Chinese who stole the cultural relics of the Mogao Caves, Li Shengduo

Chinese who stole the cultural relics of the Mogao Caves, Li Shengduo.

Li Shengduo's life spanned two centuries, that is, he served as the inspector of the Qing Dynasty and the speaker of the Republic of China government, and his career experience can be described as rich. In his spare time in politics, One of Li Shengduo's hobbies was collecting cultural relics, and he was one of the most prestigious bibliophiles in modern China, along with Ye Gongqi, Luo Zhenyu, and Fu Zengxiang, who was called the four major bibliophiles in modern times, and even the Yongle Canon was in Li Shengduo's collection list.

Li Shengduo's other identity is the first person in Dunhuang's private collection of documents, and the first person to counterfeit cultural relics in the Mogao Caves.

The story began with Stein and Bo Xi and the cultural relics of the Mogao Caves that were taken away, which attracted the attention of scholars at home and abroad, and the Qing government was also greatly shocked at the time, so it sent people to transport all the remaining scrolls to Beijing.

The official in charge of transportation affairs was Li Shengduo, who happened to be an expert again, so he waved a big hand and led the sheep.

According to Wang Yao's description in Approaching Tibetan Buddhism, however, on the way, Li Shengduo tore some scrolls in half to a sufficient total, and appropriated some of them for himself. When he handed it over to the imperial court, the number was not small, but many of the scrolls were already incomplete. This part of the volume was later collected into the Beijing Library (now the National Library). He later hired someone in Tianjin to copy the scrolls to make fakes, so many of the fakes in the dunhuang scrolls later originated from him.