I
The paintings and drawings here reproduced are a selection from the
mass of precious material discovered by Sir Aurel Stein, and brought
away by him from ‘The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’ at Tun-huang, on
the extreme western frontier of China. The romantic circumstances of
the discovery have been fully described by Sir Aurel in the second
volume of his _Ruins of Desert Cathay_; and to those pages the reader
is referred. But it may be well to recall briefly the main facts of the
narrative.
In March 1907 Sir Aurel Stein’s expedition, which had left Kashmir in
April of the preceding year, arrived at Tun-huang. From Kāshgar the
travellers had proceeded to Yārkand; thence to Khotan, where Sir Aurel
on his previous journey in 1900–1 had disinterred such interesting
remains of the ancient civilization once flourishing in that region;
thence eastward along the southern skirts of the great desert,
exploring various sites by the way with rich results, till at Tun-huang
they found themselves at last within the western border of the Chinese
province of Kan-su.
Tun-huang is a square-walled town in a prosperous oasis of the
desert. Sir Aurel Stein had been attracted thither by the knowledge
that near the oasis were a number of sacred grottos known as ‘The
Caves of the Thousand Buddhas’, filled with ancient Buddhist frescoes
and sculptures.[1] But after arriving at Tun-huang, he also heard,
through a Muhammadan trader, rumours of something still more exciting
to the archaeologist—a hidden deposit of manuscripts which had been
accidentally discovered a few years previously in one of the caves.
In a barren valley to the south-east of the town, above a narrow
strip of irrigated soil, with rows of elms and poplars, there is a
cliff of conglomerate rock, which is honeycombed with hundreds of
cavities. These have been hollowed out to serve as Buddhist shrines,
still frequented by pious worshippers; and the walls of the cellas are
covered with old frescoes.
It was in one of the larger shrines that the deposit of manuscripts
had been discovered by the Taoist monk in charge of certain grottos.
The monk had collected money from the faithful, and had undertaken to
restore this particular shrine to its former splendour; a laborious
work, since the drifting of the sand and falls of crumbling rock had
here, as in many other cases, blocked the entrance of the cave, and
the sand and debris had to be cleared away before the actual work of
the restorer could begin. While the men engaged on this labour were
at work, they had noticed a crack in the frescoed wall of the passage
between temple and antechapel. An opening was found; and this led to
a recess hollowed out of the rock behind the stuccoed wall. The room
thus disclosed proved to be completely filled with rolls of manuscript.
Specimens had been sent to the Viceroy of the Province, but no steps
had been taken to remove them; and in fact when Sir Aurel Stein first
arrived at the Caves he found that the deposit was carefully locked
away behind a wooden door; and when, after leaving Tun-huang for a
month’s journey of exploration, he returned in May, a brick wall had
been added to protect the hidden treasure.
The reader must go to _Ruins of Desert Cathay_ for the full account
of the stages by which the Taoist priest who guarded the shrines was
induced first to show some specimens, and finally to let Sir Aurel
carry off a goodly hoard of the manuscripts and most of the pictorial
remains.
The cave had been said to contain only MSS.; and bundles of MSS. were
there in immense quantities; but on opening one of the bundles Sir
Aurel was delighted to find that it contained paintings on silk. The
paintings were all, or nearly all, crumpled up. It seems as if they had
been hurriedly thrust away in the vault on some sudden alarm, probably
of a barbarian raid. And, in fact, on one of the pictures is a votive
inscription praying to Kuan-yin for protection against the Tartars and
the Tibetans. The position of Tun-huang on the westernmost frontier of
China, at the intersection of the great trade-route across Asia, from
east to west, with the high road between Mongolia in the north and
Tibet in the south, naturally exposed it to incursions and invasions.
Internal evidence of dated documents seems to show that the treasure,
or at any rate the great bulk of it, was hidden away soon after the
close of the tenth century A.D.
To complete the story, we must add that M. Pelliot, the distinguished
savant and traveller, paid a visit a year later to the Caves and
was allowed to carry off what remained of the paintings and a large
selection from the hoard of manuscripts. These are now in the
Bibliothèque Nationale and in the Louvre. What was left of Chinese
manuscripts was subsequently transmitted by official order to Peking;
much being ‘lost’ on the way.
Not till the paintings were brought to London could any real
examination of them be made. Each packet had to be carefully opened,
and the brittle, dusty silk, sometimes in a hundred fragments, opened
out, cleaned, and, where necessary, pieced together. This was done
at the British Museum; and it was a labour of years for the staff of
mounters attached to the Print Room.
The paintings were carefully cleaned, and the colours were found in
most cases to have lost little of their pristine depth and brightness;
though where a certain verdigris green was used, it has tended to eat
away the silk on which it was laid, a whole figure in some cases having
thus disappeared and left only its surrounding outline. Any attempt at
restoration or retouching has been scrupulously avoided; but when a
painting which is in fragments has been laid down on silk of a neutral
tone, and mounted, the eye is easily carried over the gaps, and the
main design reappears. Several of the paintings still retain their
original borders, usually of a dull mulberry-purple silk. The small
banners, of which a great quantity were found, had all originally a
pediment-shaped head-piece, and long silk streamers with a wooden
weight at the bottom to steady the banner as it hung. These banners are
mostly painted on both sides.
The delicate work of mounting and cleaning was done by Mr. S. W.
Littlejohn, Chief Mounter in the Department of Prints and Drawings,
assisted in later stages by Mr. Y. Urushibara, a Japanese artist and
craftsman. Meanwhile the large embroidery picture (Pl. XXXIV) had
been skilfully stitched on to a new backing of canvas by Miss E. A.
Winter of the Royal School of Art Needlework. A selection of the most
important pictures, drawings, and woodcuts formed part of an exhibition
of treasures of all sorts brought back by Sir Aurel Stein from his
second expedition and set out in the long lower gallery of the new wing
of the British Museum opened by H.M. the King in May 1914. The outbreak
of the War so soon after, and the subsequent closing of the Museum,
unfortunately prevented the exhibition from becoming adequately known
to the public. In 1917 Mr. Littlejohn, who had received a commission in
the R.G.A., was killed in action. During his last months at the Museum
he had been preparing a note on the origin of the system of mounting
pictures as _kakemono_, to use the convenient Japanese term. Those
familiar with Japanese pictures know that _kakemono_ are paintings
mounted on silk, with borders of brocade above and below the design,
and with two narrow strips of silk hanging down from above. These have
been explained as intended to keep away birds, or evil spirits; but
neither theory has ever seemed satisfactory; and in the streamers of
the Tun-huang banners, as Mr. Littlejohn perceived, was a much more
plausible explanation of their origin. They are a survival. And other
details in the Japanese (originally Chinese) system of mounting could
be explained, he suggested, by a reference to this forgotten origin.