The Taklamakan Desert is quite a place. The largest sand desert in the world, subject to “black hurricanes”, you could fairly call it a shit awful part of the planet. Surrounded by high mountain ranges, it forced the old Silk Road to divide and skirt the dunescape to meet again Kashgar.

For around a thousand years, the communities around the desert were Buddhist, and the Uyghurs of the Kara-Khoja shared the faith until they were converted to Islam, probably by Sufis, around the tenth century.

To our untrained eye, the history of the region is a complete mess, trackable through the maze of Wikipedia, and probably as unfathomable as the political story of the Low Countries to a student in Kashgar.

There is a terrific account of early Western incursions into the archelogy of the region by Ray Greenblatt, who summarised the various accounts of the expeditions available in 2000. I am revisiting his material, adding more recent links and images; there is much more to his version than the bits I have deployed:

“Silk and other articles of commerce were not the only items of major consequence which passed along the Silk Road. Buddhism–which had its origins in India in the sixth century B.C.–also travelled this route to China, as did Nestorian Christianity and Manicheism. Buddhism taught forbearance from worldly striving and compassion for all living things. Along with Buddhist theology came a profusion of Buddhist religious art…

..The Silk Road and its high Buddhist civilization remained in full flower until the Tang Dynasty began to decline in the ninth century. They then went into gradual decline until they faded out several centuries later. Ultimately, many of the bustling oasis cities disappeared completely along with their monasteries and art.”

These communities relied on elaborate cisterns and underground pipes to deliver melt water from the glaciers. These, however, were relics of the last Ice Age. As they finally died, so did the oases.

“Also, beginning in the 10th century Moslem warriors from Arabia began to appear. Fierce fighters, they made converts with the sword. By the 14th century virtually the entire population of Chinese Turkestan had converted to Islam. This supplanting of Buddhism by Islam changed radically the culture and art. Not only did Islam forbid the portrayal of the human form in painting and sculpture but Moslem iconoclasts actively destroyed or disfigured offending Buddhist paintings and statues.”

The final incentive to maintain these towns – the money from trade – disappeared as the Chinese Tang Dynasty turned inwards. The desert flowed across the sculptures, caves and monasteries. Dry beyond belief, it preserved everything it dessicated. Nothing remained but memory and myth, stories of buried cities and treasure, and the mummified remains of the inhabitants.

It was the Russians who first Kucha, he bought manuscripts dug out of a tower guarded by a mummified cow which disintegrated when it was touched. Over the next forty years, European explorers raced each other to pick over the ruins and cart away as much as possible while the locals wrecked much more in search of further treasure. Buddhist heritage was revealed, fought over and trashed at the same time.

This is, of course, the stuff of Indiana Jones.

“George McCartney, the British Consul in Kashgar, on instructions from Calcutta, and Nicolai Petrovsky, the Russian Consul in Kashgar, apparently on his own initiative and probably with the aim of thwarting McCartney, each let it be known that he stood ready to purchase manuscripts recovered from the buried cities of the Takla Makan. Manuscripts from several regions began to show up…

They were followed by Sven Hedin, a Swedish reactionary who flirted with the Nazis. Along with priceless manuscripts, he found Loulan, a garrison town abandoned to the desert in the fourth century. It is an important site which takes the archeology far beyond the Christian era, and demonstrates intriguing western influences.

Hungarian-born Aurel Stein, later to become British, followed to dig in Dandan-uilik, Endere and Rawak, and Niya, where Buddhist images intermingled with Pallas-Athene. They were confused for some time by a forger called Islam Akhun…

“an Uyghur con-man who forged numerous Sino-Indian manuscripts on birch bark and passed them off as ancient Khotanese manuscripts. Through George Macartney and Nikolai Petrovsky, the British and Russian consuls in Kashgar, his works found their way into museums in London and St. Petersburg and fooled some of the most brilliant linguists of their time, including Dr. Rudolf Hoernle. Dr. Hoernle published papers based on these manuscripts and tried, unsuccessfully, to decipher these pseudo-Brahmi manuscripts.

The Germans and Russians went to the northern arm of the Silk Road. The Berlin Ethnological Museum went to Turfan, along with Dmitri Klementz, and Albert Grunwedel. The most assiduous was probably the amiable Albert von Le Coq, who had a nose for religious confusion:

“On November 18, they reached Karakhoja, a ruined city to the east of Turfan and the ancient Uighar capital. They learned that local farmers had demolished many ancient buildings in search of frescoes whose pigments, the farmers believed, made good fertilizer. However, they found a fresco of an imposing male figure with a halo, surrounded by male and female acolytes. Scholars are virtually certain that the figure is Manes, who in the third century founded the Manichean faith. The fresco is believed to be the first painting of Manes ever found. The Manichean faith, mystically centered on the forces of light and darkness, good and evil, was anathema to Christians, Moslems and Zoroastrians. Manes was crucified as a heretic after an unfortunate debate with Zoroastrian priests. The ruins at Karakhoja reveal a flourishing eighth century Manichean community.

Manichean priest, from Le Coq’s hoard taken from Karakhoja

Since virtually no traces of Manichean religion, art or culture remain elsewhere in the world, the manuscripts, frescoes, hanging cloth paintings and textiles taken by von Le Coq from Karakhoja provide scholars with a rare source for learning about this now-extinct ascetic faith and its mystic artist-founder. Unfortunately, a peasant–mindful of the sin of heresy–dumped the better part of Karakhoja’s Manichean library into the river. Outside the walls of the old city, the Germans were startled to find the remains of a small Nestorian Christian church. The Nestorian sect denied that Christ could be at the same time both human and divine.”

To the later disgust of the Chinese, who didn’t own the region either, Le Coq furnished whole rooms of the Berlin Ethnological Museum, but was trumped somewhat by Auriel Stein who reappeared slightly later at Dunhuang and the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, the site of the original Jade Gate and some five hundred cubic feet of manuscripts. For one hundred and thirty pounds, he bought a pile of documents and shipped them back to the British Museum. It turned out he had collared “the earliest known printed book, an edition of The Diamond Sutra, printed in the year 868..”

The last explorer was “Langdon Warner of Harvard’s Fogg Museum” who returned to the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas to find it defaced by a fugitive unit of White Russian soldiers. The explorer’s photographs were often the only record.

The Chinese closed the area to Western explorers in 1925. By then “works of art and artefacts from Chinese Turkestan’s high Buddhist civilization are spread among 30 institutions in 12 countries throughout the world.” The best work in Berlin was destroyed by bombing. In the year 2000, the British Museum seemed to ignore its riches from the buried cities of the Taklamakan Desert.

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It is hard to imagine now that Google was just a curiosity in 2000, and that Western museums were still to be hammered into seriously considering the claims of theft and plunder that had been made by outraged governments and ethnic groups for generations.

Now the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive (MIDA) is assiduously collecting and placing online high quality images from the caves. Institutions involved in this collaborative effort include “The British Library, the British Museum, the Musée Guimet, the Bodleian Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France”. All in partnership with the Chinese Dunhuang Research Academy.

Lest you jump for joy at the altruism of this, just remember two things: the institutions have realised the best way to defend their ownership is to make the material available.

And you and I – the poor schmucks in the general public – can’t get access. But then, we’d only steal it, wouldn’t we? Which is of course the original argument for the appropriation.

Meanwhile, an equally spiffy website at the slightly differently names International Dunhuang Project seems to have a completely different attitude. We are encouraged to use the images for non-commercial purposes on the web.

There is good material about the project itself from its newsletter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 9:45 pm and is filed under history, intellectual property, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.