Heritage
 By Salma Mahmud | |||
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From The Friday Times / Pakistan/ March 29, 2013
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Friday, 5 April 2013
Imperial mysteries
From The Friday Times / Pakistan/ March 29, 2013
Dictionary of Manichaean Texts
Dictionary of Manichaean Texts. Volume III, 2: Texts from Central Asia and China (Texts in Sogdian and Bactrian) | Add to basket -> |
ISBN: 978-2-503-54501-1
Languages: English
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The Dictionary of Manichaean Sogdian and Bactrian covers the vocabulary of all Manichaean (and anti-Manichaean) texts in these languages (material published up to mid-2011, including short passages and even individual words which have been cited in print from unpublished texts). In addition, the Dictionary contains a full bibliography, references to discussions in the scholarly literature, and numerous corrections to previously published readings and interpretations. The volume is completed by an English index. Providing an up-to-date analysis of all published Manichaean material in the Eastern Middle Iranian languages, the Dictionary will be an essential tool for everyone interested in Manichaeism, Iranian languages, or Central Asian history.
History of ancient Dunhuang bears a lesson for Hong Kong
Professor Fan, director of Dunhuang Academy in Gansu
Among the six recipients of honorary degrees conferred by the University of Hong Kong last month was Professor Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Academy in Gansu province, northwest China.
Fan spent half a century in Dunhuang studying and preserving the city's art and manuscripts after she graduated from the Peking University's archaeology department in 1963.
The city is home to the Mogao Grottoes: more than 700 caves full of paintings and Buddhist sculpture spanning a millennium. It is the world's largest on-site art gallery and a Unesco world heritage site.
Dunhuang is situated in the Gobi Desert, known for its harsh climate and living conditions.
For years, Fan lived in a small cave home, with all her furniture made from mud, including her bed, desk and bookcase.
But despite the hardship, she excelled in her research on Dunhuang art, winning global recognition for her outstanding publications as the city gradually gained its name as an icon of Chinese art and culture.
Scholarly studies aside, Fan and her team also put a tremendous amount of effort into preserving the city's art.
This involved the re-vegetation of the area to prevent destruction by abrasive sandstorms, the diversion of saline groundwater away from the paintings to prevent further damage to them, and the digitisation of all the murals.
Digitising the murals did not just produce a permanent record of the artworks, they also facilitated in-depth research on Dunhuang art and life at the crossroads of civilisations during the medieval times.
Fan's years of innovative art preservation efforts have received wide support and global acclaim.
For example, an organisation, Friends of Dunhuang, has been set up in our city to support her efforts, particularly in the mural digitisation programme. Funds have been raised to help finance the work in dozens of caves in the Mogao Grottoes. A similar organisation by the same name exists in the US. It is led by Mimi Gates, the stepmother of Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
For centuries, the city of Dunhuang was considered a gateway to ancient China for caravan traders on the Silk Road.
Many of these traders during the Tang dynasty were Sogdians - the ancient civilisation of Iranian people based in today's Uzbekistan in Central Asia.
These traders ran a logistics business carrying silk from China to the West, and goods, such as wine and gemstones, from Central Asia to China.
In the course of their caravan trade, this group of people also brought Buddhism, Persian music and Western cultural elements into China.
Like ancient Dunhuang, which was considered a centre for trade between China and the West, Hong Kong is also seen as a logistics hub and a gateway to modern China.
For many centuries, trade along the Silk Road flourished, but eventually declined from the 13th century.
One factor attributed to the demise of the Silk Road trade was the occurrence of several wars in Central and Western Asia. Another factor was that over time, other nations eventually learnt the art of producing their own silk, thus eliminating the need for the material to be imported all the way from China.
It was a combination of these, among other factors, that lost Dunhuang its role as the gateway to ancient China.
If we think of Hong Kong as a parallel to the ancient city, there is a lesson we could perhaps take away from Dunhuang's decline.
In this era of rapid globalisation, our city has to ensure that we maintain our competitive edge to stay ahead of the game.
Professor Lee Chack-fan is the chair of geotechnical engineering at the University of Hong Kong
Monday, 1 April 2013
Mystery unfolds: Monastery unearthed in Taxila valley
The Express Tribune By Waqas NaeemPublished: March 28, 2013
ISLAMABAD:
The only Buddhist monastery in the Taxila valley was a thriving centre of learning at the end of the third century AD.
The monastery attracted so many students and monks from around greater India that its administration built an annex to house the seekers of enlightenment coming to meditate there, archaeologists at Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) have discovered.
Another notable finding was that the main compound of the monastery, located in present-day Badal Pur, is at least 300 years older than archaeologists previously estimated. The main compound, which consists of 55 “monk cells”, was excavated between 2005 and 2012.
An excavation mission that began digging at the southern end of the main monastery in March unearthed a new mini-monastery, Dr Muhammad Ashraf Khan, director of the Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations (TIAC), told The Express Tribune.
Dr Khan, who is heading the ongoing excavation mission, said eight monk cells have been excavated so far at the new monastery, which has a 40 by 40 metre square plan and four metre high walls.
“We were unaware of the existence of this monastery up till now,” Khan said. “When we cleared bushes from the area south of the main monastery, there were visible signs that a structure could be buried underneath.”
The signs were pointing in the right direction, as the archaeologists and students found a structure constructed of stucco — a coating made by mixing limestone, sand and water — and mud plaster in diaper pattern masonry.
This form of masonry pattern, which consists of thin layers of metamorphic rocks interspersed with stone blocks, is associated with Kushan architecture, Khan said.
The Kushans were a tribe that migrated to Gandhara around the first century AD from Central Asia and Afghanistan.
The tribe selected Peshawar as its seat of power and later expanded east into the heartland of India to establish the Kushan empire, which lasted until the third century AD.
TIAC archaeologists believe the new monastery flourished during the late Kushan period, when the Kushans had numerous cultural and trade exchanges with the Buddhists.
Khan said that based on artefacts such as a gold coin with the seal of a second century Kushan emperor found at the larger Badal Pur monastery, the site was believed to be from the same century.
But new evidence suggests otherwise.
Khan said pieces of charcoal found at the monastery were analysed in the US at the University of Wisonsin using carbon dating — a reliable scientific method for determining the age of certain materials.
The university’s report states the monastery was built somewhere around the third century BC, making it one of the oldest monasteries in the Gandhara region.
During the excavation of the new, smaller monastery, the team also found a stucco statue of Buddha in meditation, iron objects such as door knocks, pottery, animal bones, coins and a grinding stone. A ‘jar’, which could be the top of a buried stupa, is being excavated at present.
The bones indicate the monastery’s dwellers also domesticated animals.
The bones and coins have been sent for analysis to the Pakistan Museum of Natural History and Punjab Department of Archaeology respectively, Khan said.
A total of 200 students, of masters-level and higher are taking turns participating in the excavation.
“The best part is that our young students get training and practical experience in the principles of archaeology,” Khan said.
He said that due to limited funding from QAU, the TIAC can only commit to short excavation missions. More often than not, sites have to be left unguarded after a brief excavation due to paucity of funds.
Khan said he is trying to get the Buddhist community living in Pakistan to sponsor the excavations and the preservation of important artefacts.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 28th, 2013.
Deke Erh's fresh take on 'Burglar of Dunhuang'
MARC Aurel Stein (1862-1943), a Hungarian-British archeologist, is infamous in China as the "burglar of Dunhuang."
Stein removed - plundered - a trove of artifacts and precious documents from a secret library cell in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas that he stumbled upon in 1907. He took the Diamond Sutra, believed to be the world's oldest printed text dating from AD 868. He made several expeditions to Dunhuang in today's Gansu Province and other sites on the Silk Road.
Many of the treasures are in the British Museum, the British Library and museums in India.
Deke Erh, a Shanghai native and one of the nation's most distinguished photographers and travelers, has opened an exhibition titled "A dialogue with Stein - a visual documentation exhibition of the Silk Road after a century" at the new Deke Erh Art Center on Shilong Road.
The exhibition features photos that Erh took of the same spots Stein photographed, standing where Stein would have stood. It also features photos of Stein's own photos.
Influenced by Sven Hedin's 1898 work "Through Asia," Stein made four major expeditions to Central Asia in 1900, 1906-1908, 1913-1916 and 1930.
Stein's greatest discovery was made at the Mogao Caves, also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, near Dunhuang in China in 1907.
It was there that he discovered the Diamond Sutra, along with 40,000 other scrolls.
He was able to remove them by gradually winning the confidence and bribing the Taoist caretaker of the Mogao Caves.
Archeologist
He also acquired 25 cases of manuscripts in many languages and four cases of paintings, including silk paintings and textiles and various relics.
Thus, Stein - one of a series of foreigners who raced to uncover China's Buddhist treasures - is condemned to this day for removing the nation's priceless patrimony and causing serious damage.
Foreign archeologists, robbers and thieves from China and Central Asia scoured the region, including other caves in what is today the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, and looted grottoes, even cutting out segments of frescoes, crating them and sending them to European museums.
"That was what I had learned from books about the Mogao Caves," says Zhang Jun, a visitor to the exhibit in his 40s. "But I read more about Stein because of this exhibition. As an archeologist, he trudged to remote areas in Central Asia with great courage, and his findings are a contribution to the Eastern civilization."
"He is the key figure in the history of Dunhuang studies, of course, surrounded by great controversy," Erh said.
Since 2000, Erh followed in Stein's footsteps to capture the visual record of the Silk Road a century later. Every year, Erh spent months following the route Stein described in his books.
"I went to Hungarian Library to read all the files on Stein for a better understanding of the man," Erh says.
Now Erh plans a new project, driving nearly 18,000 kilometers from China to Central Asia and Europe to record the Silk Road. The journey will cover around 10 countries and take three months, he said.
Date: Through March 31, 10am-5pm (closed Saturday and Sunday)
Address: 27, Lane 345, Shilong Rd
Tel: 6415-0675
Sunday, 31 March 2013
A Building Boom as Chinese Art Rises in Stature
Dunhuang Academy
The Dunhuang Visitor Center under construction on the edge of the Gobi Desert. More Photos »
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 20, 2013 from the
After years of fevered activity, museum building and expansion in the United States have slowed to a crawl under a low-lying economic cloud. In Europe, where the climate is even stormier, venerable state-financed institutions go begging for cash.
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In China, by contrast, the fiscal sun shines.
Museums — big, small, government-backed, privately bankrolled — are opening like mad. In 2011 alone, some 390 new ones appeared. And the numbers are holding. China is opening museums on a surreal scale.
Many are multipurpose affairs, mixing history, ethnography, science, politics, art and entertainment. The museum devoted only to art is a relatively novel concept in China. Models for it, most of them Western, are still being sorted out, though they tend to line up at either end of the temporal spectrum, focusing on the very new or the very old.
Until recently, museums of contemporary art in China had been privately run, either as corporate entities or as the vanity showcases of rich collectors. Last October, an important precedent was set with the opening of the Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum, the country’s first government-supported museum of up-to-the-minute work.
If official acknowledgment of the importance of Chinese art’s international stature was long delayed, it was fairly bold when it arrived. The Shanghai museum, popularly known as the Power Station of Art — it’s in a converted 19th-century power plant — is physically spectacular. It opened with a major globalist bang in the form of the 9th Shanghai Biennale, which filled the capacious interior and spread out into the surrounding city.
The Biennale still has a little time to run; it closes March 31. Meanwhile, some 1,600 miles west of Shanghai, at the oasis city of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobi Desert, another museum, or something like a museum, far less conventional than the Power Station, is under construction. Its purpose is not to attract crowds to new art, but to keep them away from damaging contact with old art, specifically the ancient and rapidly deteriorating Buddhist murals that cover the interiors of hundreds of caves in the Dunhuang area.
Painted between the fourth and 14th centuries at a central point on the Silk Road, the caves constitute a virtual museum of cosmopolitan Chinese culture spanning a millennium.
As different as they are, the Shanghai and Dunhuang museums share one quality typical of China’s new cultural institutions: ambitiousness. Often this is simply measured in size.
When the revamped National Museum of China opened in Beijing in 2011, much was made, officially, of its being, square foot for square foot, the single largest museum of any kind in the world, even though the history of China it told was strategically truncated.
The taste for gigantism was evident again in Shanghai last fall. On the same October day that the Power Station opened, so did a second state museum in Shanghai, the China Art Museum, sometimes called the China Art Palace. Dedicated largely to 20th-century Chinese modernism, and housed in a zany lacquer-red structure originally erected for the 2010 World Expo, it advertised itself as the biggest museum of new art in the country. So it is, though anyone could see that its exhausting display would benefit from serious editing.
But Shanghai’s two state museums are only the tip of the city’s new-art iceberg, with smaller institutions making up in sheer numbers what they lack in size. Most of the smaller museums are privately owned and financed. At least two, the Minsheng Art Museum and the Rockbund Art Museum, have solid reputations.
The Minsheng, supported by a banking corporation, specializes in contemporary Chinese art. Under its deputy director, Zhou Tiehai, himself a well-known artist (his satirical “Joe Camel” paintings made the international rounds a decade or so ago), the museum has organized valuable retrospectives for midcareer artists who have been influential in China without being well known abroad.
The Rockbund, which opened in 2010, operates as a kind of kunsthalle, with rotating shows and no collection. It is notable for highlighting non-Chinese art, a trend that has spread to larger museums. When the China Art Palace opened it featured a special show, “Congratulations From the World,” of premier odds-and-ends loans from the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Power Station recently played host to Surrealist surveys from the Pompidou Center in Paris.
An international mix is the rule in the proliferating number of vanity museums created by private collectors.
Late last year, Liu Yiqian, a billionaire Shanghai investor, and his wife, Wang Wei, opened their Dragon Museum (also known as the Long Museum), with holdings that included ancient bronzes, Mao-era paintings and contemporary works. The couple’s attention is now focused exclusively on the new and, being ardent shoppers, they have plans for a second museum in the city.
That will be joined by yet another museum, to hold the collection of Budi Tek, a Chinese-Indonesian entrepreneur who in 2011 made the Art & Auction list of the 10 most powerful figures in the international art world. At the time he had been buying for a scant six years but had already established a museum in Jakarta. Now, thanks to a Chinese government deal, he has at his disposal a building, an old airplane hangar, ready to be renovated and expanded for a museum in Shanghai.
Given the current trophy value of new art in China, and the fact that the country has, according to Forbes, the world’s second-highest number of billionaires, the prospect of further private museums seems endless. How those museums will shape up, though, is a question. Building walls is one thing; gathering significant work is another.
Many private collections now are simply products of what the global market pushes: the same three hot Chinese artists, hot European artists, and so on. But while museums for such collections proliferate, China still has no museum offering anything like a comprehensive historical view of the country’s contemporary art over the last 30 years. And features that are taken for granted in museums elsewhere — scholarship, educational outreach, overarching curatorial perspectives — are absent or in a nascent stage in many of China’s institutions of new art.
Without knowledgeable administrative oversight, what is to prevent future state-sponsored museums of new art — and surely there will be more — from mindlessly going the bigger-is-better route? What is to prevent private museums from being glorified storage facilities — places for collectors to park art, with no higher purpose than to flaunt personal power through material accumulation?
Higher purpose is precisely what the Dunhuang project has going for it. Or maybe higher purposes: to preserve the past, but also, symbolically, to right past wrongs.
Buddhist caves are found in several sites around Dunhuang, but a large majority, some 700, are carved into long cliffs at a place called Mogao several miles outside the city. According to legend, in the fourth century a wandering monk was drawn to Mogao by a vision of flashing lights. Believing the place holy, he scooped out a cave from the cliff and stayed.
Other monks came. More caves were excavated as temples and meditation halls, and their walls covered with paintings. Stucco sculptures of the Buddha, some very large, were created and painted to produce total decorative environments. The site became a magnet for pilgrimages, and a major center of learning with a vast library of handwritten manuscripts gathered from imperial China to the east, and India and beyond to the west.
In the 14th century, as trade shifted from land to sea routes, traffic dropped off; the number of monks diminished. At some point, a library of some 50,000 manuscripts was sealed up in a single cave for safety. Mogao’s existence was forgotten. In the late 19th century, it was rediscovered, and starting in 1900 a succession of explorers — from Europe, Russia, Japan, the United States — arrived on the scene. They chipped paintings off walls and sent them home. They found the sealed library, divided it up and shipped most of it out. The Qing dynasty did nothing to prevent any of this.
It was only long after that, in the 1940s, that China fully reclaimed the caves and began restoring them. Over time, their mystique grew. In 1979, the year they were opened to the public, 20,000 visitors came. By the late 2000s, the annual count had soared to 800,000. By this time, the threat of damage to the paintings, through exposure to human-generated humidity and carbon dioxide, had become severe. Today, almost all the caves are closed.
To preserve Mogao as both a work of art and a tourist goal, archaeologists in charge of the site submitted a proposal to the Chinese government for a visitor center that would let people experience the caves with minimal access. The plan was approved. The visitor center, designed by the Beijing architect Cui Kai as a group of futuristic, dunelike domes, will open this year.
The operation will be carefully regulated. Visitors will come to the center, be shown a short film on the Silk Road history of Dunhuang, and then see immersive digital projections of several of the most elaborate cave interiors. They will then go a few miles by bus to Mogao, where they will see several real caves and spend time in a museum of Mogao artifacts — portable sculptures, textiles, handwritten scrolls — before returning to the center.
A selection of such objects will be at the China Institute Gallery in Manhattan beginning April 19 to kick off “The Year of Dunhuang,” a series of events geared to attracting Western attention, and dollars. Of the $52 million that the center will cost, $33 million is from the Chinese government; the rest must be raised independently.
This project is by no means the only example of digitally assisted conservation in China. A similar one was documented in a show called “Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan,” which was organized by the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago in 2010. But Dunhuang holds a special place in China’s cultural imagination. To care for it is to make amends for past neglect. Perhaps most important, to see the art of those caves in place at the desert’s edge is a deep experience.
Will that experience be as intense with some digital intervention? And if so, how much is acceptable? As in matters of contemporary culture, China is asking questions, about both the nature of art and the function of museums, that we rarely consider. But with money for our own cultural institutions hard to come by; with billionaire vanity museums on the rise here too; and with a 21st-century museum audience addicted to seeing art through cellphone screens, China’s long museological learning curve has much to teach us.
Saturday, 30 March 2013
Dongba culture linked to Neolithic cave paintings
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Academics from Britain and China claim to have found links between Neolithic cave paintings and the Dongba religion of Yunnan Province. The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. This crucial evidence is now on display at the UK’s Northhampton University.
For thousands of years, locked away in the mountainous province of Yunnan, Dongba has been the main religion of the Naxi people. Even today it uses an ancient pictograph–based language to document its culture – the world’s only surviving form of such a writing.
Now studies of Neolithic cave paintings in the Jinsha River Valley reveal a critical social link. Suggesting fluidity of the 7,000 year-old paintings were the words of an elite religious class among the cave dwellers. The new research findings on show at Northampton University in the UK.
Paul Middleton, University of Northampton, said, "So when we’ve looked at the Dongba pictograph we’ve found that they’re made in the same way, the very fluid marks that are obviously predetermined and planned and not everybody can do it. So those people who have those skills are going to be revered in their society."
Artists not scientists have been used to understand the cave paintings tracing similarities in Dongba art.
He Pinzheng, Dongba artist, said, "I’m very proud that it’s here in Northampton. It’s great to see it."
Such was the mountainous terrain of Yunnan – between Tibet and South East Asia – life there continued largely divorced from the outside world till the middle of the 20th century. The images of Dongba art work are dominated by the creatures that would have lived in the mountains and jungles surrounding the Naxi people. Perhaps that very geography, which constrained the expansion of Dongba culture.
Professor Yan Junqi, Beijing Communication University, said, "You’re absolutely right, the geological restrictions contributed a great deal. Before the fancy modern communications, the tools of modern technology available, how do you get your message out – by person, by the messenger."
The project has made unlikely bedfellows of Beijing Lijiang and Northampton in middle England as the Dongba Evidence tours Britain.
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| The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. |
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| The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. |
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| The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. |
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| The latest research establishes a pattern that reveals the origins of Dongba writings going back 7,000 years. |
Related stories
- China's ethnic Dongba culture tours UK 2013-03-24
Editor:Zhang Jingya |Source: CCTV.com
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