Along the Ancient Silk Road.
KENNETH WIMMEL
The Remarkable Explorations of Sven Hedin
The three shepherds tending their sheep on the bank of the Khotan River in the Takla Makan Desert of western Chinese Turkestan did not expect any visitors. It was early May in 1895, and the riverbed was dry, except for a few pools here and there, where troughs, which had been scooped out of the sand when the river flowed, still held water. Those random pools and the vegetation they supported enabled herds and flocks to live along the river during the time of year when its flow stopped. Sometimes a caravan of mules or camels passed, following the riverbed from Khotan in the south to Aksu in the north. But hardly anyone else would venture into the dreaded Takla Makan with the hot weather already well along. So when the youngest shepherd, while rounding up some stray sheep, was suddenly confronted by a haggard-looking stranger, he was petrified by surprise.
"Salaam Aleikum [peace be with you]," said the traveler in a weak voice. The startled young shepherd disappeared and returned with an older man. They took the obviously exhausted foreigner to a hut, gave him some bread and milk, and invited him to lie down and rest.
[Graphic omitted] The stranger was Sven Anders Hedin, and he was in the midst of the first of many explorations he made across Central Asia and Tibet. Almost a month earlier he had entered the desert with a small caravan. But because of erroneous information supplied by a guide, he misjudged the distance to the Khotan River, and the group ran out of water well short of its goal. Hedin left his companions and animals in the last stages of exhaustion at their final campsite and struck out alone to find the river. He walked across the towering sand dunes at night and rested during the searing daylight hours, covering himself completely with sand. He was at the point of total collapse when he encountered the shepherds. He subsequently learned that two of his men and all of his camels had died. Most of his equipment was smashed or rendered useless, and he had to return to Kashgar, his base of operations.
But Hedin was a man of remarkable courage, endurance, and resolution, and despite this brush with death on his first expedition into the Takla Makan, he again assembled a caravan and began anew. His journey of exploration revealed to the West an astonishing amount of information about the vast, unknown region of Central Asia. He traveled more than 6,500 miles, 2,000 of which, he claimed, had never before been visited by a European. In a few places he was told by local inhabitants that he was venturing into areas never before visited by any human being.
Between 1893 and 1909 Hedin made three long journeys of discovery through the westernmost Chinese province of Xinjiang-- known in the West as Chinese or Eastern Turkestan -- as well as Tibet and Mongolia. His expeditions and resulting books and scientific treatises gained him a wide following and supplied a wealth of information about a huge part of the earth's surface that was mostly a blank on European maps at the turn of the twentieth century. Though his unpopular political views and his support of German nationalists eventually overshadowed his geographical contributions, Hedin's journeys sparked a generation of scientific discovery in Central Asia.
Born in Stockholm in 1865, Hedin received his higher education in Germany, where he studied geography and geology. One of his professors was Baron Frederick von Richtofen, the geographer who coined the term "Silk Road" to describe the famous ancient trade route across Central Asia.
As a schoolboy in Sweden, young Sven had dreamed of becoming an explorer. "At the early age of twelve, my goal was fairly clear," he wrote in middle age. He wanted to become the first man to reach the North Pole. But his attention shifted to Central Asia right after college when he went to Baku, near the Caspian Sea, to serve as a tutor to the son of a Swedish engineer working in the Russian oil fields.
[Graphic omitted] Before embarking on his first expedition, Hedin wrote to the king of Sweden that his object was
to disperse the clouds which still rest over a great part of Central Asia.
An expedition to that part of the world which was the cradle of the Aryan
race, and from whose dim interior the Mongols streamed out over the whole
of Asia and part of Europe, and where there is such a host of geographical
questions still awaiting solution, is one of the most important
undertakings within the domain of geographical discovery.
On his first journey (1893-1897) Hedin explored and mapped large areas in the Pamir and Kun Lun Mountains. He tried four times to climb 25,600-foot Muztagh Ata in the Pamirs, despite having no mountaineering equipment. He was able to reach 20,000 feet, but blizzards prevented him from reaching the summit.
After spending a year in the mountains, he ventured into the Takla Makan in the Tarim Basin, where he had his brush with death, and discovered two ancient cities buried under the desert sands. His popular two-volume account of the journey, Through Asia, was published in 1898.
On the first portion of his second journey (1899-1902), he returned to the Tarim Basin and found another ancient city. Then he turned south into Tibet, the "Forbidden Land" closed to foreigners by the Tibetans on pain of death. He wanted to become the first European to visit Lhasa since the 1840s and disguised himself as a Tibetan. His companions shaved his head and rubbed a mixture of fat, soot, and brown pigment into his skin. "I became almost frightened at the sight of myself in my polished watch case, my only mirror," Hedin wrote in Central Asia and Tibet, his account of the expedition, published in 1903. "We were in high spirits, laughing and chatting like schoolboys."
Accompanied by a Tibetan lama, he set out on a "wild ride" to Lhasa, but was twice turned back short of his goal by the Tibetans. Disappointed, he eventually turned south into India.
On his third great journey (1905-1909), Hedin entered Tibet from India, despite being forbidden by the British government to do so. He departed Leh in Ladakh with fifty-eight horses and thirty-six mules, and arrived in Shigatse six months later with six horses and one mule -- the rest had died of exhaustion and exposure.
[Graphic omitted] In Shigatse he met the Panchen Lama, second only to the Dalai Lama in power and prestige, and mapped much of the mountainous area north of the Himalayas, which he called the "Trans-Himalaya." He surveyed the sources of the Indus, Sutlej, and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Rivers, chronicled in a three-volume account, Trans-Himalaya, published in 1909.
Hedin always traveled without European companions on his explorations, because he preferred to be in complete control. He wished to decide for himself where he would go and how long he would linger at any stops he made. He was accompanied only by small groups of locally hired guides, porters, and animal herders. On his third great journey, when he spent three years crisscrossing Tibet, he reported that he did not see another Westerner for two years.
[Graphic omitted] One reason he could travel so independently was his extraordinary ability to learn languages. He was fluent in Swedish, English, German, French, and Russian. Early in his career he mastered Persian and Turkish, and later he added Mongolian and Tibetan to his linguistic arsenal.
Along with books intended for general readers, Hedin also published exhaustive scientific reports of his discoveries. Results of a Journey in Central Asia, 1899-1902 appeared between 1904 and 1908 in eight volumes. Southern Tibet, published in twelve volumes between 1917 and 1922, reported on his Tibetan explorations.
Hedin was an explorer by avocation but a geographer by profession. His lifelong obsession was to fill in the white spaces on maps, to record data about remote areas of which little or nothing was known to Western cartographers. During thousands of miles of grueling travel, he recorded careful readings that produced invaluable geographical data about Central Asia.
His methods and scientific equipment were often simple by necessity, but they produced surprisingly reliable results. For example, riding a camel, he would measure a base line of 400 meters. Then, still atop his camel, he would use a compass and watch to compute the distance and direction he traveled in the course of a day. In the evening, he would record the data. Periodically, he would use his notes to draw a map in his sketch book of the territory he had traversed. During his first journey alone, he drew 552 maps.
On both his first and second expeditions, Hedin spent a lot of time in the Tarim Basin, where the Takla Makan Desert lies, and described two of its significant geographical features, the Tarim River and Lop Nor Lake. He traveled by boat for two and a half months down the Tarim, the greatest river of Central Asia, and took numerous readings of its breadth, depth, and velocity, as well as noting its relationship to the surrounding desert and its tributaries. He recorded and published a mass of geographic and hydrographic information that no one else ever had gathered, supplemented by drawings and photographs.
[Graphic omitted] Hedin visited Lop Nor Lake, into which the Tarim River empties, on several occasions during his years of wandering. He had done research about the lake by reading accounts in ancient Chinese annals, reports by Russian explorers and early European Jesuit travelers, and treatises by European geographers. He learned that information about the lake's location, size, and configuration varied enormously. He concluded that it was a "wandering lake" that moves around in the huge Lop Nor depression, constantly changing its location and size -- sometimes becoming a series of lakes, sometimes a single large body of water. In Lop Nor (1931) Hedin explained, "There are two constant factors effecting such changes, namely, the eastern sandstorms which are especially violent in the spring, filling the basin and pressing the lake westward, and the sediment carried down by the river."
Thomas Holdich, a respected English geographer of the early twentieth century who criticized some of Hedin's mapping methods, nevertheless described his mapping of Lop Nor as "one of the most valuable of modern additions to the geography of Central Asia." Aurel Stein, the Hungarian-born archaeologist, also held Hedin's maps and the other data he gathered in high regard for their accuracy.
Stein, whose first explorations began in 1900, described Hedin as "the distinguished explorer." Through Asia became one of Stein's principal sources of information for his first exploration. Relying on Hedin's data and maps, Stein had no trouble relocating sites Hedin had found in the flat, featureless desert.
The most dramatic of Hedin's revelations about Central Asia as his discovery of buried cities. Acting on information supplied by nomads and animal herders, he located two abandoned cities during his first expedition. He found the ruins of numerous wooden structures, some of them large and beautifully decorated. He was able to carry out limited preliminary excavations, but Hedin was not an archaeologist and was not equipped to undertake extensive investigations of what he had found. He took careful sightings to fix and record locations, but it remained for archaeologists who followed in Hedin's footsteps, notably Stein, to analyze the sites and eventually to discover others.
The cities had been oases along the ancient Silk Road that linked China with India, Persia, and the Mediterranean Basin. They were located on rivers fed by melting snows in the Kun Lun Mountains. When the rivers shifted their courses or dried up, the cities were abandoned to the desert sands. Archaeological excavations at these sites uncovered a wealth of information about interactions between Eastern and Western civilizations, when the Roman Empire and China's Han Dynasty were at the pinnacles of their power and influence. Stein's subsequent work at the sites revealed that a unique civilization -- an amalgam of East and West -- flourished in ancient Central Asia.
[Graphic omitted] The most spectacular of the buried cities, which Hedin discovered on his second expedition, was Lou-lan, a legendary kingdom that had served as a major way-station along the Silk Road during the centuries just before and after the birth of Christ. The city stood on the shore of Lop Nor Lake amid lush forests and fields. As the Han Dynasty declined and fell, its Chinese garrison withdrew, and it was occupied by fierce Hun nomads from the desert. Subsequently, when the Tarim River shifted its course, the wandering lake moved to the south, and the city was abandoned for good in the fourth century A.D.
Lou-lan's existence had been known from the ancient Chinese annals, but its location had become lost in the mists of time, until 1901, when Hedin stumbled upon its half-buried remains in the desolate Lop Nor Desert. He found the ruins of wooden houses and clay watch towers thrusting upward from the flat, lifeless earth. The dry desert had perfectly preserved delicate wooden implements, textiles, and other perishable items for more than two thousand years. Hedin uncovered Chinese records written on wood and paper that mentioned "seed-corn banks," "armies," and "numerous farms," suggesting that Lou-lan in its heyday was a large, prosperous city. Among the buried artifacts he found were strips of paper, dating from the third century A.D., that proved to be the oldest paper ever discovered.
Hedin took particular pride in his discovery of Lou-lan. Writing in the 1920s, he summed up his feelings:
To this day I like to dream of its past greatness and its glamour ... not a
single one of our ancient Swedish rune-stones is older than the fragile
wooden staffs and paper fragments I found in Lou-lan. When Marco Polo made
his famous journey through Asia in 1274, the sleeping city had already lain
a thousand years unknown and forgotten in the desert. And after the great
Venetian's journey, it was to slumber 650 years more before the ghosts of
its past were roused to life, and their ancient documents and letters made
to shed new light on bygone days and mysterious human fates.
After Hedin's third expedition, World War I prevented further exploration in Asia, although he was able to spend seven months in the Middle East in 1916. In 1926 he returned to Central Asia to lead an expedition organized by Germany's state airline, Deutche Lufthansa, to establish an airline route to China. Financial support was also supplied by the Swedish government, as well as by Hedin himself. The expedition spent several years exploring and surveying possible air routes and sites for weather stations. In the 1930s the Swede revisited the Lop Nor depression and further investigated the "wandering lake" and the shifting rivers that fed it.
[Graphic omitted] Three of his books, The Flight of Big Horse (1936), The Silk Road (1938), and The Wandering Lake (1940), form a trilogy about these last explorations of Lop Nor. Hedin departed Asia for the last time in 1935.
Along with being a tough and rugged explorer, Hedin also showed talent as a writer and artist. His books for general readers contain passages of marvelous description. One describes meeting a desert caravan at night:
Of a sudden one hears the muted sound of bells far away. It is a strange
music, it creates an impression that is magical. It makes one sleepy. The
sound gets more and more precise, finally it is very close. Like huge black
ghosts, the camels appear out of the darkness; slowly, majestically, with
dignity they move across the desert sands.
The enormous volume of his published works -- more than 30,000 pages -- suggests that Hedin was a rapid, facile writer. In 1974 his grandnephew told a biographer, "He never rewrote anything. He never went over his manuscripts. That was the finished work."
Hedin was reputedly a spellbinding lecturer in half a dozen languages. When he described his harrowing experiences in the burning sands of the Takla Makan, audiences reportedly hurried to the water fountains when he finished. Hedin illustrated his books with delicate drawings rendered of the people and places he had seen. An exhibition of his drawings opened in Stockholm in 1964, the year that saw the publication of the book Sven Hedin as an Artist.
Hedin's early journeys took place when the age of European exploration was reaching its climax. The public lionized explorers as heroes. When Hedin returned from his first journey the Royal Geographical Society in London awarded him its Founder's Medal and a fellowship. In 1902 he became the last person to receive a Swedish knighthood. A few years later he received a second gold medal from the Royal Geographical Society. His books were bestsellers.
[Graphic omitted] Nevertheless, some disputed Hedin's claims of geographical discovery. When he returned from his third journey, a few members of the Royal Geographical Society acknowledged some of his accomplishments but questioned others. Tom Longstaff, a mountain climber and explorer familiar with the Himalayas and southern Tibet, questioned whether Hedin had been the first European to reach the sources of the Sutlej and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra Rivers, as Hedin claimed, though he accepted Hedin's claim to have discovered the source of the Indus. The dispute became an argument about what constitutes a river's source. Longstaff and others also questioned whether a distinct mountain chain, which Hedin called the "Trans-Himalaya," exists north of the Himalayas. Rather, they saw it as a mountainous area, not an identifiable chain with a distinct crest, such as the Himalayas or Karakorums. Such differences of opinion were never completely resolved, and Hedin's term has never been accepted in general usage.
Hedin's later years were marked by political controversy. An admirer of Germany and strong autocratic leaders, he supported the German empire during World War I. Sweden remained neutral during the war, but early in 1915 Hedin wrote a speech for the king urging Sweden's entry on the German side. His 1915 book, With the German Armies in the West, reportedly based upon personal observations, was published in Germany.
Before and during World War II, Hedin was sympathetic to the Nazi regime. Germany and World Peace (1937) presented a positive analysis of Nazi policies. He met Adolf Hitler on more than one occasion and as late as 1943 visited Berlin, where he attended a dinner in honor of Hermann Goring, head of the German air force. Hedin also wrote a sympathetic biography of Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese nationalist leader. His reputation became tarnished by these unpopular political views and associations. When he died in Stockholm on 26 November 1952, at the age of eighty-seven, he was almost totally forgotten, except among a handful of scientific specialists.
For most of the twentieth century, Central Asia was closed to the West by the Communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, so interest among Westerners was stifled. But the breakup of the Soviet Union and changes in the policies of China have opened the area to outsiders. Groups of tourists now visit some of Hedin's buried cities, although Lou-lan, in the Lop Nor region that the Chinese have used for nuclear testing, remains closed to visitors. The American Museum of Natural History has resumed paleontological exploration in Mongolia, which had been suspended in the early 1930s. Exploratory oil drilling is being carried on in the Takla Makan, and some geologists speculate that beneath the desert lies an enormous pool of oil to rival those of the Middle East.
This opening up of Central Asia, along with the region's growing political and economic importance, may signal a resurgence of interest in Hedin. His summary account of his first three great expeditions, My Life as an Explorer (1925), was recently reprinted by Kodansha International. His excellent panoramic drawings have reportedly proven useful in interpreting satellite photographs of Central Asia.
Sven Hedin was a complex personality whose remarkable accomplishments have been overshadowed by his espousal of extreme political views. He was, nevertheless, one of the great explorers of modern times and, perhaps, the greatest explorer of Central Asia. His detailed scientific writings and maps served as key sources for the study of the historical and cultural geography of Central Asia and Tibet.
Further Reading
Meyer, Karl E., and Shareen Blair Brysac. Tournament of Shadows: The Race for Empire in Central Asia and the Great Game. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999.
Hedin, Sven. A Conquest of Tibet. London: Macmillan, 1935.
Hedin, Sven. Central Asia and Tibet. Two volumes. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1903.
Hedin, Sven. My Life as an Explorer. Garden City, N.J.: Garden City Publishing Co., 1925.
Hedin, Sven. Through Asia. Two volumes. London: Methuen, 1898.
Hedin, Sven. Trans-Himalaya. Three volumes. London: Macmillan, 1909.
Hopkirk, Peter. Foreign Devils on the Silk Road. London: John Murray, 1980.
Kenneth Wimmel spent twenty-five years in the U.S. Foreign Service, working mostly in Asia. He currently is completing a book about the Survey of India. This article is adapted from his book The Alluring Target: In Search of the Secrets of Central Asia (Trackless Sands Press, 1996).
Mercator's World, March 2000 v5 i2 p36
Reply With Quote
Sweden
Bookmarks