assertion that ‘[He knew] how to manage them’, the six thousand dollars put aside in the budget for discrete donations (bribes) for the Chinese officials would not be enough to soothe the dislike of Western imperialism.

They never stood a chance. Knowing what we know about Stein’s methods, you might find this next bit satisfying. Upon the parties arrival, they found that the government, aware of their impending arrival had hastily passed the new Law for the Joint Preservation of Antiquities, that made the accompaniment of a Chinese official to the party non-negotiable and removal of antiquities from the country laughably out of the question. Stein agreed only because he assumed that the official in question would be amenable to money. He assumed wrong. Stein soon found that any aid request at any level of government was declined, similar to the average phone call to any customer service ‘helpline’ today. Bureaucracy had outsmarted the aging archaeologist.

But that wasn’t all: soon news came out of an alleged conversation between Stein and Harvard University, who had funded the expedition. Stein was reported to have said: "I think I can do with Sinkiang officials today what I used to do with those of the old regime. If you can give me some additional money with which to bribe them, I can have everything my own way in Sinkiang." Oh dear. Stein denied this, but even if he hadn’t said these exact words, they clearly reflected his views. Understandably this sank any remaining goodwill in China and ironically it did not go over well in Britain either, where Stein’s contemporaries had recognised that bribery wasn’t working anymore and had moved on. Stein had no choice but to leave China with little to show for himself. For once China had the upper hand, having succeeded in ending the age of archaeology as a form of Imperialism within its borders.

The whole event was so embarrassing for Stein and those who had celebrated his achievements that it has gone unmentioned in much of the historical record; unrecorded in Stein’s own writing (to be expected) or in his obituary in The Times: lifelong publisher of his endeavours. Stein may have wondered why ‘I should be burdened with worries about the attitude of modern successors of those, whose tracks on this wind-worn desert I am tracing’, but it seems clear to us. The prominence of his underhanded methods is too shameful, and his subsequent stubbornness too wearing. This legacy is likely part of the reason you will be hard pressed to locate Stein in the annals of history, unusual for a celebrity of his stature in the archaeological sphere, let alone find mention of him in the very museum he furnished with the lion's share of his finds. Today evidence of discomfort over the collection’s origin is reflected in only a few of Stein’s findings being publicly displayed, in a small case in the British Museum’s China and South Asia exhibit.

How Silk Roads describes Stein’s adventure to Mogao.

Photograph by the author’s mum

The truth is that we do not know what would have happened to the scrolls if Stein had not removed them, ostensibly for safe-keeping. During the First World War, Mogao was occupied by Russian Soldiers, who did significant damage to the temple's frescos and made off with several remaining artefacts. Had documents like the Diamond Sutra remained undiscovered it may well be that they would have been lost. It is also possible that without brazen acts such as those committed by Stein in 1907, China may not have developed nationalist interest in their material past in the same way, in the same vein that if the Titanic hadn’t sunk the laws demanding enough lifeboats for the maximum occupancy wouldn’t have been passed. Tragedy is so often the impetus for change.

These days, Stein’s trip is just another one of those 19th century archaeological expeditions that has two narratives. One forged Western views of moral superiority and still upheld in institutions like the British Museum, where Stein’s loot is held even now. Silk Roads, which ran from 26 September 2024 – 23 February 2025 at the British Museum would have been remiss not to utilise his findings, and so they didn’t; two artifacts are highlight objects for the exhibition, a votive panel from Dandān-Uiliq, and a sketch of tribute horse and camel from Mogao. Shockingly the caption for the latter says that the sketch was ‘preserved in a cave sealed in the early 11th century and accidentally discovered in 1900.’

Likewise the information panel merely states that the documents ‘‘acquired’ by Stein, that’s one way of putting it. As such the public is deceived into thinking these objects were acquired by good fortune and in good faith. Likewise, The Guardian’s (rave) review of the exhibition also states that ‘At its temple complex of Mogao… treasures were discovered in 1900 in a hidden cave…’. In these ways untruths proliferate.

The other is by that of the artefact’s place of origin, which regards the venerable archaeologist as nothing more than a grave robber, stealing objects of unparalleled national importance in the name of Western superiority in legally dubious circumstances. The Chinese view of Stein’s expedition is best summarised in this statement from the Republic of China in 1960 about the Diamond Sutra from Mogao, stating that: ‘This famous scroll was stolen over fifty years ago by the English-man Ssu-t 'an-yin [Stein] which causes people to gnash their teeth in bitter hatred’.

Stein’s expedition travelling across the Taklamakan Desert.

Photograph © Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

China joins Greece (Parthenon Marbles), Nigeria (Benin Bronzes), Easter Island (Hoa Hakananai'a), Egypt (Ramesses II) and many more in indignation and ongoing litigation.

These days the British Museum has established a Memorandum of Understanding with the Dunhuang Academy in order to share the knowledge held by the manuscripts from the library cave in Mogao that was ‘purchased’ for a mere £130. Yet, all those years ago when Aurel Stein left the Taklamakan Desert with precious cargo packed into crates carried on a camel train, echoing the journeys of the thousands who travelled the Silk Road centuries before, it was quite literally a steal.