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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
[AUGUST, 1917
I conjectured to have been the line of the earliest Chinese route leading into the Tarim Basin from Tun-huang and the extreme west of China proper. A succession of important discoveries soon confirmed that hope. On the top of a large clay terrace or mesha, rising steeply some 35 feet above the eroded ground-level, I came upon most interesting remains of an ancient burial-ground. On the sides of the mound graves had been partially exposed and destroyed by wind-erosion undercutting the banks and causing them to fall. But the top of the mesha had been safe from this destructive agent, and there we found a series of large grave pits which yielded a rich antiquarian haul in quite bewildering confusion.
Mixed up with human bones and fragments of coffins there emerged here in abundance household implements of all sorts, objects of personal use such as decorated bronze mirrors, wooden models of arms, Chinese records on paper and wood, and, above all, a wonderful variety of fabrics which delighted my eye. Among them were beautifully coloured silks, pieces of rich brocade and embroidery, fragments of fine pile carpets by the side of coarse fabrics in wool and felts. It soon became evident that these remnants of garments of all sorts had been used for wrapping up bodies, perhaps partially embalmed. I could not have wished for a more representative exhibition of that ancient Chinese silk trade which we know to have been a chief factor in opening up this earliest route for China's direct intercourse with Central Asia and the distant West, and which had passed along here for centuries.
A variety of very interesting problems as to the origin of designs, etc., usually attributed to Persian art of the Sassanian period, had been raised by the fine decorated silk fabrics I had discovered on my former journey in the walled-up cave temple of the "Thousand Buddhas" near Tun-huang. Here a mass of far older and dateable materials was coming to light to help to solve those problems. I soon realized, from various indications, that the contents of these pits must have been collected, before the final abandonment of the Chinese military station of Lou-lan, from older graves which wind-erosion or some similar cause had exposed or was threatening. Consequently the relics, here saved in obedience to a pious custom still prevalent among the Chinese, could safely be assigned to that period of the rule of the Han dynasty, which followed the first expansion of Chinese trade and power into Central Asia about the close of the second century B.C. There was no time then to examine the wealth of beautiful designs and colours making a feast for my eyes. But I felt that in this utter desolation of the wind-eroded olay desert, where nature was wholly dead and even the very soil was being reduced, as it were, to the condition of a skeleton, there had opened up a new and fascinating chapter in the history of textile art. It will take years to read it in full clearness.
My satisfaction was equally great when, after a long and fatiguing tramp from our base, I found myself by nightfall at a large walled enclosure near to where one of the dry river-beds passing the Lou-lan site seemed to merge in the hard salt expanse of an ancient terminal marsh. We had struck the fortified castrum which, as close examination soon showed, had served as a point d'appui for Chinese missions and troops where they first reached Lou-lan territory after having crossed the salt-encrusted dry lake-bed and skirted its absolutely barren north shores. Its walls, built with regular alternate layers of clay and carefully secured reed fascines, and remarkably well preserved after two thousand years' exposure, showed constructive features in closest agreement with those observed in the westernmost extension of the ancient Chinese border wall, which I had discovered and explored in 1907 in the desert of Tun-huang.
