Hamilton and Wright visit the Dunhuang Library Cave and Xi’an in China
Under the auspices of the South African Archaeological Society, NRF Research Chair Carolyn Hamilton and APC Research Associate John Wright visited historical sites in China in early May.
Their first stop was at Dunhuang in north- west China. It is the site of the famous “library cave” that contained the largest deposit of documents and artifacts discovered along the Old Silk Road, amongst other things some 40 000 documents including the world’s earliest printed book, the Diamond Sutra (868 CE).
Situated at what was historically the western end of the Chinese part of the Old Silk Road, Dunhuang was a key oasis in the Gobi for travellers, an important Chinese military outpost, and a significant agricultural settlement throughout the first millennium. It was also a Buddhist pilgrimage center. Near the modern town of Dunhuang is a series of 492 caves, of which the library cave is one. Known as the Mogao grottoes, the caves are carved out of soft gravel conglomerate in a cliff and house Buddhist shrines, adorned with thousands of wall paintings, an extraordinary visual archive in its own right.
According to the historian Valerie Hansen (2012), the library cave, originally a memorial to a monk, came in the course of the tenth century to be used by the monks as a manuscript storeroom. A monk named Daozhen (active 934-87), the first collector, noted down his resolve to go through “the cartons and storehouses of all the families, seeking after old and decayed scriptural texts”. After he died, other monk-librarians carried on collecting. The earliest text found in the cave dates to 405 CE, the latest to 1002 CE, when the cave was sealed up. It remained hidden until its rediscovery in 1900. As in Timbuctu, dry desert conditions offered ideal preservatory conditions for documents and other materials used for writing, including wood, silk and leather. Today, relatively few of the manuscripts remain in China. The bulk, inveigled out of the custodians by often unscrupulous collectors, are to be found in Britain, France and Russia.
Hansen notes that the original arrangement of the documents in the library cave was irretrievably destroyed in the early twentieth century when the documents were hastily snapped up by the European collectors. Some clues remain that give indications of the way in which the documents were originally ordered. The monks made use of a primer, The Thousand Character Classic, consisting of one thousand different Chinese characters, “a kind of Chinese alphabet”. The librarians assigned a single character to each Buddhist text and then grouped many of the Chinese language scrolls into what the early collector Aurel Stein called “regular library bundles”. Originally, the bundles had outside wrappers, but because none of the people who handled them in the early twentieth century grasped their significance, only a few survive.
While the bulk of the documents are religious texts, many -some of these copied on the backs of the religious texts - were not intended to survive, and were written by people from a wide swathe of society who were active in the extraordinary transmission of ideas, technologies and goods. Many other items were included in the cave: paintings, scraps of paintings, and scrap paper with all sorts of text, in Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Uighur, Khotanese, and even Hebrew, and concerning a variety of religions other than Buddhism. As Hansen notes, it is the librarians’ eclecticism that makes cave 17 such a remarkable repository.
The Dunhuang archive, like that of Timbuctu, presents an opportunity for APC researchers to think about archive outside of and beyond inherited European notions of archive and the narrow European colonizer/colonized African binary. The visit was suggestive of a number of areas of potential intersections and comparisons with APC research concerns, including, among others, the theorization of cross-media archives, the history and ethnography of alternative archival protocols and ordering systems, a global history of the archival imperative in religions and of the destruction of archives in the course of religious struggles and supercessions, the role of trade in generating archives, a global genealogy of the notion of tribes as the uncivilized other without archives, and the challenges of reconvening conceptually, if not physically, dispersed, alienated and disaggregated archival assemblages.
Dunhuang Cave Complex. Photo: Carolyn Hamilton
The APC researchers also visited the city of Xi’an, known previously as Chang’an when it was the first capital of imperial China and a starting point of the Silk Road trade. It was in Xi'an that the famed Terracotta Warriors were discovered in 1974. Made after 220 BCE, the Warriors were commissioned by Emperor Qin Shi Huang, ostensibly to accompany him in the afterlife. Most striking to the APC researchers, with the Rhodes statue removal fresh in their minds, was the deliberateness with which many of the Warriors has been decapitated in a peasant rebellion after the death of the emperor in 210 BCE.
Although much is made of the conditions of secrecy under which the Warriors were constructed, notably the killing of certain of the builders in order to secure their silence, the deliberate decapitations by the peasants attest to the extent to which the existence of the Warriors and other statues was in fact an open secret, a physically instantiated statement of imperial power that the peasants then toppled.
Indeed, throughout the trip, the researchers were confronted with evidence of the destruction of the symbols of one power by those that succeeded them and subsequent restorations in still later time. With the spread into Central Asia of Islam that began in the 8th century, many Buddhist statues and paintings were damaged and destroyed, a process that was repeated in the twentieth century in the Cultural Revolution. In contemporary China, however, there is a effort to conserve and foster cultural heritage and to restore these statues, undertaken both by Buddhists and by the state. The presentation of heritage by the state today actively promotes China as having a long history of immense developmental projects (the Great Wall being a case in point) as well as having made a hugely significant contribution to world civilization. In the first instance this is directed at Chinese citizens, who visit sites across the country in astonishing numbers, and secondarily at foreign visitors, very few of whom were encountered by the APC researchers.
Undertaken under the auspices of the South African Archaeological Society, the trip followed a densely packed itinerary that included visits to a host of other historical sites in western China, almost all raising interesting points about the making and shaping over time of archives, in one or another form, many of which will surely feature in future aspects of APC research. A further area of comparative work that is likely to be of interest to the APC concerns China’s pre- documentary past and its capture after the fact, in early documents, often by a newly established imperial power.
Also fascinating was what museum displays revealed about the ways in which the past is presented in contemporary China. A first point relates to the stylization of language in museum captions (at least as revealed in English-language versions), which are written in stilted, almost formulaic terms to underscore the continuing magnificence of Chinese civilization. A second point relates to the periodization of the past, which is everywhere fitted into the chronology of the successive imperial dynasties, from the Xia (c.2070-1600 BCE) to the Qing (1616-1911 CE). A third point relates to the widespread classification of peoples and cultures in the past into one or other of “Four Great Civilizations: Chinese, Islamic, Graeco-Roman (European), and African”.
Hamilton and Wright met up in Lanzhou with former APC researcher, Megan Greenwood, who has worked in China since leaving the APC two years ago, and who is currently studying Mandarin full time. In addition to the pleasures of reunion, the meeting laid the groundwork for initial APC research in relation to the Chinese material, with Greenwood agreeing to pursue an initial line of research enquiry suggested by the visit.