Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province is extremely rich in ancient literature resources. To preserve these ancient publications, the local government has recently released a list of ancient books for protection. All of them have great historic and cultural value.
A total of 409 ancient books of great historic and cultural value have been included in the list. They include classic Chinese texts, historical documents, literary works by renowned writers, and Buddhist sutras.
These books were composed or printed in different times. Some even have a history of more than a thousand years.
Expert said, "These 409 ancient books were selected from the oldest books existing in Shaanxi Province. Although they are all very old, some have been preserved intact. They are undoubtedly very important."
"The Great Sutra of the Perfection of Wisdom" is also in the list. The Buddhist script was written by hand in the Tang Dynasty. This precious sutra was translated from Sanskrit by Xuan Zang, a Buddhist pilgrim who endured a 17-year trip from China to India 1350 years ago.
Qiao Weixin, Expert, Xi’An Museum, said, "Xuan Zang brought a lot of Sankrit scriptures from India, which were kept in the Wild Goose Pogoda in Xi’an. Later, he translated them into Chinese. And the Chinese versions became very popular at that time."
Experts also made some interesting discoveries while they were doing clean-up work. They found a petal-shaped object among a poem collection of renowned poet Li Bai.
Expert said, "We believe that it’s a bookmark. We also found some dry leaves. Just as we use beautifully designed bookmarks today, people in ancient China had their own bookmarks, too."
The Shaanxi Provincial Department of Culture will later establish a digital base for these ancient books.
It was one of the world’s great cultural mysteries, a tantalising rumour of ancient Afghan treasures hidden from the Taliban during its brutal rule. As the Melbourne Museum prepares to unveil a glorious collection once feared lost, Andrew Stephens charts an extraordinary tale of rediscovery.
Curators examine items recovered after being hidden for decades. Photo: Ken Garrett, National Geographic
The ancient treasures of Afghanistan, including a huge hoard of gold, were long gone when photographs circulated in 1994 showing Kabul's National Museum with its roof destroyed. It had been hit by rockets, a fire had been lit and chunks of its vast collection had been hidden, looted, damaged or spirited away to the international black market. The building had been annexed by the military, the city was in terror, and it was a disaster zone.
Another great Afghan treasure, the 1600-year-old giant Buddha statues a few hundred kilometres away at Bamiyan, couldn't be sold or melted down. Instead, they were dynamited in March 2001 by the Taliban. The world was aghast at pictures showing the shattered sockets where the two monumental statues, 55 metres and 38 metres tall, once nestled beautifully in the side of the cliff. Their destroyers also laid waste to more than 2500 pieces of art that had somehow survived at the museum.
As cultural heritage was obliterated, people were, too.
Fredrik Hiebert finds the extremities perplexing: knowing there is a small minority of people who can kill others and seek to erase culture, while there are also people who nurture each other and create astonishing works of beauty, such as the Buddhas or the delicate golden treasures – necklaces, crowns, medallions – that were kept in Kabul's museum.
He remains optimistic. As he says, such histories and cultures can be powerful tools for diplomacy. Hiebert's own story has become a form of ambassadorship for Afghanistan, and it is a story that has caused many tellers of his tale to invoke Indiana Jones. It has all the ingredients: priceless piles of ancient Afghan gold, treasures buried, found and lost again, single-minded archaeologists making spectacular finds, and a violent enemy that would stop at nothing to achieve its aims.
This tale began in 1988, when Hiebert was 19 and travelled to Afghanistan's neighbour, Turkmenistan – then part of the USSR – to research his PhD on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that stretched from China and south-east Asia to Europe, via central Asia, Africa and the Middle East. There, he met the man who was to be his co-supervisor: a famous, much older Greek-Russian archaeologist named Viktor Sarianidi.
Banners at the National Museum of Kabul declare: 'A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive'. Photo: Pierre Cambon, courtesy Musee Guimet
Hiebert is now a renowned archaeologist and explorer. He is a fellow with the National Geographic Society and the curator of an exhibition touring the world named Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul, but the meeting with Sarianidi was portentous for the course the younger man's career would follow.
"It was amazing," he says. "We were sitting outside under the stars, in central Asia, in this mystical land, and I asked Viktor, 'What was your best find?' " The archaeologist sat back, looked at the stars and said that 10 years earlier he had been working in Afghanistan and found this incredible treasure: almost 22,000 pieces of intact gold in six burial mounds at a place called Tillya Tepe, or the Golden Hill. No person had touched that gold for more than 2000 years. Finding the Bactrian Gold – or the Bactrian Hoard, as it was known – made headlines around the world.
The wonder was short-lived.
Sarianidi told Hiebert it was impossible to imagine what it was like to be an archaeologist with 22,000 pieces of gold sitting in your hands. "He said it was the most glorious moment of his life, and the most difficult because as he was finding these intact golden treasures, which were, in fact, the first Silk Road art, there were armed horsemen riding around saying, 'You better get out of here because something is about to happen'. Revolution was in the air."
Sarianidi photographed some of the treasures, put them in paper bags and took them to the National Museum in Kabul. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan the following year, 1979, and millions died in the uprising that ensued. The country fell into chaos; the museum was plundered. Within a few years, Sarianidi could get no information about where the invaluable objects were. His glorious treasure seemed lost.
Hiebert wanted to tell the tale and convinced National Geographic to do a report, which it did in March 1990. The article ended by asking readers to look well at the photos because no one knew where these golden treasures were, or if they even still existed. Hiebert, Sarianidi and the world's leading archaeologists believed the hoard had been destroyed and lost forever – probably melted down to get cash to fund a terrorist cell or to buy passports out of the war-ravaged country.
The story haunted Hiebert, who kept in touch with Sarianidi. They concocted theories about the fate of the Bactrian Gold, but deep down believed it would never be seen again.
"The problem was after the Taliban got chased out of Afghanistan in 2001 and the country came back onto the world's radar screen, questions about the treasure came up," Hiebert says. "I was absolutely sure it was gone." But in 2003, rumours (albeit flimsy ones) suggested it might not be.
Hiebert again went to National Geographic magazine and convinced it to send him to Kabul on the off chance. There he visited the National Museum and asked the director, Omara Khan Massoudi, about the treasure. It seemed to be a dead end. He asked if the treasures were preserved and was told "maybe", but that the keys had been lost. "It was like The Wizard of Oz," Hiebert says. As he was walking out the door, Massoudi said, "Wait, don't go away." If Hiebert promised to inventory the items from Tillya Tepe – all 22,000 of them – the crates containing them could be found, the director said.
Hiebert does not know why Massoudi chose that moment, and chose him, to finally reveal that the treasure was safe. "Maybe we will never know the answer."
He returned to the US and encouraged National Geographic to employ him and fund the inventory. After some time, the museum asked Hiebert to return to Kabul and he was taken, along with Viktor Sarianidi, who had been flown in from Turkmenistan for the occasion, to see the "lost" treasures. There, someone with a blowtorch and a circular saw was ready to cut open the steel boxes. The keys, indeed, had truly been lost – probably deliberately so – but the treasures had secretly been kept safe in a presidential bank vault.
What was even more astonishing than the treasures being rediscovered was that about 30 Afghans – mainly workers at the National Museum – had somehow managed to maintain silence for all those years about the treasure being hidden. While some of the museum's collection had been stored in a suburban residence – objects were piled to the ceiling in basements and hallways – the Bactrian Gold had been packed in the steel boxes and conveniently "forgotten" at its secret location.
Now the boxes were cracked open and Sarianidi, their first discoverer who knew them so well, verified their authenticity. And now they are touring the world – they are about to be unveiled at Melbourne Museum – and are a form of cultural ambassadorship for a country Hiebert believes will rise from the ashes. "You see the effects of war everywhere in Kabul," he says. "Every street corner, every intersection, in the eyes of every person. War is hell, let me tell you that. But to think they had the sense of self to preserve this.
"It was the most amazing moment, humbling and honouring to actually witness [the rediscovery]. That sense of transformation from art heritage that has been stolen to saying, 'We are the stewards of the past'. These are people who have lived day-to-day for the past 20 years in a war-torn country. This made all the difference; it was about the Afghan people."
Sarianidi took Hiebert aside after the unveiling – or rediscovery – and told him he had already inventoried the 22,000 items, in 1978. Now it was Hiebert's turn. It took a few months; not one item was missing.
How on earth, though, did those 30 key holders, as they were known, manage to keep the Bactrian Gold's location a secret? How did they even keep the fact that they had been hidden in the first place a secret?
"You can have five or six different stories about why they initiated this process," Hiebert says. "We will never know what happened. We in the West want to know the truth but maybe one of the ways they kept it secret was that they had five different stories, all of them true in their own way. It confused everybody."
Dr Patrick Greene, director of Museum Victoria and also an archaeologist, knew when he saw the Afghan treasures on display in London a few years after the rediscovery that he had to bring them to Australia. "That rediscovery was a sensation, and what an enormous relief that the material has survived because the Kabul National Museum is going to be important for Afghanistan's future in terms of its knowledge of itself and its material," he says.
Some of the Bactrian Gold is part of the exhibition. There are also bronze and stone sculptures, ivories, painted Roman glassware and other ancient works of art and – astonishingly – material from a Greek city that was founded in Afghanistan in the 4th century BC by one of Alexander the Great's generals. "That Greek city was there for about 300 years and this was not known about until the 1960s," Green says. "During excavations they found a gymnasium, stadia, theatres, a grid layout – a planned city – all sorts of things, even down to busts of the philosophers."
The exhibition ranges from 2200BC to the 2nd century AD and comes from four archaeological sites in Afghanistan: the ancient city of Fullol, the former Greek city Ai Khanum, treasures from what is thought to be a merchant's storeroom in Begram and the gold treasures found in the nomads' graves in Tillya Tepe.
Greene marvels that all these treasures have come out of Afghanistan, a country whose image – correctly – is of a land beset by war, with much destruction and death.
"And not just in terms of the current conflict," he says. "But there is another story and that is of a very beautiful country. It doesn't look particularly beautiful when you see the news shots, but for people who have been there, they speak glowingly of just what a beautiful place it is. And it is also a country with a rich cultural history, a lot of which Icertainly didn't know but which will come out very strongly with this exhibition."
Greene's interest in the importance of cultural heritage is echoed passionately by Hiebert, who notes its humanising effect, its ability to draw people together from vastly different parts of the world, and to promote mutual understanding. As he says, the hidden treasures Sarianidi discovered are not only artistically splendid but they unlock mysteries about "our ancient shared past" on the Silk Road, a route that transformed much of the world and connected East, south and West.
Hiebert says he "might be over-psyching it", but he suspects understanding this sense of Afghan identity that goes back 2000 years is really important given today's situation. The tribalism of modern Afghanistan is, he says, a recent fracture. In the long-term trajectory, such tribalism is "the outlier, the variant – not the core".
At that core is a sense of who the Afghans are, their long history. "This is something more important than a pretty picture," Hiebert says. "You can be poor and in a difficult situation, but if you have a sense of self and a sense of heritage, you can overcome all this. You may not be literate or you may not have the iPhones and computers that people who live in the US, Australia or the UK have, but [a sense of heritage] is a very noble thing."
He is especially admiring of those 30 key holders who kept their lips sealed for more than 20 years, knowing all the while the treasure was safe from those who sought to plunder and destroy. "I have tried many times to say that these guys are heroes but they really reject that," Hiebert says. "They would say they were just doing their jobs. And I'd say, 'But you guys just saved Afghanistan's cultural heritage'."
■ Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul is at the Melbourne Museum from March 22 to July 28.
■ Fredrik Hiebert will talk about the exhibition on Tuesday, March 26, at 6pm. museumvictoria.com.au
The base of a life-sized Buddha, one of more than 200 found at the Mes Aynak site, sits along with hundreds of other statues depicting figures from Buddhist life and teachings in Afghanistan. | Jay Price/MCT
French-Afghan archaeology The French organization that’s advising the Afghan government on the Buddhist ruins at Mes Aynak, the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, has been in the country almost long enough to be the subject of an archaeological study itself. Begun in 1922 under an agreement between the French and Afghan governments three years after Afghan independence, the group had sole rights to conduct archaeological surveys and excavations in the country until 1978. Most of the artifacts found were split equally between Afghanistan and France until the mid-1960s. In 1982, the Soviet-backed Afghan government expelled the group, but it returned in 2002, after the U.S.-led invasion had ousted the Taliban regime.
MES AYNAK, Afghanistan — It had the potential to be another Afghanistan Buddha disaster, recalling the Taliban’s destruction of two ancient statues that had stood for centuries in this country’s west: A buried Buddhist city lost to time was about to be obliterated by what promised to be one of the largest copper mines in the world.
Now, however, thanks to delays in construction of the massive mine and a hefty influx of cash from the World Bank, the 1.5-square-mile Mes Aynak complex is an archaeological triumph – though bittersweet.
An international team of archaeologists and more than 550 local laborers are now frantically excavating what turns out to be a unique window into Afghanistan’s role on the ancient Silk Road connecting China and India with the Mediterranean.
With its Buddhist city, a ring of perhaps a half-dozen monasteries and a striking complex of workshops and mine shafts built into a high mountain ridgeline at an altitude of 8,200 feet, the site shows the interplay of Buddhism, mining and trade during the years it was in operation, now thought to be from the fifth to the late eighth centuries.
It underscores the conflict between cultural preservation and Afghanistan’s desperate need to find a way to survive as the international community winds down its involvement in the country. The copper here may be worth $100 billion by some estimates, five times the estimated value of Afghanistan’s entire economy, in which the government and military are funded mainly by foreign countries. The best private-sector jobs are with foreign relief groups.
A Chinese consortium agreed in 2007 to pay $3 billion for a 30-year lease on the mine. It was the largest private investment in Afghan history, and Afghan officials hailed it as a key component in building an economy that one day won’t rely almost solely on donor nations and the opium trade. They said it would generate hundred of millions of dollars a year for the government eventually and would provide thousands of jobs.
The massive, open pit mine, though, would destroy most or all of the ruins, which were larded with well-preserved frescoes and more than 1,000 statues, including hundreds of Buddhas.
The specter of Buddhas being dynamited or bulldozed immediately sparked comparison with one of the greatest cultural disasters in Afghan history: the Taliban’s destruction in 2001 of the giant Buddhas set into cliff walls in Bamiyan province. But a small group of French and Afghan archaeologists cut an informal deal with the Ministry of Mines in 2009 for time to perform a "rescue excavation," to recover as many key artifacts and document the site to whatever degree possible before the mining begins.
When that will be, they don’t know. A December deadline came and went. Now they have until June to finish work on the primary sites, said Mossadiq Khalili, the Afghan deputy minister of cultural affairs. Work on some of the monasteries on the edge of the mine area could continue for several years, he said.
The archaeologists feel almost certain that they have until at least 2016, because so little progress has been made on the mine. There seem to be no firm plans yet for the necessary power plant, smelter and rail line, or for the mining operation itself.
"So, if that’s correct, it means that there is, I won’t say plenty of time, but a reasonable, good amount of time to work on this site," said Philippe Marquis, the director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, which has been operating in the country since 1922 and acts as an adviser to the Afghan government.
What makes the prospect of success even greater, Marquis said, is the international interest in getting the mine up and running. Afghanistan has long been desperately poor, but it’s thought to have untapped oil, gas and mineral reserves worth perhaps more than $1 trillion. The World Bank, keen to see the mine project succeed, committed $8 million last year to the archaeological project.
Without the copper mine, Mes Aynak and its artifacts very likely would have been destroyed anyway, Marquis and others think, looted by dealers in stolen antiquities, the fate of many Afghan archaeological sites. But with hopes for an economic boon, there’s a strong chance that the site will be documented and its artifacts preserved.
Many of the site’s statues and paintings have been removed, and the rest will soon follow, said Nicolas Engel, an assistant director of the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan.
It’s an adventure just to visit the site, in Logar province about 25 miles south of Kabul. Al Qaida trained here before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the highway is still subject to occasional Taliban assaults. The massive copper mine site is fenced and heavily guarded. One tunnel, apparently dug by the Russians when they occupied Afghanistan in the 1980s, is thought to be booby-trapped, and land mines left from their presence are still a major hazard. One laborer was wounded last year when he struck a mine while digging, Engel said.
Everywhere are the telltale signs of copper mining going back centuries. Blankets of fused slag – the byproduct of the old copper-smelting operations – tint the mountainside black. In one place the slag was piled nearly 40 feet high, evidence of thousands of years of production.
Shovels and picks ring out against rock as local laborers dig. Large sections of the city have emerged, as have roads and alleys that cut across several neighborhoods. Several monasteries, each on a hill or mountain above the main city, have been excavated, and more than 1,000 sculptures have been found, including Buddhas more than twice life-sized. Ancient manuscripts and decorative woodwork also have been uncovered.
On a recent sunny day, British archaeologist Thomas Eley sat on a wall sketching the layout of a small building and pondering a small indentation beside a heavily scorched depression in the floor. More than 700 coins had been found in the building, and he said it appeared to be a place where coins had been made from the copper smelted atop the mountain.
Across an ancient street and several buildings away, another archaeologist was sketching the unusually thick walls and small, extra-secure doorways of what may have been a bank where copper and coins were stored. All around them, laborers were uncovering more buildings, more pieces of the puzzle of Mes Aynak.
"I’m an archaeologist, so of course I’m sad about what will happen here, but it’s also life, and life has to go on," said Usman Ishanzada, who’s from Tajikistan. "If this mine can bring some life and jobs for local people, why not?"
The site poses intriguing questions about the era when Buddhism was the dominant religion in Afghanistan, Marquis said.
"The odd thing is all these Buddhist monasteries," he said. "Monks are not supposed to be miners, because Buddhist monks are not supposed to be working.”
The way monasteries are arrayed around the city and mine creates almost a wall around the site, which almost suggests a type of military activity, too, which would be a previously unknown role for monks.
The success of the project from a scientific and economic standpoint is becoming a positive lesson for the Afghan population and once-skeptical officials in the government, who thought the archaeological efforts would slow the mine and cause problems. Instead they’ve pumped money into the local economy, improved security and made it clear that such work can coexist well with economic development projects.
It’s also showing that even projects unrelated to mines may have big benefits for local communities, Marquis said.
It seems unlikely, he said, that the Afghan government will stop work on the excavation without any mining. That not only would trigger an international uproar but also would make hundreds of workers jobless, a major security issue. Many workers here already acknowledge that they were part of a rocket attack last August that was staged to protest the destruction of villages that sat atop the mine, Marquis said. Their hostility, however, has turned into enthusiasm now that they’ve been hired on.
The plan is to remove all the artifacts, even the largest statues and the domed shrines called stupas. For now, some statues are being stored in shipping containers at the site, and some have been sent to the national museum in Kabul. Afghan officials hope to build a museum just north of Mes Aynak.
Marquis said it was possible that time wasn’t the major challenge now.
"Our biggest problem has become the long-term conservation of all these things that are being saved," he said. "We need to work on a plan for what to do with them."
A team of scholars and students from Taxila Institute of Asian Civilization (TIAC) headed by its Director Prof Dr Mohammad Ashraf Khan has discovered a large number of objects during excavations at ancient Buddhist Stupa and monastery near Taxila.
Antiquities discovered at the Buddhist stupa and monastery near Taxila dating back to the first century AD [Credit: Dawn Com]
`The most remarkable discovery is an iron nail and animal bones which opened two new chapters in the history of Gandhara. One is that these people knew the use of different metals and the second rejected the notion that the followers of Buddhism at that time were only vegetarian,` said Dr Khan while talking to this correspondent here on Sunday.
He said the discovery of animal bones at a deep surface and at the kitchen area was a proof that the monks and followers of Buddhism at that time were not vegetarians. `This will need rewriting of the history of Taxila in the light of the new and substantial evidence.` Dr Khan said the discovery of the iron nail revealed the craftsmanship of the people living in the area between the first century and 4th century AD and their knowledge and utilisation of different metals. He said the other discoveries, including a lamp, terracotta and beads and kitchen pots, belonged to the Kushan period.
During the excavations, as many as 55 monk cells were also discovered, he said, adding in the previous excavations such a huge quantity of cells was never discovered in Taxila valley. He said the monastery where the discoveries were made comprised 280 metres area and so far only 80 metres area has been excavated while the remaining was still being unex-cavated. Dr Khan said the main water tank area would also be excavated during the current season while during the next session the stupa would be excavated and preserved.
He said despite limited resources, the university had planned to excavate and preserve the whole site.
In reply to a question, he said around 60 students from the TIAC were participating in the excavation which gave them an opportunity to learn about practical work, including the principles of excavations, tools of excavation, method of preservation survey and drawing.Responding to another question, he said though the site remained victim of digging by illegal treasure hunters, he was optimistic about a major discovery.
He added that due to significance of the site, TIAC had, in collaboration with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa department of archaeology and museums, initiated the excavation and preservation project.
Dr Khan said TIAC had earlier carried out excavation at the site in July 2011 during which an assembly hall, a cooking area, stores as well as steward areas had been discovered along with a significant amount of antiquities.
A joint expedition of scientists led by Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago has unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that shows trade existed between China and east Africa decades before European explorers set sail and changed the map of the world.
The coin, a small disk of copper and silver with a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt, is called “Yongle Tongbao” and was issued by Emperor Yongle who reigned from 1403-1425AD during the Ming Dynasty.
The emperor’s name is written on the coin, making it easy to date. Emperor Yongle, who started construction of China’s Forbidden City, was interested in political and trade missions to the lands that ring the Indian Ocean and sent Admiral Zheng He, also known as Cheng Ho, to explore those shores.
“Zheng He was, in many ways, the Christopher Columbus of China,” said Dr. Kusimba, Curator of African Anthropology at The Field Museum. “It’s wonderful to have a coin that may ultimately prove he came to Kenya,” he added.
Dr. Kusimba continued, “This finding is significant. We know Africa has always been connected to the rest of the world, but this coin opens a discussion about the relationship between China and Indian Ocean nations.”
That relationship stopped soon after Emperor Yongle’s death when later Chinese rulers banned foreign expeditions, allowing European explorers to dominate the Age of Discovery and expand their countries’ empires.
The island of Manda, off the northern coast of Kenya, was home to an advanced civilization from about 200AD to 1430AD, when it was abandoned and never inhabited again. Trade played an important role in the development of Manda, and this coin may show trade’s importance on the island dating back to much earlier than previously thought.
“We hope this and future expeditions to Manda will play a crucial role in showing how market-based exchange and urban-centered political economies arise and how they can be studied through biological, linguistic, and historical methodologies,” Dr. Kusimba said.
Other researchers who participated in the expedition to Manda include Dr. Janet Monge from the University of Pennsylvania, Mohammed Mchulla, staff scientist at Fort Jesus National Museums of Kenya and Dr. Amelia Hubbard from Wright State University. Also involved was Professor Tiequan Zhu of Sun Yat-Sen University, who identified the coin. The researchers also found human remains and other artifacts that predate the coin.
In 1901 in Khotan on his way back from his first expedition to Central Asia, Aurel Stein tracked down and questioned Islum Akhun about his manuscript forgeries. These had been sold as genuine fragments to the Russian and British Consuls in Kashgar by Islam Akhun and his colleague for about a decade. Islum Akhun gave a detailed description of how he made the forgeries, including the dyeing process.
‘The sheets of modern Khotan paper were first dyed yellow or light brown by means of ‘Toghrugha’, a product of the Toghrak (or Toghraq) tree, which, when dissolved in water, gives a staining fluid.’ (M. Aurel Stein, Ancient Khotan, 512).
‘Toghraq’ is the Uygur name for the black poplar tree (Populus euphratica Oliv., Populus diversifolia Schrenk, Huyang 胡杨 in Chinese) and ‘Toghrugha’ refers to its sap. When the bark is cut the sap flows and forms into lumps. This has traditionally been used by the Uygurs as baking soda in cooking and in soap, and is listed as a medicine in Uygur and Chinese materia medica, but its use as a dye was also known.
IDP received samples of various parts of the Toghrak tree some years ago from a scholar in Xinjiang and recently Richard A. Laursen, Professor Emeritus in Bioorganic and Protein Chemistry at Boston University, agreed to analyze them. However, none were found to contain colorants. They did however produce a dark liquid that could have been used, like tea, to stain the paper brown.
Professor Laursen reports that there is also some evidence that the leaves are used to prepare a yellow dye, as chromatographic profiles of extracts of textiles from Cherchen and Loulan are similar to those from a related poplar tree from the region, Populus pruinosa Schrenk, and not to other known sources of yellow dyes.
For an audioboo of the sound of walking over autumnal Toghrak leaves on IDP's 2011 Field Trip on route back from Karadong, see below:
A photo exhibition titled “Cultural Landmarks of the Mongol Empire” opened at the Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery on February 28, displaying photographs of key monuments established during the Great Mongol Empire at sites in Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
The exhibition was jointly organized by the Office of the President, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the “Diaspora Mongols” non-governmental organization, and the Council of Mongolian Architects, in the frame of the National Program for Mongol Studies, under the auspices of the President of Mongolia.
Adviser to the President, R.Bold, gave the inaugural speech at the opening ceremony, explaining the importance of the exhibition in raising awareness of Mongolia’s astounding history and heritage.
Visitors to the exhibition can see photographs of monuments such as the tomb of Zuchi Khaan in Kazakhstan; the remains of the Astrology Center in Iran, which was established by Khulegu Khaan; the Astrology Center in China which was established by Khubilai Khaan, founder of the Yuan Dynasty; the Astrology Center in Uzbekistan, which was established by Ulugbekh; the remains of the Summer Palace in Iran, which was established by Argu Khaan; the Mausoleum of Ulziit Khaan in Iran; and the tomb of Tumur Khaan in Uzbekistan. Visitors to the exhibition can also see coins designed by the Mongol Khaans and photographs of ‘Mongol Era’ handicrafts from Central Asia.
The exhibition displays the enormity and range of the Mongol Empire and presents Mongolia’s proud history and heritage. Anyone interested in viewing the remarkable vestiges of the Great Mongol Empire, should visit the exhibition.
In 2002, photographer Lisa Ross found herself far away from home — in the remote Taklamakan Desert of western China, in what is known as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
"I was looking for something," she says, but "I didn't know what I was looking for."
She had been visiting a friend in Beijing but ventured out to the desert on her own. That's where she first encountered mazars: handmade holy sites in Sufi Islam, built to commemorate saints who are buried there.
Several trips to China and about a decade later, Ross now has a book out — as well as a show at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City: Living Shrines of Uyghur China.
The Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) are Muslims who live in this remote part of China. And these sites are tributes to saints, who in their lifetime were deemed to have healing power that they carried to the grave.
The shrines are located sporadically throughout the sprawling region and are often unmarked. Some of them, Ross says, are easily 500 years old. The sites serve as destinations for pilgrims — who leave offerings in exchange for healing.
But in Ross's quiet, lonely photos, the pilgrims are obviously missing.
"Intimacy was very important to me," she says. "I couldn't really make intimate photographs of people I didn't know. I wanted to photograph the landscape as if I were making a portrait."
The shrines aren't always easy to find — especially for an outsider. It's not like there's a handy map to the region. The closest thing Ross found was a 2001 hagiography (or a biography of saints) written in the Uighur language by local scholar Rahila Dawut.
With that as a basic guide, Ross traversed the desert by rickety bus, donkey and foot — accompanied first by historian Alexandre Papas, and later by Dawut and her students.
They managed to find dozens of shrines — but another thing Ross excludes from her photos is the specific location: "As much as it would be awesome for as many people to see these things in person, it would also endanger their existence."
This part of the world is modernizing, and that could jeopardize some of these places and the traditions. But Ross has captured something that will endure: The spirit of a place.
Play Video
