Miran is a first millennium CE city, now in ruins. It is situated in the far southeastern corner of the Tarim Basin. The first European intrepid explorer to mention this city was Nicolai Prejevalsky after he saw it in 1876.

 

In March 1988, I saw the wall paintings, the frescos, brought back to India by Aurel Stein. They were in three rooms of the Central Asian Antiquities Museum in New Delhi. In my diary, I said they were from Turfan, but in fact, they were Buddhist frescoes taken from the ruins of Miran. I noted that the glass that covered the tall fascinating paintings was dirty or perhaps from a too humid atmosphere. More likely, the fragile frescoes, levered off the walls of stupas and temples by Stein’s workers and laboriously carried back to India on the backs of camels, horses, donkeys and yaks, had mildewed. Centuries of dry air and then being buried in dry sand, had kept the paint fresh for the eyes and the camera lens of Stein and company. But now, the delicate frescoes were in bad shape.

 

Marco Polo had been to Miran, or rather, passed by in 1273 on his way to meet Kublai Khan. It would have been a ruin in his day. But Polo did write about Charkilik and mentioned crossing the Great Salt Desert of Lop. Miran sits on the edge of this desert, and in its heyday, about 1000 years before the explorer passed this way, would have been a ‘must stop’ for all travelers on the Southern Silk Road. Polo noted that the great city at the end of the desert is called Lop and noted that travelers needed a week to refresh themselves and camels before the crossing eastward, which took a month. The desert was formidable. (More about this in another blog.)

 

An earlier traveler, Xuan Zang, a Chinese Buddhist monk who had traveled from China to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures, passed this way on his return in 645. He undoubtedly stopped here, as it had been and presumably still was, a large Buddhist site, full of monks, monasteries and stupas. He went on to Loulan, to the north, but his journey home (to China) was now finished and he had little to say about Charkilik, Miran or Loulan, or the crossing of this perilous salt desert.

 

Aurel Stein had much to say about Miran. He probably felt as though he ‘owned’ it in the sense that he was the one who systematically collected artifacts, mapped it and ‘saved’ it from further looting. He visited and excavated over the years 1900-1916, in which he made three extensive trips to Chinese Turkestan. His inspiration was Xuan Zang and he carried a copy of the book that the monk wrote about his travels to India and back. It was Stein’s collection of frescos I saw in New Delhi, as he had worked for the Indian Archaeological Survey, and naturally his loot went to his employer.

 

One of the most engaging travel accounts of getting to Miran is by Christa Paula. A graduate student, she was working on her PhD thesis about Miran and was desperate to visit the ruins, to see for herself and to answer some questions about Stein’s excavations and maps. Her biggest problem was timing. In the late 1980’s, when I first went to Chinese Turkestan, only a few cities and roads were open for tourists. She dutifully saw Kashgar, Urumqi, Turpan and visited the ruins available to her. But she wanted, needed, to go to Miran. In her book, The Road to Miran, she filled the pages with adventures of trying to get permission, being thwarted, trying again, and experiencing wretched accommodations in out of the way places. Finally, she made a desperate clandestine dash with a local who had friends in the lonely outposts that dotted the road. Her visit to Miran, while thrilling for her, was only for a few hours and couldn’t have revealed much in the way of archeological finds. “It had taken me three months to get to Miran, and I had one day to explore the site.” As she crept among the ditches and ruins, she noted, “Below us lay a vast and desolate expanse, interrupted only by sand-covered mounds, bobbing like buoys on the grey Atlantic.” She managed to identify Stein’s mounds and even find some of Stein’s ‘outhouses’.

 

The town, or city, of Loulan had first been identified by Sven Hedin in 1900. And the serendipitous finding of this amazing site will have to wait for another telling. But Stein knew about the ruins of Loulan and also knew other sites were dotted about. Of course, the locals knew where they were. And Stein carried a copy of Xuan Zang’s journal (his ‘bible’), so he knew about the bustling city of Charkalik, now only a small outpost on the edge of the desert. Stein wrote, “In a region where all is dead and waste, spiritual emanations from those who have passed by centuries ago, seem to cling much longer to the conspicuous landmarks than in parts where life is still bustling.”

 

In December 1906 and January 1907, Stein dug in the ruins of Miran, located fifty miles northeast of Charkilik, called Ruoqiang by the Chinese. He had hired a guide, a Loplik by the name of Tokta Akhun, who knew the area well. Detailed descriptions are given in his many books about his first sight, his diggings and other activities carried on over the years.

 

It was of great interest to him to speculate on the climate and how it had changed over the years. A large monastery complex, with hundreds or thousands of monks, must have had sources of food and water. Xuan Zang and Marco Polo noted that on the other side of the great Salt Desert of Lop, one month’s difficult journey away, lay the Oasis of Dunhaung. But his corner of the Takla Makan was fed by mountain streams from the Altun Shan Mountains in the south, which separate this area from Tibet. This region also received some water, if not continuously, from the Tarim River. The Tarim arises in the mountains that border the Takla Makan and flows in a great eastward arc, eventually emptying into a wide inland salt sea. Over the centuries, this shallow sea dried up, leaving a few corridors of water and a vast salt desert. Today, there is no longer any water from the Tarim River, and only a wide salt plain.

 

But when Stein encountered Miran, water still flowed to the inhabited area, fifty miles away, but no longer to here at the ruined city. As Stein dug in those early years, he was excited and astonished by a number of things. The first were the manuscripts, their age, their astounding preservation, their variety of languages and topics and their sheer volume. He unearthed hoard after hoard, written on wood and parchment and often kept in sealed envelopes of wood. These helped him date the various houses, monasteries and refuse pits. The second were the frescoes, the ones I had seen in the museum in Delhi. Many of them had been destroyed by the weather, by looters or were just too delicate to survive the assault of a modern archeological digging team. Although the weather is dry and the air exceedingly so, rain and wind managed to damage anything close to the surface. Looters had figured out that the Buddhists of a thousand years before had used gold leaf on their statues and paintings. Burrowing into ruined stupas could reward the intrepid thieves with precious objects, or they could scrape the gold off the frescos and statutes. Often, they smashed the statues looking for treasure in the hollow insides. The third memorable thing were the refuse pits where many manuscripts were to be found. Ancient feces retains its stench and Stein, as well as Paula, reeled from the odors that rose from the refuse piles. The question of why the storage of manuscripts and toilets were one and the same place was never answered. A fourth discovery delighted Stein, but no longer seems amazing to us. The statues and frescos exhibited signs of classical Greek art, the Gandharan style of Buddhist art. Alexander the Great brought Greek styles to the places he conquered, but this out of the way place is far, far away from Greece.

 

My trip to Miran in the summer of 1992 was marred by bureaucratic delays, car troubles and disappointment in what was left of the once extensive city. We drove out of Charkilik to the edge of the desert and pulled up at a small outpost with an office whose sign read ‘State Farm #36.’ From the journal, “we pick up an old toothless man for a guide. Out to the edge of the farm, locked gate, no one there. We opt to walk. It’s hard core sand desert. We’re pointing north, there are mountains to our right converging with the little jeep trail we’re on. Lop Nor is about 100 miles ahead. A brick chorten, mostly ruined, bits of pottery, other structural remains, mostly 5 to 7 feet high. (About every 100 yards). Ahead, there is a sort of a fort on a rock outcrop. The jeeps have now gotten through and join us with a young Uyghur man who is the guardian of the ruins. He doesn’t know how old it is or who lived here. Our guidebook says its Tang, probably from the time of the Tibetan occupation.”

 

I have no more of a memory than this diary entry. The views of lumps of stupas in the desert landscape are all that remain in my mind. The romantic in me wants the toothless old man to be the son or nephew of Tokta Akhun.

 

There is now a rail line from Dunhuang to Korla that stops at Ruoxiang. A modern iron horse that crosses the mighty Lop Nor Desert in 12 hours compares favorably with the month that Marco Polo took.

 

References:

Bergreen, Laurence, 2007, Marco Polo, From Venice to Xanadu, Alfred Knopf, New York

 

Paula, Christa, 1994, The Road to Miran: Travels in the Forbidden Zone of Xinjiang, Harper Collins, London

 

Polo, Marco, 1958, The Travels, Penguin Classics

 

Prejevalsky, Nicolai, 1879, From Kulja, Across the Tian Shan to Lob-nor, Sampson, London

 

Stein, Aurel, 1964, On Ancient Central Asian Tracks, Random House, New York

Photo: Panoramic view of the sand blown landscape of the city of Miran, in 2018 (Photograph Yunxiao Liu).

 


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