Wang Daoshi is a native of Macheng, Hubei Province, Wang Yuanlu is also. He was a soldier in Gansu, and then deserted, became a Taoist priest in order to make a living, and went all the way to the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. The Mogao Grottoes were originally based on Buddhism, which can be described as the "Pure Land of Zen Forest with True Fragrance and Enlightenment", but such a Taoist priest appeared out of thin air, and the world is really strange. Let's switch back in time, there is a Christian cemetery on the outskirts of Kabul, the Afghan capital, thousands of kilometers away, where a foreigner named Stein is buried.
If we talk about the discovery of the Dunhuang Testament (Zhao Chengjin Collection, Yongle Dadian and Siku Quanshu), one of the four major collections of the National Library of China, it is impossible to avoid a person named Wang Yuanlu. Talking about Wang Yuanlu, we must talk about the famous Dunhuang Tibetan Scripture Cave and the outflow of cultural relics from the Tibetan Scripture Cave. It can be said that through the writings of Westerners such as Stein, Bo Xihe, etc., the "Wang Daoist" has long been familiar to the academic community in the world. In terms of its popularity, it is no less than Qu Yuan, a world celebrity from Hubei, and to some extent, it can be said that Wang Daoshi is a world celebrity. Coupled with the long-term rendering and interpretation of literary and artistic works and news media, "Wang Daoshi" can also be regarded as a household name in contemporary China. However, not everyone knows about a real Wang Daoist and the real people and true facts about Wang Yuanlu.
Wang Yuanlu (c. 1849-1931), whose real name was Yuanzhen (元箓), was a yuanlu and a yuanzhen. Hubei Macheng people. It is said that in his early years, his family was poor and he was displaced. In the early years of Qing Guangxu, he entered the Suzhou Patrol Battalion as a soldier and followed Taoism. After leaving the Qing army barracks, he was ordained as Dao Tu (道土), with the Dao number Fa Zhen (法真), and the Dao people revered him as "Wang Fa Zhen". For the sake of convenience, laymen used to call them "Wang Daoshi" or "Wang Daoren". He traveled as far as Xinjiang. Around the 23rd year of Guangxu (1897), when he arrived at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, although the Mogao Grottoes were already depressed, the incense of the monastery was still intermittent because of the support of the people. The Mogao Caves, carved into the east cliff of Mingsha Mountain, due to the long years of blowing of the northwest wind, the quicksand continued to spread down from the cave roof, and the cave entrance yongdao was full of sand, and the entire cave door was sealed. Wang Daoist then cleaned up sand and stones in the northern part of the southern area of Mogao Grottoes, offered incense, received alms, and made four sermons and made small savings, so he built the Taiqing Palace Taoist Temple (now the "Lower Temple") on the east side of Cave 16 of Mogao Grottoes. He also hired Yang Guo, a poor man in Dunhuang, as a copywriter, and copied the scriptures in winter and spring for sale. Because of the arrival of incense pilgrims from the mountains, Yang Guo was now numbered as Cave 16 YongDao to set up a case, receive pilgrims, write seals, collect alms, and register them. As a result, this black, thin and dry Taoist priest dramatically became the "head" of the Buddhist family in the Mogao Caves.
Opportunity also pays special attention to this industrious and simple Hubei person. On May 25, 1900 (June 21, 1900), Wang Yuanlu's subordinate Yang Guo sat in the Yongdao of Cave 16 and prostrated his cigarette pot on the north wall, feeling that there was an empty echo, suspecting that there was a secret room, and immediately told Wang Daoshi. Wang Daoshi then broke through the wall in the middle of the night and found another ear chamber that was more than 2 meters high and an area of about 3 meters square, and this ear chamber was impressively piled with various ancient suicide notes and other cultural relics from the 4th to the 11th centuries, and this was the Tibetan Scripture Cave, which was later numbered Cave No. 17 (these stone chamber suicide notes, plus other caves in the Mogao Caves and some of the writing volumes and manuscripts found nearby, collectively known as the Dunhuang Testament. ), the treasure of Dunhuang has since reappeared. So much so that the history of world cultural discovery in the 20th century recorded such a text: Wang Yuanlu Daoist discovered the Dunhuang Tibetan Scripture Cave.
Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes is 25 kilometers southeast of Dunhuang City. According to the records: after the opening of the Silk Road, Dunhuang in Gansu Province became an important transportation center between the East and the West in ancient times. Many monks translated and lectured here and excavated grottoes, forming the famous Dunhuang Grottoes. In 1035, the Western Xia Kingdom attacked Dunhuang, and the monks fled to escape the chaos of the war. Before leaving, they hid the Buddha statues, sutra scrolls, silk paintings and other objects that were inconvenient to take away in the cave, and built earthen walls outside and decorated them with murals on the earthen walls to make it difficult to find. Since then, these cultural relics have been sealed in the cave for nearly 900 years, until Wang Yuanlu Daoist accidentally discovered the Tibetan scripture cave.
After the discovery of the Tibetan Scripture Cave, Wang Daoshi walked 50 miles to the county seat to find Ling Yanze of Dunhuang County, and presented two volumes of scriptures taken from the Tibetan Scripture Cave. It is a pity that this Yan Zhixian did not learn any techniques, and regarded these two volumes of scriptures as just two yellowed pieces of waste paper. This is the beginning of the outflow of cultural relics from the Cave. In the twenty-eighth year of Guangxu (1902), the third year after the discovery of the Tibetan Scripture Cave, Wang Daoshi again reported the situation of the Tibetan Scripture Cave to Wang Zonghan, a new Hubei native of ZhiXian County, and Wang Zhixian immediately took a group of people and horses, personally went to the Mogao Caves to inspect, and conveniently picked up a few scrolls of scriptures to take away, and left Wang Daoshi to seal them on the spot.
But Wang Daoist was still unwilling. Therefore, he picked two boxes of scripture scrolls from the Tibetan scripture cave, traveled more than 800 miles to Suzhou (Jiuquan), and found the Daotai Tingdong, who was then the Ansu Military Preparation Road, but the rather conceited Manchu bureaucrat only felt that the calligraphy of these ancient scriptures was not as good as his own, and expressed no interest in it.
Due to the ineffective sealing measures, wang Daoist priests superficially promised, but in fact continued to take out the scriptures from the cave and sell them quietly. Until the collection of the Tibetan Scripture Cave was shipped abroad, resulting in a large outflow of Dunhuang testaments, the authorities still did not know anything.
In November of the 29th year of Guangxu (1903) and in April and August of the thirtieth year of Guangxu, Ye Changchi, then a scholar of Gansu, was given a scroll and a portrait of the scriptures and portraits by Wang Zonghan of Dunhuang County (in order to enrich the book "Yushi" that Ye Changchi was writing), but the information conveyed by Wang Zonghan was extremely inaccurate, saying that there were only a few hundred scrolls in the cave, and it seemed that it had been divided. Therefore, although Ye Changchi saw at a glance the value of the Tibetan Scripture Cave Scripture Scrolls, he never took a step towards Dunhuang. However, Tingdong, who had a cold attitude toward Wang Daoshi, later really reported the news of the Tibetan Scripture Cave to the Gansu Fantai and suggested that the ClanTai transport this treasure to the province for proper storage, but the Gansu Fantai gave Wang Zonghan only an order: "Seal it on the spot and be guarded by Wang Daoshi." Therefore, Wang Zonghan personally visited the Mogao Caves in March of the 30th year (1904) to carry out this order, ordering Wang Daoshi to keep it properly and not allow it to flow out. This is the first time that the government has sealed the cave. The good news is that Wang Daoshi guarded the tibetan scripture cave very tightly, and there were very few lost scrolls.
History is often such a yin and yang. Wang Daoshi guarded so many ancient scriptures and scrolls for a long time, thinking about how to use it in exchange for some "incense money", in the thirty-second year of Guangxu (1906), Wang Daoshi built a three-story pavilion in front of the large cave where the Tibetan Scripture Cave was located, and there is a record of the "Record of Meritorious Deeds of Rebuilding the Three Floors of the Thousand Buddha Cave". What is even more tragic is that Wang Daoshi, in order to raise funds for the construction of the Taoist Temple, sold all the Dunhuang cultural relics to Stein and other foreigners at an extremely cheap price, totaling ninety-seven boxes of scripture scrolls, nineteen boxes of woven scrolls, twenty boxes of paintings, and thirty-seven Tang sculptures. Since then, he has been criticized and scolded by the world.
Stein first came to Dunhuang on March 12, 1907, the thirty-third year of Guangxu. Because he did not speak Chinese, when he first communicated with Wang Daoshi, Wang Daoshi only agreed to accept Stein's generosity, wanted to see the manuscript, and the request to buy a few books was politely rejected. Through observation, Stein discovered that "although wang Daoists knew very little about Buddhism, they worshiped the Tang monks." So, in the Taoist temple hall full of legends of the Tang monks from the hands of local painters, Stein talked to Wang Daoist about his worship of Xuanzang, and he even said in an almost superstitious tone that it was the spirit of the Tang monks in heaven who entrusted these secret chamber scriptures to Wang Yuanzhen, who knew nothing about the Buddhist scriptures, in the name of waiting for himself, an admirer and loyal disciple of the Tang monks from India, that is, "tang monks", to deceive Wang Dao's trust. Apparently, Wang Yuanzhen was "fooled" by Stein. Although the two had a common topic, Wang Daoshi still insisted that Stein not enter the cave, but personally took out a bundle of scripture scrolls and sent them to the ear room of the main hall for him to read. In the end, he accepted Stein's offer and sold all the scrolls and paintings selected by Stein for 40 horseshoe silver (200 taels of silver), and added 60 bundles of Chinese scrolls and 5 bundles of Tibetan scrolls. When Stein left the Mogao Caves, only the scrolls were filled with 24 boxes, and the exquisite silk paintings and embroidered artworks and other cultural relics were filled with 5 large boxes. After the cleanup, there were 7,000 complete volumes, 6,000 mutilated, and a large number of other cultural relics, setting a precedent for a large number of Dunhuang suicide notes to flow abroad. Because Stein didn't understand Chinese, there were a lot of worthless things in the documents he took with him.
The British-Hungarian Stein had just walked on the front foot, and the Frenchman Paul. Bo Xihe came to Dunhuang again.
In February of the thirty-fourth year of Guangxu (1908), Bo Xihe arrived in Dunhuang. Here Bo Xihe negotiated with Wang Daoshi, and Bo Xihe and his fluent Chinese soon won the favor of Wang Daoshi, and Wang Daoshi learned from the conversation that Bo Xihe did not know that he had sold a large number of manuscripts to Stein, so he was satisfied with the foreigners' promises. Bo Xihe also used the method of money seduction, promising to give Wang Daoshi a sum of incense money. After about twenty days of negotiations, on March 3, Bo Xihe was introduced to the cave and allowed to choose from the cave. This is the second time that foreigners have entered the Tibetan Scripture Cave after Stein, and after three weeks of investigating the documents of the Tibetan Scripture Cave, Bo Xihe finally exchanged 500 taels of silver for more than 6,000 fine works and 38 large-scale paintings such as tibetan scriptures, prints, scripture scrolls, and documents, and took 376 pictures of the Mogao Caves. Although Bo Xihe and Stein arrived at the cave a year later, Stein was not able to enter the cave to select and see the entire collection, while Bo Xihe was different, not only did he personally enter the cave to review all the collections, but Bo Xihe was an expert in sinology and spoke at least 13 languages. With a wealth of knowledge of Chinese and Central Asian historical documents, the number of suicide notes obtained is not as good as Stein's, but almost all of them are fine. Bo Xihe later said in a speech: "Of the nearly twenty thousand volumes, I regret that I missed one." ”
Bo Xihe came to Beijing in May 1909 after transporting the scrolls he had obtained by sea to Paris. Knowing that the Qing Dynasty Academy was preparing to build the Beijing Normal Library and was "looking for various ancient books to preserve the essence of the country", I don't know if he was showing off or some other psychology, Bo Xihe carried some Dunhuang rare books with him, such as "Shang Shu Interpretation", "Shazhou Tujing", "Hui Chao to the Five Heavens Zhu Guo Biography", "Dunhuang Stele Zan Collection" and so on at the Six Kingdoms Hotel in Beijing. At that time, Bao Xi, the head of the Faculty, Liu Tingchen, the general supervisor of the Beijing Normal University Hall, Ke Shaoyi, the supervisor of the Economics Department of the Beijing Normal University Hall, Yun Yuding, the attendant of the Hanlin Academy, Jiang Han, the counselor of the Faculty, Wang Renjun, the teacher of the Beijing Normal University and the deputy director of the Compilation Bureau of the Faculty, Jiang Axe, the teacher of the Beijing Normal University, And Xu Fang, the guozi, and the well-known scholars Luo Zhenyu and Dong Kang all went to visit. After these officials and scholars in the capital saw Dunhuang's written copies of the LaoziHua Hu Jing and the Dead Scrolls of the Book of Shangshu, they were "surprised and mad, as if they were dreaming", and first learned that there were major discoveries in Dunhuang, Gansu.
On September 4, Beijing normal scholars hosted a banquet at the Six Kingdoms Hotel, attended by Bao Xi, the head of the Faculty of Studies, Liu Tingchen, the general supervisor of the Beijing Normal University Hall, as well as Dong Kang and Wu Yinchen, mainly a group of scholars from the Beijing Normal University Hall. At the reception, Yun Yuding formally put forward the request to photocopy the essential version of it in his speech, and Bo Xihe said that he "can do it himself." The specific implementer is Luo Zhenyu. Luo Zhenyu also asked Duan Fang for help, and urged Bo Xihe to sell the photos of the four important books that he had brought and had been transported back to China, and Bo Xihe and as promised, sent them one after another, and Duan Fang handed them over to Luo Zhenyu and Liu Shipei for interpretation. During the Mid-Autumn Festival of the same year, Luo Zhenyu visited Bo xihe and Suzhou Hutong for the first time, and then learned that there were still about 8,000 scrolls in the Dunhuang Stone Chamber, but most of them were Buddhist scriptures. Luo Zhenyu immediately reported to Qiao Maonan, the head of the Academy, and Luo Dai drew up a telegram ordering Mao Qingfan, the governor of Shaanxi and Gansu and the governor of Gansu, to immediately seal the Dunhuang Tibetan Scripture Cave, and to release all the remaining suicide notes to the Beijing Division, and transfer them to the Beijing Normal Library (the predecessor of the present-day National Library of China). After the Gansu side received a telegram from the Academic Department, He Yansheng, the gansu clan and acting inspector, had just arrived at his post, and he ordered Chen Zefan of Dunhuang ZhiXian to check the remaining scriptures and release the Jingshi. At the same time, Wang Daoshi stole some of them and hid them while the government was rushing to transport them. At this time, it had been exactly 9 years since the discovery of the Cave.
In the second year of Xuan reunification (1910), the relics of Dunhuang were shipped from Dunhuang. Chen Zefan sent Fu Baoshu and Wu Xiangchen to be responsible for escorting coal trucks. Facts have proved that Fu Baoshu and Wu Xiangchen did not do their best during the escort process, and the Dunhuang scrolls they passed through were selected by local officials, and almost everywhere they went, a part was stolen, and in order to hide their eyes and ears, one scroll was torn open and turned into two volumes, and the Dunhuang testament was seriously damaged. After that, it was handed over to the Faculty, with a total of 18 boxes and a number of 8679 volumes. However, this act of splitting the scriptures to fill the number of pieces was soon exposed. At that time, baoxi, the attendant of the faculty, found that there was a problem with the scrolls transporting the faculty, so he wrote a note and the Fu Baoshu who was responsible for escorting the transport was detained. Only because of the Xinhai Revolution, the officials of the Qing Dynasty had no time to take care of themselves, and had no choice but to release Fu Baoshu back to Gansu, and the matter was not resolved. Therefore, when we rightly accuse foreign explorers, we can't help but feel more hurt and embarrassed in our hearts.
Around the same year, Wang Daoshi dug passages in dozens of caves, connecting the caves and destroying a large number of murals. And build the "Ancient Han Bridge" to facilitate the pilgrimage to the mountain to worship the Buddha. He also moved out the remnants of each cave to build the "Thousand Phase Pagoda", and Ting Dong wrote and wrote Dan's "Dunhuang Thousand Buddha Cave Thousand Phase Pagoda" stele to record his deeds. In October of the first year of the Republic of China (1912), The Japanese Koichiro Yoshikawa waited for the Mogao Caves and used 350 silver to fraudulently buy more than 400 volumes of scriptures and two Tang sculptures.
The loss of a large number of scripture scrolls once made Wang Daoshi feel very sad, because he had discovered the cave of the scriptures, and for many years during his custody, there had never been a large amount of loss for no reason, and the official plundering and greediness made him feel extremely indignant. Therefore, when Stein arrived at the Mogao Caves for the second time in 1914, Wang Daoshi said a thought-provoking sentence to Stein, which is recorded in the Archaeological Records of Stein's Western Regions: "Speaking of the official government's damage caused by the removal of his beloved Chinese scrolls, he regretted that he did not have the courage and courage at that time, listened to Master Jiang's words, accepted a large sum of money from me, and gave me the entire collection of books." After being harassed by the government, he was so frightened that he hid his Chinese manuscript, which he regarded as particularly valuable, in a safe place. In Wang Daoshi's view, he would rather sell all the scrolls to Stein for preservation intact, or keep them in his own possession, rather than let the scrolls suffer from this disaster. At this time, Wang Daoshi sentenced two people before and after, which made it difficult to speak, so Stan used silver 500 taels to buy more than 570 Chinese writing scrolls in Private Collection of Wang Daoshi. These scrolls were specially collected by Wang Yuanzhen, and they are all complete long scrolls with extremely high value. In the same year, the Russians Oldenburg took a batch of scripture manuscripts from Dunhuang, and surveyed the caves, and also stole the frescoes of Cave 263.
When the American Warner came to the Mogao Caves, the mood and practice of wang Daoist were completely different. In 1924, because the Tibetan scripture cave was empty at that time, and the inventory in the hands of Wang Daoshi had long been sold out, Warner shifted his target and set his sights on the murals and painted sculptures in the Mogao Caves, he gave Wang Daoshi a little gift, gave a little silver money, and Wang Daoshi turned a blind eye to Warner's pasting and destroying the murals and removing the painted sculptures, which can be said to be a familiar blind eye. It is completely contrary to the behavior he advocated repairing the Buddhist caves, pushing sand and sweeping the caves, and constantly protecting the Thousand Buddhas Cave and turning the relationship to the common people. It is necessary to explain that the earliest loss of cultural relics in the Cave was in October 1905, when the Russian Bluchev exchanged a little Russian goods for a large number of documents and scriptures; the last one was the British Ba Shensi on March 22, 1935, as a special correspondent of the English Beiping Pingshi Daily (a party newspaper directly under the central government of the Kuomintang), who went to Dunhuang thousand Buddha Caves to "travel" as a special reporter. Indignantly, when Watching and browsing, Papa actually took advantage of the people who were not prepared, and used iron tools to steal the "good statue" in the cave and hide it in the car, in an attempt to transport it out and take it away. Fortunately, it was prevented by detection and ultimately failed. Immediately afterwards, Basshinsi was escorted to the Anxi County Government, where he was sent to Jiuquan via Yumen on May 9. This is a postscript.
At this point, most of the Tibetan scriptures were robbed abroad, and the dunhuang treasures are still artificially scattered around the world. Under the temptation of outsiders, Wang Daoshi guarded himself and illegally sold cultural relics, and the people who counted the emperors received 1550 taels of silver, and the income raised over the years became a huge wealth in Dunhuang. It was planned to rebuild the ninth floor of the Great Buddha Hall in Cave 96.
Undoubtedly, Wang Yuanlu played a key role in the important event of the loss of mogao cave scriptures and scattered overseas, which is also an important reason why he was criticized by posterity. Although before Stein's arrival in 1907, no matter how much the Royal Daoist shouted, no one paid attention to it. However, it is difficult to define the nature of Wang's behavior, after all, to a large extent, he worships the Buddha and emphasizes the Tao, and even uses the money from selling the scriptures to build a temple. In evaluating Wang Daoshi's handling of the cultural relics of the Tibetan Scripture Cave, Wang Daoshi's "economic interests" and "vanity psychology" should play a considerable role, especially when Wang Daoshi was raising funds for the Sanqing Palace, so that the originally cautious Wang Daoist was desperate to actively cooperate with Stein. Previously, he had carried out only a very small amount of bribery and giving activities in one volume and two volumes. In "Dunhuang of Mankind", there is a direct evaluation of him: "He was regarded by the cultural relics community as a historical model of ignorant and ignorant 'destructive protection'", which is perhaps the most appropriate evaluation of him.
Looking at Wang Daoshi's life, childhood and adolescence and youth were spent in hunger and misery, middle-aged waves, helpless to steal life in the barracks, and there was no way to grow hair for the Tao, although later in the Mogao Grottoes for a while, but in the end he himself also knew that what he did was not a matter of accumulating merit, and the foreigners finally deceived this shrewd Hubei Yankee again and again, especially by the local people. In fact, Wang Daoshi was indeed crazy in his later years, or at least because of his crimes, he had to rely on pretending to be crazy to spend his old age. The miserable scene of Wang Daoshi's later years can be imagined from this. On July 30, 1931, Wang Daoshi died at the age of 80 and was buried on the east bank of the Daquan River in front of the Mogao Cave Temple. According to the Taoist precepts, the Taoist priest should not build a pagoda after death, but Wang Daoshi's disciples and disciples still built a very grand Daotu pagoda for him and erected a meritorious wooden monument. The pagoda tablet records the process of Wang Daoist discovering the cave. This pagoda has become a scene of the Mogao Caves today, whether as a merit pagoda, or a memorial tower, or a pillar of shame for wang Daoists, it has become a historical record. With a humble body, wang Daoist could be satisfied no matter what. When we see this Pagoda of Daotu standing tall in the land of the Buddha, we have indescribable emotions in our hearts.
Looking back on the past hundred years, the vicissitudes of the sea. Wang Daoshi guarded the Mogao Caves for more than 30 years and dedicated his life to the holy places that did not belong to him. Leaving aside the fact that Wang Daoshi sold the cultural relics of the Mogao Grottoes to foreigners, however, the money he used to repair the Mogao Grottoes, clean up the sand, and repair the dilapidated temples, so that people can see the living Mogao Grottoes Thousand Buddha Caves today, which undoubtedly has a credit to wang Daoists. Although his actions caused great losses to Dunhuang cultural relics, they also objectively created Dunhuang Studies. May we face up to that period of history and have a fair evaluation of Wang Daotu to comfort him in the spirit of heaven.
Wang Yuanlu, a small person who was originally unknown, was famous for a hundred years because of the discovery of the Mogao Caves! This cannot but be said to be a historical coincidence and coincidence, and it is even more a ruthless trick of history!
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The first British-Hungarian, Stein, in 1907, in the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, cheaply purchased 24 boxes of Dunhuang literature, 5 boxes of posthumous paintings and silk fabrics from Wang Yuanzhen, and photographed the murals of the Mogao Grottoes. Between 1913 and 1915, he went to Dunhuang again and fraudulently purchased more than 570 Dunhuang manuscripts and some wood carvings and painted sculptures from Wang Yuanzhen. These Dunhuang documents and paintings are in the collections of the British Museum in London, the British Library, and the Museum of Central Asian Antiquities in Delhi, India.
The second was the Frenchman Bo Xihe, who led a Central Asian expedition into the northern silk road of Xinjiang from 1906 to 1908, and went to the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, copied the inscriptions of the murals, photographed the murals, and fraudulently purchased 6,000 volumes of manuscripts, printed scriptures, documents, and paintings from Wang Yuanzhen, and transported them to Paris, where the manuscripts were entered into the Oriental Department of the French National Library in Tibet, and the textiles were collected in the Museum of Asian Art in Tibet.
The third is the Russian O'Denver, also translated as Oldenburg, who organized a visit to Dunhuang and other places in 1914-1915 and obtained a large number of Dunhuang documents and other cultural relics, which are now in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the State Hermitage Museum.
The fourth is the Japanese Koichiro Yoshikawa, who bought 7 volumes of Buddhist scriptures from villagers three times in Dunhuang from 1911 to 1912, and defrauded Wang Yuanzhen twice of 169 volumes and 200 volumes of Buddhist scriptures, snatched two statues, and is now in the National Museum of Korea.
There was also an American Warner, who went to Dunhuang in the first time in 1924, applied adhesive-coated tape to the surface of the murals of the Mogao Caves, peeled off more than ten Tang Dynasty murals, and together with the painted statues to offer bodhisattvas and other two bodies, they were put together in the Fogg Museum of Art in tibet and now transferred to the Sackler Museum. In addition, fragments of the Dunhuang document "Miaofa Lotus Sutra" were also purchased. In 1925, he organized another expedition to Dunhuang to try to peel off the cave paintings, but was prevented and failed.
How much do you know about the Dunhuang Testament?
According to statistics, about 50,000 Dunhuang cultural relics are preserved in China, while more than 30,000 are collected abroad. Among them, the British Museum has a collection of 13,700 pieces, the Paris Library in France has 6,000 pieces, Russia has 12,000 pieces, and Japan, the United States, Sweden, Austria, and South Korea also have Dunhuang cultural relics collections. In comparison, some of the artistic value of the French collection is relatively high.
Among them, the largest collection of Dunhuang testaments is the Beijing Library in China, which has more than 10,000 suicide notes and 9803 numbers that have been sorted out and cataloged; and the National Map Collection has more than 16,000 Dunhuang testaments, accounting for about a quarter of the existing number of Dunhuang testaments.
The Oriental Writing Department of the British Library has 11297 numbers, of which 9172 have been cataloged; the National Library of Paris, France, has 6,000, the Chinese volume 4038 has been cataloged, and the Tibetan volume is about 2,000 unorcrographed; the Leningrad Institute of Asian Ethnology in the former Soviet Union is 11050, which has been cataloged 2954; and the Japanese Orange Ruichao Collection is 429.
In addition, there are 189 volumes of Lushun Museum in China, more than 100 volumes of Gansu Provincial Library, 137 pieces of Gansu Provincial Museum, 367 pieces of Dunhuang Research Institute, 78 pieces of Chinese and 226 volumes of Tibetan language of Dunhuang County Museum, 22 pieces of cultural relics of the History Department of Northwest Normal University, 182 pieces of Shanghai Museum, more than 300 pieces of Tianjin Art Museum, 153 pieces of Taiwan Central Library, and more than 20 pieces of National Taiwan History Museum.
Some libraries and museums abroad also have some suicide notes, such as the Library of the British Ministry of Indian Affairs with 765 Tibetan documents; the 38 volumes of Daiho University in Japan; 7 volumes of Ryukoku University; 163 pieces of Japanese private collector Nakamura; 28 volumes in others; 14 volumes from the Oriental Department of the Royal Library of Denmark; and 220 silk paintings in the Collection of the Guimet Museum in France. There are also some libraries with an unknown number of books, such as the Hexi Regional Museum in Gansu, China, the Institute of History and Linguistics of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, some private collectors in Taiwan also have dozens of volumes, the Kindley Library of Oxford University in the United Kingdom, the Royal Asian Society Library in the United Kingdom, and the Berlin Academy of Sciences in West Germany have more than 6,000 Chinese documents, the Seoul Museum in South Korea has more than 2,000 documents of the former Korean governor, and about 3,000 Japanese Dagu documents have an unknown number of Dunhuang documents. The Delhi Museum in India also houses a number of Tibetan documents. Sweden, Austria, the former East Germany and other countries also have their own treasures.