Buddhist paintings on silk and the world’s oldest printed document, the
Diamond Sutra, dating to 863ce. He was apparently able to smuggle all
these documents away by bribing the Abbot, Wang Yuanlu, the leader of the
monastic group in charge of the caves, and carried away thousands of
manuscripts back to Britain (Hopkirk 1980: ch. 12; Wood 2004: 199–200).
The study of the Dunhuang manuscripts would begin in earnest with the
French Sinologist Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) (Debaine-Francfort 1999: 20–4).
Having learned Chinese under Chavannes at the E ́cole des langues orientales,
in 1900 he arrived as a research scholar at the E ́cole Franc ̧aise Extreˆme-Orient
in Hanoi, where he was put in charge of forming the Chinese collection in the
library. As early as 1901 he had risen to the rank of Professor of Chinese. He
returned to France to represent the E ́cole at the fourteenth International
Congress of Orientalists held in Algiers in 1905, where he was selected to direct
an expedition to Xinjiang. Pelliot studied several archaeological sites on this
expedition but the most important part of his trip was his work in Dunhuang.
In 1910 he stayed there and systematically examined the cave of Mogao. With
his permission he entered Wang Yuanlu’s secret chamber. After three weeks of
analysing the manuscripts he was able to convince the Abbot to sell him a
selection. Wang’s plans for the refurbishment of his monastery impelled him
to agree. The documents, now in the Collection Pelliot at the Bibliotheque Nationale, were not the only purchase. About 230 paintings on silk, cotton, and hemp cloth and aboutWfty sculptures from the cave were deposited in the Muse ́e Guimet. In 1911 a special chair in Languages, History, and Archaeology of Central Asia was created for Pelliot at the College de France. With his works,
Pelliot greatly contributed to the study of the languages and the history of
religions and cultures of that area. His attention mainly focused on Maniche-
ism, Nestorianism and the history of the Mongol Empire and he paid particu-
lar attention to the analysis of Iranian inXuences on Central Asia (Gie`s 1996;
Hopkirk 1980; Walravens 2001; Wood 2004: ch. 14).
Pelliot was not the only one to send many objects back to Europe. The Russian
explorer, Kozlov, sent about 3500 objects he found in 1908 to St Petersburg, all
datingfrombefore1387.ThesewerefoundintheexcavationsofaBuddhiststupain
the lost city of Khara Khoto, the ‘Black City’ on the Edsin-Gol river delta, near the
border between China and Mongolia. Once in Russia theWnds were divided: the art
works went to the Russian Museum, and from there to the Hermitage, and the
books and manuscripts to the Asiatic Museum of the Russian Academy of Science
(Norman 1997: 97–9). The number of objects obtained by other scholars, however,
was much higher. It has been calculated that Stein sent to museums—the British
documents, and studied the frescoes at Domoko (Wood 2004: 198–203). Stein would undertake
two more expeditions, the third in 1813–16, in which he visited Dunhuang once again, and the
fourth, nowWnanced by Harvard University, in 1930.Latin America, China, and Japan 195