Sinologist Vasily Alekseev, in 1907 he travelled again to China, photographing
and documenting antiquities and recording many ancient inscriptions by
collecting rubbings of them, a practice invented by Chinese epigraphers in
the Sung period (960–1279). His last work was a monograph on the Tai-shan
mountain (1910) as a focus of state ritual and local belief. Chavannes had not
been theWrst explorer to visit sites in China, although his interest was
certainly more focused than that of his predecessors, mainly explorers, who
combined ancient art with geography, cartography,Xora, and fauna.
Antiquities in the Age of the Explorers: the Silk Road, Dunhuang,
and the Khotan areaThe treaties signed in Beijing in 1860 had opened China to Europeans. The
Wrst visits in the area were undertaken by individuals supported by the
imperial powers: Russia, Britain, France and Germany, followed later by
the US. They would compete with each other to bring back to Europe as
many antiquities and documents as they could which would then be bought
by various museums and libraries. The sites of Khotan and the Cave of the
Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang would be of key importance in theWrst
years of Western exploration into China’s antiquities. Both were connected to
the Silk Road and had manuscripts, which enabled a link to be made between
philology, the study of comparative religions (mainly Buddhism) and an-
tiquities. The Silk Road, a term coined by the German geographer Ferdinand
von Richthofen 13 (1833–1905), had been a network of trade routes mainly
operative in theWrst millenniumcein which silk, as well as many other goods,
on some occasions travelled great distances. The route linked together China,
India, Persia, and had reached into Europe since antiquity. Most merchants
only moved short distances and those who travelled its whole length were very
rare. At one end the Silk Road reached the western frontier of China. To the
south it crossed the wasteland of the Tarim basin and joined with several other
branches at the city of Kashgar, in the region of Khotan, the entry to Kashmir
towards India (map 2).
Khotan occupied the southern part of the Silk Road in an oasis of the
Taklamakan Desert, in Xinjiang. It was located in the east–west corridor
connecting China with Afghanistan and Pakistan. TheWrst Westerner to arrive
in the area, in 1865, was a writer, William Johnson, who, despite mentioning
13 From 1868 von Richthofen crossed China in a series of seven journeys studying its
geological structure. His research would be key in Ding Wenjiang’sWrst years as head of the
Geological Survey of China (Furth 1970: 39–40).
192 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism