Kilns excavated in Hebei

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A new archaeological site has been discovered in Hebei Province. Experts discovered a porcelain workshop with six kilns and a large area of buried fragments. Judging from its size and style, the site could date back to before the Sui or Tang Dynasty.

Waking up from a long thousand-year sleep, the porcelain has been unearthed from its burial just beside where it was made. In a scatter of kilns, the edges of these small windows have been burned a dark blue color. It was through the windows that raw wares were sent into the kiln, to set their shape and color. They were then packed on their thousand-mile journey to South Asia and even farther across the globe to Europe. Experts say the multi-window kiln is quite rare.

A new archaeological site has been discovered in Hebei Province. Experts discovered a porcelain workshop with six kilns and a large area of buried fragments.

Wang Huimin, Cultural Relics Researcher, said, "Firewood and raw wares were transported in and out through the windows which face different directions. One person could handle two or three at a time. It was quite convenient."

Among the fragments excavated from beside the kilns, tri-colored pottery has been found. This provides the evidence tracing the kilns to the time around the Sui or Tang Dynasty.

A new archaeological site has been discovered in Hebei Province. Experts discovered a porcelain workshop with six kilns and a large area of buried fragments.

Wang Huimin said, "This piece of a bowl comes from the Sui Dynasty. It's thicker as it gets deeper. The glaze and the shape, as well as the tails, all indicate its age. Experts have long been haunted by the questions of: What was a kiln like before the Sui Dynasty? Were pottery and porcelain made together or separately? This site might provide the answers to these questions. "

The kilns were accidentally discovered by a new construction project at the site. While further study is ongoing, experts say the discovery has great significance for the history of porcelain-making in China.

A new archaeological site has been discovered in Hebei Province. Experts discovered a porcelain workshop with six kilns and a large area of buried fragments.

A new archaeological site has been discovered in Hebei Province. Experts discovered a porcelain workshop with six kilns and a large area of buried fragments. Source: CNTV.com

Xuanzang and the "Records of the Western Regions"

Abstracts:

Timothy H. Barrett, “The Xiyu-ji and Chinese Historiography”

Although a considerable quantity of Buddhist and non-Buddhist literature survives from the first millennium of the Common Era describing the world as the Chinese knew it, the Xiyu ji is generally regarded as representing the apogee of detailed Chinese knowledge of other parts of the world during this period.  Certainly it provides a clear picture of China as but one of a number of civilisations which remained part of the heritage of Chinese knowledge of the wider world for as long as it was read or its influence was indirectly felt.  Yet Xuanzang, for all his travels, did not arrive at his own appreciation of China’s place in the world; rather, he drew on earlier traditions of knowledge.  These require examination.  Equally, there is no reason to assume that once the Xiyu jiitself no longer represented current knowledge its picture of the world receded entirely in importance.  No matter how sharply China turned inwards, the broader conception of the inhabited world captured in its pages still survived in some unremarked but quite important contexts.

Max Deeg, “The ‘Record of the Western Regions’ Between Chinese Text and Western Historical Imagination”

The Xiyu-ji (‘Record of the Western Regions’) has been used, since its first translation into a Western language through the French sinologist Stanislas Julien, as a source for the study of Buddhist and history in general of Central Asia and India in a assumedly positivist-objective way without really questioning the hermeneutical approach to the text in its Chinese historical context. This has led, paradoxically, to a “romanticized” view of the text as the personal account of a Chinese Buddhist monk of his travels through Central Asia and India which is historically correct and precise in its description which was, however, influenced by a confusion with another text, the Xuanzang-biography (Ciensi-sanzang-fashi-zhuan). The paper will present some examples where this confusion has resulted in an imagined Western historical reality which does not take into account the intentionality of the original text of the Xiyu-ji.

Antonello Palumbo, “Between religious disputation and imperial  mentorship: Xuanzang as Buddhist partisan and ideologist”

Xuanzang's astonishing life is usually labelled under two main rubrics: the travelling monk, author of the Xiyu ji and first-hand knower of Indian and Central Asian Buddhism; and the consummate scholar, impeccable translator of scores of Sanskrit texts and expert of Yogācāra doctrine. Far less studied is Xuanzang's involvement in court politics and in the ideological argument of his days, which saw him as the single most authoritative spokesman for the elite Buddhist clergy between 645 and 664. This paper will offer a preliminary exploration of this intriguing facet of Xuanzang's life, focusing on his role in the Buddhist-Taoist polemic and his exchanges with the throne, as recorded especially in the Si shamen Xuanzang shangbiao ji.

Tokio Takata, “Old Japanese Manuscript Copies of the Da Tang Xiyu ji and Their Value”

A considerable number of manuscript copies of the Da Tang Xiyuji have been transmitted until now in Japan. They were hand-copied by Japanese Buddhist monks in the Heian period (794-1185) and theKamakura period (1185-1333). The oldest one even dates back to 785 AD ( 4^th year of Enryaku延暦), much older than Dunhuang manuscript fragments. The text of these Japanese manuscript copies differ in many cases from the text extant in the printed editions of the Chinese Tripitakas, and considered to represent an earlier version of the work, i.e. the text of the Tang period. They are extremely important for establishing a critical edition of the Da Tang Xiyuji. The paper attempts to shed light on the scope and nature of the emendation undertaken in the Tang court by collating all the seven ancient Japanese manuscripts available to us now, the Dunhuang fragments, and the versions in the Tripitakas.

Giovanni Verardi, “Xuanzang’s Account as Testimony of the Difficulties Faced by Buddhism in the Second Half of the Sixth and at the Beginning of the Seventh Century”

The dismal state of Buddhism in many regions of India as reflected in the Xiyuji has been the object of various evaluations, although we can say that it has been mostly attributed to a long process of decay coupled with external factors such as the invasion of the Hūṇas. But it is more appropriate to single out two periods of crisis, the first of which corresponds to the establishment of the Gupta dynasty and the acceleration of the process of Brahmanical colonization of a large part of the Indian fertile lands and the imposition of varṇāśramadharma (fourth and early fifth century).

As to the second period of crisis, it was due to the formation, in the sixth century, of regional states modelled on the Gupta state and politics in the Deccan and in Bengal, and to the instrumental use by the Brahmans of the foreign invaders, who were directed, as for instance in Gandhāra, against the representatives of the religion of Dharma. The Xiyuji mirrors this second period of crisis, although it was conceived when Harṣavardhana, for about half a century, succeeded in creating a powerful bulwark against Brahmanical revivalism.

Dorothy Wong, “Xuanzang as an Agent of Artistic Transmission”

The accomplishments of Xuanzang are multifaceted. This paper examines the role this celebrated pilgrim-monk played in the transmission of Buddhist art from India to China, and the subsequent impact he had on East Asian Buddhist art. From the icons he brought back to China to his own personal devotional focus and the Buddhist texts that he translated, he directly and indirectly contributed to the dissemination of a new Indian Buddhist art style as well as generated interests in new subjects. Some of the topics investigated in this paper include the Buddha type associated with Bodhigaya (with right hand in earth-touching gesture), renewed interests in devotion to Maitreya and Avalokiteśvara, the practice of dedicating numerous stamped clay tablets, and also Xuanzang’s request of the building of a stūpa in Indian style.

Hellenistic Sculpture

• Hellenistic Sculpture
• by Guy Dickens
• 
  
• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Forgotten Books (18 May 2012)
• Language English
• ISBN-10: 144003415X
• 
  

As an undergraduate Guy Dickins gave up his intention of entering the Indian Civil Service in order to devote himself to the study of Classical Archaeology, an allegiance from which he never swerved. In 1904 he went as Craven Fellow to the British School of Athens and for five years lived mostly in Greece, studying and exploring. In 1909 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of St.John's College and Lecturer in Ancient History. In 1914 he was appointed University Lecturer in Classical Archaeology; but before he could take up the duties of the post the great call came and he obeyed it at once. A most efficient and able company commander, he served in the King's Royal Rifle Corps. In July 1916 he died of wounds received in the battle of the Somme. Before the war Dickins had been occupied in tasks of research and in preparation for a teaching career. He had published several papers and a volume of the catalogue of the Acropolis Museum. He had visited most of the museums of Europe and brought back a large collection of photographs which his widow has presented to the Ashmolean Museum.

The Bamiyan Buddhas will not be rebuilt

The Bamiyan Buddhas will not be rebuilt, says Unesco. The architect Andrea Bruno proposes a scheme that focuses reverently on their absence

By Anna Somers Cocks. Conservation, Issue 236, June 2012
Published online: 31 May 2012

The empty niche of the Great Buddha in 2010. “The void is the true sculpture,” says Andrea Bruno (inset), Afghanistan’s most seasoned conservation architect

When Andrea Bruno, an architectural consultant to Unesco for the past 40 years, went back to the Bamiyan Buddhas, blown up in March 2001 by the Taliban, he immediately scrapped all ideas he might have had about some sort of replacement. “The void is the true sculpture,” he says. “It stands disembodied witness to the will, thoughts and spiritual tensions of men long gone. The immanent presence of the niche, even without its sculpture, represents a victory for the monument and a defeat for those who tried to obliterate its memory with dynamite.”

See also:

• Tenth anniversary of Taliban’s destruction of ancient buddhas

Two years after the destruction, the Japanese National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, working through Unesco and the Afghan authorities, began putting money into clearing up the site and consolidating the surfaces of the niches. The aim at this point was to recreate the Buddhas, an immensely ambitious project since the larger of the two was taller than the Tower of Pisa. 

But there were doubts from the first whether this was the right approach. There have been other proposals, from laser projections of Buddhas onto the cliff face—unrealistic in a part of the world that barely has electricity—to a plan from the University of Aachen to attach the remaining fragments to the niche wall on a metal frame—unsatisfactory because hardly any of the stone carving remains intact, the Buddhas having been hewn all in one piece out of the living rock, which was therefore reduced to rubble by the explosions. 

What is more, Andrea Bruno, who knows the country intimately, having led the conservation of the fort at Herat and the minaret of Jam over many years, believes that such solutions do not take the sensibilities of the Afghans into account. Rebuilding the Buddhas would inevitably be politically loaded, he says, besides causing religious offence. “Here the Muslims strictly oppose images; to recreate the Buddhas would be an insult even to non-Taliban Afghans. We must show good manners,” he says. In fact, after ten years, the Unesco meeting on Bamiyan held in Tokyo in December 2011 announced finally that the Great Buddha would not be recreated, and the smaller Buddha was unlikely to be.

Bruno has a proposal, however, which he describes as ecumenical, and which, above all, aims to enhance the emotional and aesthetic experience of viewing the empty niche. His idea is to create an underground viewing space at the foot of the Great Buddha. He calls this a sanctuary, alluding to the numerous sanctuaries within the cliff. For the two Buddhas were part of a complex extending over a kilometre of cliff-face, honeycombed by passages connecting hundreds of decorated caves once inhabited by Buddhist monks, and now lived in by the poorest of the local villagers. Stairs leading up and then down into the sanctuary would enhance the feeling of entering a concealed sacred space, like a Bronze Age barrow. At the end of the chamber, there would be a small replica of the Great Buddha, with light streaming in on it from a circular opening above, through which the visitor’s gaze would be focused on the grandeur of the void, in the same way as James Turrell frames the sky and makes you see it with particular intensity.

The other part of the visit would take you into the tunnels inside the cliff, up to a circular aperture above where the head of the Buddha used to be. Pilgrims travelling along the Silk Route used to come here and look out over the Bamiyan Valley, so Bruno has designed a small viewing platform, which would be completely dismountable. He emphasises that nothing in his design would be environmentally or visually intrusive, and could all be built with local skills in a matter of months rather than years. 

The local people are Hazaras, Shia Muslims who were persecuted by the Taliban, and while enjoying relative peace at present, they have seen their already low standard of living reduced further by the loss of the Buddhas, which used to bring them travellers. They had no hand in their destruction and would like to have something to offer tourists when travel becomes possible again. 

Bruno’s sanctuary would be the centrepiece of a much broader programme, announced at the last Unesco meeting on the subject, in December 2011 in Tokyo, which includes de-mining, archaeological excavations, conservation of the cave sanctuaries and their wall decorations, instructing the population on the importance of archaeological remains, and creating a Museum for Peace and a museum for the few fragments of carved stone that survived the dynamiting. Bruno sees all this as the very least the developed world can do to make up for the cultural damage it has done to the Afghans, from broadcasting rubbishy, consumerist TV channels into their homes to having failed to give them alternatives to bad modernist architecture. He estimates that his sanctuary project could be built for under €400,000 and would be a considerable boost to local morale as well as homage to the majesty of the figures that presided over the valley for one and a half millennia. 

As for the decision not to recreate the Buddhas, it can be seen as the wheel of history turning full circle. In the first century AD, it was this part of the world, ancient Gandhara, that with its Hellenistic sculptural tradition first gave Buddha his physical form. Until then, Buddha had been represented by his absence—an empty throne or a footprint—and now in Bamiyan he is present once again in an empty niche.

Victor Mair, the Indiana Jones of China

On POPUP Chinese a discussion with Victor Mair, available on Podcast

To listen to this podcast: click below:

After his controversial involvement with the Tarim mummy excavations in Western Xinjiang, Victor Mair might just be the closest thing Sinology has to Indiana Jones, assuming the fictional Spielberg character was a renowned linguist, translator and popular blogger in addition to his standing as a historian/archeologist. So it can be no surprise that we're delighted to be joined by Victor today for a discussion that delves from the origins of well-known Buddhist texts to digressions on ancient migration patterns, and even a bit of myth-clearing on Chinese romanization.

In addition to Victor Mair, joining Sinica hosts Kaiser Kuo and Jeremy Goldkorn for one of the most wide-ranging shows we've done to date is David Moser, a close Sinica friend and Director of the CET immersion program in Beijing. Everyone is very much on their game, and this is a great show for anyone with an interest in Chinese history.

New facsimile of Buddhist sutra unveiled

A new Indian facsimile edition of the Gilgit Lotus Sutra – an important document of Mahayana Buddhism – written in Sanskrit has brought the last teachings of Gautama Buddha before his death to researchers and lay people. Known as the Saddharma Pundarika Sutra – or the teachings of the white lotus and sun – the sutra is the basis of the Tiantai and Nichiren schools of Buddhism. Transcribed by monks for over 100 years between the 5th and 6th century AD, they are possibly the only body of Buddhist manuscripts discovered in the Gilgit region and probably compiled there as well, scholars say. The facsimile was launched Thursday in the capital by secretary of culture Sangita Gairola at the India International Centre. The facsimile edition of the Gilgit Lotus Sutra is a collaboration between the National Archives of India, Institute of Oriental Philosophy (IOP) and Japanese Buddhist sect Soka Gakkai. Unveiling the edition, Gairola said “much work was going on in cultural thought both in India and abroad. It is fitting therefore that in India we take care to preserve, promote and disseminate all forms of culture. We have entered into cultural agreements with several foreign countries”. Leading Buddhist scholar Lokesh Chandra, who had suggested the publication of a facsimile edition of the sutra to the National Archives, said: “The Gilgit manuscripts found in three stages by cattle grazers in 1931 in a circular chamber within a Buddhist stupa.” Found in a wooden box, these manuscripts survived for centuries partly because they were written on the bark of the bhoj tree that does not decay or decompose, Chandra said. The icy weather of the Gilgit region also helped it survive. After they were discovered, the manuscripts were taken to Srinagar where archaeologist Aurel Stein announced their discovery. Chandra, who has grown up with the Lotus Sutra, recalled that an army captain brought the box of Buddhist manuscripts to his father (noted Sanskrit scholar Raghu Vira) in the early 1930s. “The army officer was posted somewhere in the Gilgit region. He wanted my father to buy the papers but they were very expensive. He asked several institutions, but no one wanted to buy the manuscripts. The manuscripts went different ways – a part of it went to the former Maharaja of Kashmir while the rest went to Germany and Britain. The original manuscripts – small portion which remained in India – are now at the National Archives,” Chandra said, addressing an the audience at the launch. “The manuscripts are about the beauty of the human mind – purity and light – as expressed by the white lotus. The white lotus sutra has given a value system to Asian nations for the last 1,600 years,” Chandra said. One of the Lotus sutras, “the Shri Mala Devi Simha Nanda Sutra, was a great feminist text – and probably the earliest one”, he said. Historian Kapila Vatsyayan, one of the guests of honour, said Indians were losing the power of reading ancient epigraphical inscriptions and one of her studies showed that the country had only 61 inscription scholars. “It might lead to a generation of Indians who may keep all ancient papers in satin textiles but not be able to read them,” she said, recalling how Lokesh Chandra’s father was sent to China to bring back Buddhist manuscripts during the regime of former prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. “I was a young education department employee when Raghu Vira promised to bring donkey loads of papers from China,” she said. Director of National Archives Mushirul Hasan said the extra pennies given to the archives by the government might be useful for preserving more ancient manuscripts and developing the repository.

Source: Hindustan Times, May 25, 2012

Time travel tourism to the Ghandhara civilisation

By Fazal Khaliq

Published: May 3, 2012

The Amlook Dara stupa is vulnerable to natural decay and looters. PHOTO: EXPRESS

SWAT: 

It is often said that Pakistan, particularly the north, is a tourist paradise waiting to happen. As soon as the terrorists, the corrupt and the unimaginative are swept away, a tourist boom is inevitable.

Perhaps – but not if ancient relics and sites are left to vandals, looters and natural rot.

Two beautiful archaeological sites, the Amlook Dara stupa and Balokaley Gumbat, serve as examples. Fortunately, they have once again started to attract historians, local authorities and tourists, who enjoy the peaceful surroundings and the glimpse into the wonder of the Ghandhara civilisation.

The Amlook Dara stupa is two kilometers from the main road which travels from Barikot to Buner. Even the most urban of souls can’t help but be moved by its setting in a lush green valley.

Sheltered by the great Mount Elum, the stupa stands with ancient majesty and can be seen from the surrounding mountains. “The location is so calm and serene that one forgets every misery of the world,” says Habib Nawaz, a tourist from Gujranwala. The visitor is evidently transfixed: “The sound of the gushing stream just in front of the stupa and the sweet chirping of birds from the surrounding mountains enthrall visitors.”

Another tourist, from Mardan, wants outside help for the site. “It could become a very attractive tourist spot if the government tries to bring it to the eyes of the world,” he says.

The stupa was first discovered by the Hungarian-British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein in 1926. It was later studied by Domenico Faccena in the 60s and 70s. Archaeologists are now returning to the area.

“It is possibly the largest stupa in the Swat valley, built upon a 34m-wide podium,” Dr Luca Maria Olivieri, the Director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, tells The Express Tribune.

Its chronological history is not clear, though further excavation will bring us closer to an exact date of construction, but those who have studied the stupa agree it is probably from the Ghandharan era in the third or fourth century. “It seems that the stupa and its environs were inhabited until the ninth century, as evidenced by a Hindu Shahi watchtower constructed a few metres from the stupa,” Dr Olivieri says.

The site needs constant vigilance. In February, a Bodhisattva statue worth millions of rupees was recovered by police, after they received a tip-off regarding illegal excavation of the stupa.

Another archaeological site, a masterpiece of ancient architecture, is located in the small village of Balokaley in the Kandak valley, Barikot. With its high location, the sight is visible from far away. According to archaeological scholars the site was also discovered by Stein and was then hastily excavated in 1938. Though the site is protected, it has been looted for almost a century by vandals and smugglers.

“The site is now protected and has been restored by the Archaeology, Community and Tourism project,” Dr Olivieri says. “The excavations revealed an artificial terrace marked by three major aligned monuments. The central one is still preserved till the top of its dome. The other two were possibly a stupa and a shrine. The central one is a famous monument in Gandharan architecture for its double-dome. The stupa terrace was constructed in the second century CE and lasted for approximately three centuries.”

Amjad Ali, a local activist, appeals for stronger help from outside sources. “I hope the international community, like the Italian Archaeological Mission, would step forward to protect all the archeological sites of the great Ghandhara civilisation, which are fading fast due to vandalism and looting. This could rub out our rich cultural heritage from the Swat valley. It would really be a big loss for the country.”

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3^rd, 2012.

The Buddhas of Bamiyan by Llewelyn Morgan – review

The story of two Afghan sculptures, destroyed after a millennium and a half

• Samanth Subramanian
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012 22.55 BST
• Comments (2)

Afghan girls walk past the empty seat of one of the Buddhas in Bamiyan. Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

In 2001, in a violent attempt to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism, a clutch of men empowered by the Taliban brought down a titanic pair of structures that loomed over their skyline. No lives were lost. The few people living near the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, were cleared out first, before anti-artillery weapons were trained on the sculptures, carved out of the russet cliffs of the Bamiyan valley. "These statues have been and remain shrines of unbelievers," a February 2011 edict from Mullah Omar had proclaimed. Their destruction was carried out with a rare and perverse vim. Failing at first to pulverise the Buddhas, the Taliban called in Pakistani and Arab engineers to finish the job. In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart observed that the Taliban had scorched a fresco on the ceiling of one of the caves that honeycomb the cliffs and then stamped boot-prints over the patina of soot. "This must have taken some effort, as the ceiling was 20 feet high."

1. The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Wonders of the World)
2. by Llewelyn Morgan
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

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The Buddhas had stood for a millennium and a half; the smaller figure, 38m tall, was built around AD550, and the larger – at 55m only a little shorter than London's Monument – around AD615. In The Buddhas of Bamiyan, Llewelyn Morgan, a lecturer in classics at Oxford University, explores not so much the heartbreaking demise of the statues as their remarkably long lives. How and why did the Buddhas survive more than a dozen centuries of an Islamic Afghanistan, only to meet their end at a particular political moment in 2001? The final downfall of these sculptures – their arms already snapped off, their surfaces pitted by erosion and minor vandalism – represented the nadir of a long and complex process of civilisation. In the plangent words of the Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, perhaps the Buddhas could take no more: "Even a statue can be ashamed of witnessing all this violence and harshness happening to these innocent people and, therefore, collapse."

The story of Bamiyan, Morgan suggests, is really the story of Afghanistan itself – of a fractured land with the misfortune of being one of the world's great crossroads, the benefits accruing to it from trade and commerce rubbed out by the curse of being coveted for its strategic location. Bamiyan lay on a branch of the silk route that cut efficiently through the heart of the Hindu Kush mountains, providing both merchants and soldiers access to the Indian subcontinent, to China, to central Asia and thence to Europe. It has hosted a multitude of nationalities, religions and armies, a tinder-dry mix ever primed to be set afire: Greek stragglers from Alexander's campaigns; Hazaras descended from Genghis Khan's troops; Indians and Pashtuns and Persians and Turks; Buddhists and Christians as well as Shia and Sunni Muslims; the forces of the British Raj, the Soviet Union, the Taliban and Nato. Incredibly, through this tumult, Bamiyan managed to retain an air of pacific calm; the historian Arnold J Toynbee, visiting in 1960, wrote of "peace in the glistening white poplar-trunks … peace in the shadowy shapes of the Buddhas and the caves".

Buddhism arrived in the Bamiyan valley in the first or second century AD. This was as far west as the religion would advance, but it flourished here; archaeologists have discovered the remains of a great stupa – a domed home for Buddhist relics – and the Chinese traveller Xuanzang, who passed through Bamiyan in AD629, wrote of "several tens" of monasteries with "several thousand monks". An uncommon stability prevailed in Bamiyan at the time, the result of a delicate balance of regional powers. Morgan proposes that Buddhism benefited from this stability, but also from Bamiyan's nature as a hub of commerce. The town's monks, Xuanzang noted, shrewdly charged visitors to see their relics, and their monasteries functioned as dormitories, bazaars and banks for merchants. Out of such unexpectedly mercantile zeal were Bamiyan's giant Buddhas funded.

Nearly all of Morgan's material is distilled from the recorded impressions of travellers such as Xuanzang, journeying through Bamiyan en route elsewhere. In the book's latter sections, which draw on the writings of surveyors, soldiers and antiquarians of the Raj, these sources tell us little that is new or noteworthy about Bamiyan or Afghanistan. But similar texts by Muslim travellers allow Morgan to parse the surprising malleability, over the ages, of Muslim attitudes towards this Buddhist iconography.

The contrasts between these attitudes is striking evidence that the Taliban were by no means acting in a "typically" Islamic manner in razing the statues. The emperor Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty and ordered several Indian idols to be destroyed, didn't mention the Buddhas in his accounts of his travels through Bamiyan. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, a Pashtun and a 20th-century freedom fighter in India, called the Buddhas "an unparalleled example of perfection in the art of sculpture". In 1842 a British prisoner of Afghan soldiers recalled his captors firing idly at the statues and "cursing them as idols"; on the other hand, a 12th-century Islamic text titled The Wonders of Creation marvelled at these "talismanic" images and declared that "the Creator gives divine inspiration to His subjects to make such wonders". Tellingly, a member of a delegation of 11 Muslim clerics who pleaded with Mullah Omar to cancel the demolition, would later say that the Taliban "had no knowledge about Islam. They are so naive, they really can be influenced."

This textured response of Islam to Bamiyan's Buddhas – and even, on occasion, the projection on these statues of Islam's own folkloric figures – protected them from significant harm until the 21st century, Morgan argues. Surprisingly, he misses another crucial part of the explanation. While Sunni doctrine is rigidly iconoclastic, the Shia branch of Islam – long dominant in the Bamiyan valley – has been considerably more tolerant of imagery used in the service of religion. This remains true even today; how else to explain, as the scholar Jytte Klausen noted in a 2009 paper, the depiction of the Imam Ali and members of the prophet Muhammad's family in "the posters and wall hangings for sale in the bazaars of Tehran and Istanbul"?

For hundreds of years, the Buddhas of Bamiyan managed to be simultaneously featureless and eloquent; their faces had been rendered blank. "No statue which has had its face removed can express justice or law or illumination or mercy," the poet Peter Levi wrote in 1970, "but there is a disturbing presence about these two giants that does express something." The Buddhas continue still to communicate presence through absence, their empty niches in Bamiyan's ochre cliffs speaking to mankind's distressing tendency to discard the very qualities Levi cited: justice, law, illumination and mercy.

• Samanth Subramanian's Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, will be published by Atlantic this summer.

Masks of the Afterlife

The gold mask in the Jinsha Site Museum is believed to be more than 3,000 years old.(Source: China Daily)


BEIJING, May 20 (Xinhuanet) -- There is a collection of gold masks in Sichuan that tell a tale of rituals past. Huang Zhiling reports from Sichuan. Visitors to the Jinsha Site Museum in Chengdu, Sichuan province, never fail to be impressed by a gold mask taking pride of place in the exhibition hall on the second floor. It is only one of many ancient masks excavated from the Sanxingdui and Jinsha Ruins in Sichuan. According to Zhu Zhangyi, the deputy curator of the Jinsha Site Museum, these masks are unique to the area. About 3.7 cm tall and 4.9 cm wide, they are very thin and the gold mask exhibited in the museum is believed to be more than 3,000 years old. "The gold mask was not donned by a living person. Instead, it was affixed to a bronze human head or a wooden human head," Zhu says. Some scholars believe the bronze head represents the soul of a dead ancestor, while others hold the opinion that it is the image of a necromancer and the bronze head is probably that of a high-ranking shaman. Despite the diverse views, the certainty is that the bronze heads were worshipped by ancient Sichuan people, who believed that they were channels to higher beings and would afford protection. It was also an indication of the advanced level of witchery and religion during the Shu Kingdom, according to Zhu. Shu is the ancient name for Sichuan. Masks are closely linked with witchery craft. They are widely used by many ethnic groups in sacrificial ceremonies and holiday celebrations or when they pray for a better harvest. In sacrificial ceremonies, necromancers wearing masks dance to amuse the gods, and work themselves into a trance during which they believe they can communicate directly with the spiritual realms. "Facial make-up in the modern Peking Opera and Sichuan Opera as well as masks in modern masques are related to the ancient masks," Zhu says. As gold masks have been excavated only in Sichuan, some scholars think they might have been influenced by Western Asian civilization. Between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, a large number of gold ornaments appeared in Egypt and Western Asia. They quickly spread along the Mediterranean Sea to Central Asia and South Asia. It is very likely that gold masks also found their way into the Chengdu Plain through India and Central Asia. Although they adopted some elements of Western Asian civilization, the ancient Sichuan people are said to have made their masks in line with their own cultural heritage in an innovative way. The Jinsha Ruins, where the Jinsha Site Museum is located, cover 4 square kilometers including an area for holding sacrificial rites, residential quarters for the nobility, another residential complex for commoners and a graveyard. Experts hail the ruins as one of Sichuan's most important archaeological finds after the discovery of the San-xingdui Ruins in 1929. Like Sanxingdui, Jinsha was discovered by accident. On Feb 8, 2001, builders working on an apartment construction site in Jinsha village found ivory and jade pieces among the piles of earth. Since then, archaeologists have excavated more than 5,000 precious relics including gold, jade, bronze and stone wares as well as one metric ton of whole elephant tusks and tens of thousands of pottery and ceramic shards. A farmer digging a ditch in his fields also discovered the Sanxingdui Ruins in Guanghan, 40 km from Chengdu. From that site, more than 10,000 relics, some of which date back 3,000 and 5,000 years, have been unearthed. In 1986, six gold human masks and 24 bronze human masks were recovered in Sanxingdui. The excavations have yielded what are considered some of the most significant archaeological discoveries in China in the last century.
(Source: China Daily)