New Directions in 20th Century Buddhist Studies in ….pdfVIP

New Directions in 20th Century Buddhist Studies in China: Dunhuangs Mogaoku as Case Study Robert A. Jones, University of Louisville Introduction Beginning at the end of the 19th century and ending in the third decade of the twentieth century, foreign archaeological explorers mounted a number of independent and more or less systematic explorations of northwestern China, including Tibet, Xinjiang and Gansu Province. These included expeditions from Sweden, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, France and the United States. Although the territories covered were ostensibly under the control of the Qing, and later, Republican, governments, these expeditions (with the exception of a few of the later ones) were not under the control of Chinese authorities. Due to the lack of Chinese oversight, large amounts of archaeological materials were taken out of the country. In the West, modern archaeological theory and methodology were at the time still in their early stages. International treaties protecting the cultural heritage of sovereign nations did not exist. The expeditions in the west of China were in fact unregulated grabs of anything of value by the explorers, who had little to fear from the Chinese government, at least at first. Each of these expeditions possessed among their members varying degrees of expertise and competency in the archaeological arts (see Hopkirk 1980; Meyer 1999). Despite a deficiency in modern theoretical frameworks and techniques, most of these expeditions managed to discover, remove and bring back to their countries vast quantities of art and relics, the knowledge