The sight the small room disclosed was one to make my eyes open; heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly 10 feet and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet - an unparalleled archaeological scoop....
Aurel Stein (1907)
Roughly 25 km southeast of Dunhuang, a strategic oasis along the Silk Road from the 4th-14th centuries CE, lies a system of caves. For over a thousand years, countless pilgrims, monks and scholars who passed these caves settled nearby to meditate and translate sutras. Many of the caves were turned into temples, and murals were painted on the caves' walls to assist devotional contemplation. Numerous donors paid for these murals, as it was believed that such a meritorious act would help the donor enter Paradise after death.
As centuries passed, the murals painted within the caves changed to reflect the political and religious fortunes of those occupying the caves. Some murals began to take on a more narrative function, often illustrating well-known stories from the life of the Buddha. Such illustration reached its zenith during the Tang Dynasty.
As sea routes replaced the Silk Road as a means of transnational transportation for merchants, this system of caves gradually fell into disuse. By the 14th century, all the caves had been sealed and abandoned.
And there they lay, for almost 600 years....
In 1900, a wandering Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu re-discovered the caves by accident. Fortunately for the rest of our story, this wandering monk recognized he had found something significant. The International Dunhuang Project tells us what happened next:
[Wang Yuanlu] become an unofficial guardian of the caves and went on fundraising tours to raise money [for restoration]. In 1900, while clearing sand from [a cave], his workmen accidentally discovered a hidden door which, when opened, led into a small cave filled with ancient documents and paintings dating from the fourth to eleventh centuries....
The full significance of [this] cave's contents was not immediately recognised in China after its discovery. Wang went to the county town to report the discovery to [the] local county magistrate..., taking two manuscripts with him as proof. The official was not particularly learned and regarded these two yellow manuscripts as useless old paper. Three years later, a new county magistrate came to Dunhuang.... Wang Yuanlu hoped [the new magistrate] would be more interested in the preservation of the ... cave's content but, after visiting the cave, the new magistrate simply took away a few manuscripts and told Wang Yuanlu to guard the cave, without making any further arrangements. The monk did not give up however. He took two crates of manuscripts to Suzhou.... The magistrate there was a scholar but he did not ascribe any great value to the manuscripts shown to him by Wang....
Hmmm ... seems to be a pattern. But a British archaeologist would soon disrupt it.
Born in Hungary in 1862, Aurel Stein had been fascinated as a child by the adventures of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. He later studied Persian and Sanskrit, eventually becoming an Indo-Iranian scholar while he pursued his dream of exploring ancient trade routes. He was especially interested in the meeting of cultures — Iranian, Indian, Turkic, and Chinese — along the Southern Silk Road.
Stein's passion had been heightened by reading the works of the great Swedish explorer Sven Hendin, and thus it was that in 1900 he undertook the first of what eventually would be four major archaeological expeditions to Central Asia (1900, 1906-8, 1913–16 and 1930). It was on his second expedition that he encountered the now-settled Wang Yuanlu.
For the most trifling of sums, Stein acquired from Wang YuanLu some two dozen crates of manuscripts, together with four cases of relics and paintings. Included in this haul was what turned out to be the world's earliest known (datable) printed text, the so-called Diamond Sutra (868 CE):
Although the Dunhuang manuscripts, paintings and relics were far and away the most (in)famous of Stein's finds, his four archaeological expeditions uncovered much more besides: relics from Dandan Oilik, a Silk Road oasis which had been discovered, lost, then re-discovered numerous times due to shifting desert sands; manuscripts in the previously lost Tocharian languages of the Tarim Basin at Marin; and a huge number of Chinese, Tibetan and Tangut manuscripts, Prakrit wooden tablets, and documents in Khotanese, Uyghur, Sogdian and Eastern Turkic which now form a large part of the British Museum's collections in Central Asia. The murals from Dunhunag, however, remain among the best-known of all his finds:
Stein, however, was not the only archaeologist to benefit from his encounter with Wang Yuanlu. The French actually made off with more valuable documents, thanks to the efforts of Paul Pelliot, who was much more thorough about documenting the caves and their contents. It is largely thanks to Pelliot that the Chinese government finally recognized the importance of Wang Yuanlu's re-discovery. Unfortunately, by the time the Chinese government roused itself to action, most of this patrimony had been disbursed to museums around the world.
Stein wrote a number of volumes about his expeditions, and First Editions of all of these are quite rare and expensive in anything approaching Fine condition. Fortunately, several of these have been reprinted, and all of the major texts associated with the finds at these caves and elsewhere along the Silk Road have now been digitized for scholarly use by the Digital Silk Road Project (from whence came the images below)....
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