PELLIOT TELLS OF CAVE EXCAVATION IN CHINA

The following article was written expressly for the Crimson by professor paul pelliot of the College de France, Visiting lecturer on Chinese Art at the University.

It has been until now almost impossible to conduct any regular excavations in the provinces of China proper, and the great progress made by Chinese archaeology in the last thirty years with the exception of prehistory, is mainly due to work done on the outskirts of China, by the Japanese in Core, a, by the French in Indo-China, by British. German, French, Japanese, and Russian missions in Chinese Turkestan and in Mongolia. The two Koslov missions of 1907 and 1922 have revealed to us the extent of the Hsi-hsia literature, in the late middle ages, today absolutely unknown, and the importance of the relations between Western Asia and the Far East via Upper Mongolia at the beginning of the Christian Era. As to the missions in Chinese Turkestan, they have shown, unexpectedly, that Chinese Turkestan, now inhabited by a Turkish population of Mohammedans, was untill the end of the first millennium A. D. the area of a Buddhist culture, developed by a population speaking Indo-European languages, that is to say, languages of the same stock as almost all the languages of modern Europe. These languages. Tokhanian. Eastern Iranian. Togdian, have not only disappeared many centuries ago, but, with the exception of Togdian, we had not even an intimation that they had ever existed, and all our conceptions of Aslatic history have been greatly changed by the fact that languages akin to ours were once spoken on the Western borders of China. Moreover, the artistic remains discovered or unearthed in Chinese Turkestan and Western china have given us the missing links for the transmission from Bastriana (present northen Afghanistan) to the Far East of motifs and types which combine in new formulae Greek, Iranian, and Indian elements.

Personally, I have led in Wob-Wog a French, archaeological expedition to Chinese Turkestan, which has yielded, I believe, important finds from the double point of view of philology and a archaeology. In the Western part of Chinese Turkestan, at a place which was supposed to be a late Mohammedan shrine, I have found the ruins of a Buddhist temple of about 500 A. D. and collected there quite a number of clay figures, turned to a sort of a terra-cotta when fire was set to the temple and which show unmistakable signs of hellenistic influence. From another temple of the eighth century come many Sanskrit and Tokharian manuscripts, and also figures carved in wood, including the oldest woodblock extant, cut before 800 A. D., for printing an image of Buddha.

But another surprise awaited me in Tun-huang. In the course of my travels through Chinese Turkestan. I had heard reports about a great find of manuscripts which had been made a few years earlier in one of the caves. When I was at Noumchi, the provincial capital, I had even received one of these manscripts, a Buddhist scroll of the eighth century, from Duke Lan, a cousin of the Chinese Emperor, against whom I had fought at the time of the siege of the Peking Legation in 1900, but who had since become my friend. Of course I was eager to know more about the find. When I reached Tun-Huang, I was first somewhat disappointed to hear that my friend Sir Aurel Stein, head of the British expedition, had already been in Tun-huang ahead of me and had taken away loads of the precious documents. But my disillusion did not last long. When I entered the cave containing the manuscripts. I saw that most of them were still there. Of the 15000 scrolls, documents, paintings, Sir Aurel Stein had only been able to acquire about one fourth, and, being an Indian and not a Chinese scholar, had had to be content with buying a certain number of bundles without making an examination of the rest. I then squatted in the cave and in the course of two weeks, all the manuscripts passed through my hands, about one thousand a day. Finally, I bought all of them which were of some interest, in Chinese in Sanskrit, in Tibetan, in Logdian, in Eastern Iranian, most of them Buddhistic, but some also Nestrian, Manichaean, even a Hebrew book of prayers, and also the earliest extant manuscripts of the Chineses classic and of some other Chinese works of a historical or literary character, all of them ranging from the fifth to the tenth century of our era. As to the origin of the collection, I formed then a theory which has stood the test of time. In about 1085, a foreign invasion from the East frightened the monks who piled up in that cave all their manuscripts and paintings, and walled up the entrance. They must have been killed or scattered, and the memory of the hoard died out. It was rediscovered by chance in 1900, but luck had it that in the course of the next few years no Chinese scholar happened to pass through Tun-Huang, and thus the largest collection of ancient manuscripts found in modern times came to the hands of Sir Aurel Stein and myself. When I reached Peking, I gave notice to the Chinese authorities of what I had left on the spot. A mission was sent and brought of Peking the rest of the manuscripts; a list of these was then published and I have been glad to see that, in spite of the haste with which I had proceeded, there was only one important text, a Manichaean treatise in Chinese, which had escaped my attention.

Besides the manuscripts, Sir Aurel Stein and myself have brought back from that same cave hundreds of paintings on silk, on hemp, and on paper, embroideries, early book bindings, printed books, and images, most of them of local make, but some also of high artistic value and which had been made at the capital or in some great centers. The prints are the earliest prints in existence and the paintings almost the only Chinese paintings prior to the eleventh century and about the date of which there cannot be any doubt