Central Asian Manuscripts ‘Are Not Worth Much To Us’: The Thousand-Buddha Caves in Early Twentieth-Century China

As word filtered up through the local yamens in xinjiang 新 疆 in the summer of 1901 that a “casual foreign traveler” (youlizhe 游歷者) had unearthed “wooden tablets, fragments of leather plaitings ... [and] quite a bit of tattered paper with tracings of writing visible,” the Chinese-educated officials serving on the Qing 清 frontier apparently assumed that such writings would be in their own language. How else to account for the seemingly naive bureaucratic request forwarded to Pan Zhen 潘震 (Stein’s “Pan Darin”), district magistrate of Khotan, that he “transcribe” an additional file copy of several 2,000-year-old Sanskrit documents that archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein had produced for his inspection? The awkward position in which Pan found himself as he carefully crafted his May 17, 1901 reply is evident. “Insofar as I cannot make out the style of calligraphy used in this script,” he admitted sheepishly, “any attempt to trace a copy by hand would ultimately prove futile.”1 What Pan did not wish to admit openly was that the “style of calligraphy” in question was in fact an entirely different language, one that very few in the employ of the Qing government could accurately identify, much less “copy by hand.” Pan Zhen’s inability to make sense of the Sanskrit documents unearthed by Stein was indicative of a much larger cultural bias among the Sino-Manchu-Mongolian ruling class in northwestern China. Ye Changchi 業昌熾, the provincial education commissioner for Gansu 甘肅 province from 1902 to 1906, maintained copious diary entries regarding the specific contents of Chinese-language documents and steles that had begun to trickle out of Dunhuang’s 敦煌 Thousand-Buddha Caves (qianfodong 千佛洞) during his tenure in Gansu. In his entry for September 28, 1904, however, Ye made only a terse remark regarding the receipt of a gift of “31 leaves of a manuscript sutra ... all in Sanskrit,” whose strange script he derisively characterized as a “flurry of raindrops in a windy storm, with letters puny as flies.” In December 1909, however, three years after retiring to his home in Zhejiang 浙江 province, Ye deeply mourned reports that the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot had carted off a great many Chinese “Tang-Song manuscripts and paintings” from the Dunhuang cave library.2 The linguistic preferences of Western and Chinese scholars were also evident within the northwestern manuscript forgery business. Peddlers of manuscripts (both real and forged) living in China proper shrewdly perceived that Chinese-educated officials, antiquarians, and scholars would only open their purses for documents penned in Chinese. Chen Jikan 陳季侃, a government official first stationed in Gansu in 1917, recalled that by the time he arrived in Dunhuang it had “already become quite difficult to purchase the best of the Tang manuscripts. And if they were inscribed with a year or were written during the time of the Six Dynasties [222–589, the dates of the earliest manuscripts], the price was extraordinarily high.” By 1925 a Chinese scholar passing through Dunhuang found that, “despite the lackluster selection, the asking price for each manuscript was exceedingly high, with the longer ones selling for even more.” By contrast, the Sanskrit manuscripts “sold quite poorly, and thus were extremely cheap.” What sort of person would prove most likely to exchange large sums of silver for a short length of Chinese-scripted hemp, silk, or paper? Zhao Weixi 趙惟熙, a Qing official traveling through Gansu and xinjiang on the eve of the 1911 revolution, provides a classic character profile of an interested buyer of Chinese-language Dunhuang manuscripts. Resting his weary limbs at a wayside inn near Gansu’s Jiayu Pass 嘉峪 關, Zhao prepared himself for his imminent entry into Chinese Turkestan by penning a lengthy colophon on the back side of a Dunhuang Mahā-parinirvāna sutra that he had obtained from former garrison commander Chai Hongshan 柴洪山. “The paper and ink appear to be brand new, while the characters are vibrant and smooth, tender yet muscular,” Zhao observed. Noting similarities with the style of several famous Tang calligraphers, Zhao remarked that “the structure is tight and orderly. Bursting with latent vitality, in form and appearance the characters succeed in harmonizing elegance and grace with a firm, robust bearing.” Such a feat, Zhao believed, “can only flow from the brush of an early Tang genius.” After tabulating each and every one of the sutra’s 7,788 characters individually, Zhao triumphantly declared that “every character is worth a pearl, and if placed in a hu-vessel these pearls would burst out over the side.” Zhao’s afficionado admiration for the abstruse minutiae of the Chinese calligraphic art—more than one-third of the entire colophon is taken up with such purple prose—was not atypical. When the famous calligrapher Wang Shubo 王樹柏 gazed for the first time upon the mesmerizing strokes of the lishu-script 隸書 on a manuscript brought from Turpan in 1914, he dreamily described the sight as “an elegant flow interspersed with rich splashes of recklessly bold ink dashes that achieve intensity through a refined grace. The entire page,” Wang continued breathlessly, “is overcome with a mesmerizing beauty. No one has seen such a thing