Recent Publications on the

Art and Archaeology of Kucha
A Review Article

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S ON YA S . L EE

ab­stract  Kucha was one of the ma­jor po­lit­i­cal pow­ers and cul­tural cen­ters along the an­cient Silk
Road, home to a great num­ber of Bud­dhist cave tem­ples that have sur­vived from the time of their
­cre­a­tion some­time be­tween the third century and the eighth. Although they are not as well-known as
their coun­ter­parts in Dunhuang, the complexes at Kizil and Kumutra, among oth­ers, have pre­served
equally in­valu­able ma­te­rial ev­i­dence of the vi­brant in­ter­change of goods, ideas, and cul­tural prac­tices
that took place across the en­tire re­gion in the first mil­len­ni­um. These sites rep­re­sent the cru­cial link
with the ar­tis­tic tra­di­tions of Gandhara, In­dia, and Persia in ex­pli­cat­ing the Chi­nese ad­ap­ta­tion of a
com­plex, for­eign vi­sual cul­ture through the in­tro­duc­tion of Bud­dhism. This es­say re­views a num­ber
of sig­nif­i­cant pub­li­ca­tions on the art and ar­chae­­ol­ogy of Kucha that have appeared in the past de­cade.
Marking one of the no­ta­ble trends in Asian stud­ies to­day, the re­mark­able growth in Kucha schol­ar­ship
has been fa­cil­i­tated in one way or an­other by the open­ing of China’s Xinjiang Ui­ghur Autonomous
Region to the out­side world. The re­view fo­cuses on the com­pi­la­tions of source ma­te­ri­als, re­cep­tion
and col­lec­tion his­to­ries, and in­ter­pre­ta­tive stud­ies of source ma­te­ri­als, ex­am­in­ing each of these three
ar­eas within their proper his­tor­i­cal and his­to­rio­graph­i­cal con­texts. An ex­ten­sive re­view of Archaeologi-
cal and Visual Sources of Meditation in the Ancient Monasteries of Kuča (2015) by Angela F. Howard and
Giuseppe Vignato ap­pears in the last sec­tion of the es­say.

key­words  Silk Road, Bud­dhism, Cave Temples, Xinjiang, Material Culture

Introduction

The an­cient Silk Road con­tin­ues to cap­ture our imag­
i­na­tion to­day. Much of its al­lure lies in the mys­tique
surrounding those long-lost civ­i­li­za­tions that once
thrived in the dif ­fi­cult ter­rains, now im­mor­tal­ized in
im­ages of ruined mon­u­ments par­tially bur­ied in an
ex­otic desertscape (Figure 1). eir sen­sa­tional dis­
cov­er­ies more than a cen­tury ago showed mod­ern
so­ci­e­ties the lim­its of their knowl­edge of the world,
as this lit­tle-known part of the planet turned out to
be a well­spring of new in­for­ma­tion about the hu­man
past as well as a con­stant source of ad­ven­ture and sur­
prise. e more we learn about the high cul­tures of
the an­cient Silk Road, the clearer it has be­come that
the leg­acy of ar­tis­tic, eco­nom­ic, so­cial, and re­li­gious
ex­changes they rep­re­sent res­o­nates with our out­looks
and ex­pe­ri­ences to­day. Despite the cen­tu­ries that sep­
a­rate our time from theirs, we still feel connected to
the peo­ple who trav­eled and lived within this net­work
of oa­ses, if not only be­cause we see our­selves in a dif­
fer­ent kind of glob­al­ism and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in a far­
away land. It is lit­tle won­der that the an­cient Silk Road
has been re­peat­edly evoked to pro­mote the “One Belt,
One Road” Initiative, an am­bi­tious pro­ject for global
trade and in­fra­struc­ture build­ing in­tro­duced by Presi­
dent Xi Jinping in 2013 in a bid to re­de­fine China’s role
on the world stage as much as the very course of glob­
al­iza­tion in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­r y. While the pro­
ject’s long-term suc­cess re­mains to be seen, it has gen­

Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018

DOI 10.1215/00666637-7162255  © 2018 Asia Society

Figure 1.  Remains of monastic complex and cave temples at Simsim Caves, China, fourth–fifth century. Photograph: Sonya S. Lee.
er­ated sig­nif­i­cant changes in how cul­tural mon­u­ments
and ar­ti­facts of the an­cient Silk Road are man­aged
and stud­ied. Nowhere is the im­pact more keenly felt
than in Kucha, lo­cated at the heart of China’s Xinjiang
Ui­ghur Autonomous Region, the launching ground for
the “One Belt, One Road” Initiative.
Kucha was one of the ma­jor po­lit­i­cal pow­ers and
cul­tural cen­ters along the an­cient Silk Road, home to
a great num­ber of Bud­dhist cave tem­ples that have
sur­vived from the time of their cre­a­tion in the third
to eighth cen­tu­ries (Figure 2). Although they are not
as well-known as their coun­ter­parts in Dunhuang, the
complexes at Kizil, Kumutra, Simsim, and Kizilgargha
have pre­served equally in­valu­able ma­te­rial ev­i­dence of
the vi­brant in­ter­change of goods, ideas, and cul­tural
prac­tices that took place across the en­tire re­gion in the
first mil­len­nium ce. They are also key to un­der­stand­
ing the kind of Bud­dhism once prac­ticed in Kucha as
well as its con­nec­tions with other re­li­gious com­mu­ni­
ties in the Tarim Basin and be­yond. For his­to­ri­ans of
art and ar­chi­tec­ture, cave tem­ples of Kucha rep­re­sent
the cru­cial link with the ar­tis­tic tra­di­tions of Gand­
hara, In­dia, and Persia in ex­pli­cat­ing the Chi­nese ad­ap­
ta­tion of a com­plex, for­eign vi­sual cul­ture through the
216 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
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in­tro­duc­tion of Bud­dhism. As an in­te­gral com­po­nent
of the so-called Liangzhou model that came to dom­i­
nate the en­tire north­west­ern re­gion un­der the short-
lived Northern Liang re­gime and later the north­east
un­der the Northern Wei, Kucha con­trib­uted enor­
mously to the de­vel­op­ment of Bud­dhist art and ar­chi­
tec­ture across north China through­out the fifth cen­
tu­r y, as its unique pic­to­rial style, ico­nog­ra­phy, and
ar­chi­tec­tural de­signs were em­braced from Dunhuang
to Yungang.1
The sig­nif­i­cance of Kucha was read­ily rec­og­nized
upon its rediscovery in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tu­r y,
when Ger­man ex­plor­er-schol­ars Albert Grünwedel and
Albert von Le Coq led a se­ries of ar­chae­o­log­i­cal mis­
sions to Chi­nese Turkestan that came to be known as
the Ger­man Turfan Expeditions (1902–14). After their
return to Europe, Grünwedel and Le Coq published
re­ports on their ar­du­ous jour­neys and some of the ar­ti­
facts that they re­moved from the ar­ea, and mounted
pub­lic dis­plays of ob­jects from the col­lec­tion in their
in­sti­tu­tional base, the Museum of Ethnology in Ber­
lin, be­tween the two world wars.2 The Chi­nese be­gan
their own sci­en­tific study of the sites shortly af­ter the
founding of the People’s Republic of China. Although
well known to the ac­a­demic cir­cle, the his­tor­i­cal, ar­tis­
tic, and sci­en­tific val­ues of Kucha were not widely cel­
e­brated in China un­til the past de­cade. The suc­cess­
ful list­ing of Kizil Caves as a UNESCO World Heritage
Site in 2014—as part of a se­rial trans­na­tional in­scrip­
tion ti­tled “Silk Roads: Routes Network of Chang’an
Tianshan Corridor” that gave Xinjiang the first batch
of prop­er­ties ever to be rec­og­nized by this in­ter­na­
tional body—marked a sig­nif­i­cant turn in of ­fi­cial pol­
icy to­ward the con­ser­va­tion of the site and oth­ers in
Kucha.3 The el­e­va­tion in sta­tus brings not only more
funding and sup­port from the pro­vin­cial and state
gov­ern­ments for the lo­cal man­age­ment unit (Kucha
Research Academy, in this case), but also pres­sure from
lo­cal businesses to ac­cel­er­ate de­vel­op­ment and ex­pand
the tour­ism in­dus­try in China’s northwest fron­ti­er.
Nearly a cen­tury has passed since the first round
of ep­och-de­fin­ing ex­hi­bi­tions and stud­ies appeared in
Germany. Although there were a num­ber of im­por­tant
pub­li­ca­tions on the art and ar­chae­­ol­ogy of Kucha in
the in­ter­ven­ing years, the past de­cade has witnessed a
sig­nif­i­cant growth in the schol­ar­ship across the globe,
which has been fa­cil­i­tated in one way or an­other by
the open­ing of Xinjiang to the out­side world. Indeed,
the new wave of pub­li­ca­tions on the art and ar­chae­­
ol­ogy of Kucha con­sti­tutes one of the no­ta­ble trends
in Asian stud­ies to­day. While this in­creased schol­arly
out­put can be seen as re­lated to the con­tin­ued in­ter­
est in the an­cient Silk Road as fueled by re­cent geo­po­
lit­i­cal de­vel­op­ments, the con­tri­bu­tions that the new
stud­ies make are none­the­less rooted in the is­sues and
de­bates raised in pre­vi­ous stud­ies on Kucha as well as
Asian art his­tory and Bud­dhist stud­ies at large. In fact,
many schol­ars who have writ­ten about Kucha re­cently
also aim to ad­dress some larger de­bates within their
own dis­ci­plines and/or in the hu­man­i­ties in gen­
eral us­ing the ma­te­ri­als from Xinjiang. As the cross-
regional ap­proach to sit­u­ate Kucha within a wide geo­
graph­i­cal span has long been a hall­mark in the study of
the re­gion’s art and ar­chae­­ol­o­gy, the field has be­come
par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to­day in the rise of global art his­
tory and transregional ma­te­rial cul­ture, which so far
have fo­cused mainly on the world of the early mod­ern
and mod­ern pe­ri­ods. Scholarship on Kucha can bring
a unique, timely per­spec­tive to the cur­rent dis­course,
while con­cepts and ar­gu­ments crit­i­cal to other pe­ri­ods
and re­gions are help­ful to prompt ques­tions that can
open up new ar­eas of in­quiry in the study of ma­te­rial
cul­tures along the an­cient Silk Road.
This es­say ex­am­ines the new body of in­ten­sively
in­ter­dis­ci­plin­ary and in­ter­na­tion­al­ist schol­ar­ship on
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Figure 2.  Map of Kucha Caves, China. Map: Sonya S. Lee.
the art and ar­chae­­ol­ogy of Kucha that has appeared in
the past de­cade within the proper his­tor­i­cal and his­
to­rio­graph­i­cal con­texts. It is struc­tured around three
main ar­eas of re­search: com­pi­la­tions of source ma­te­
ri­als; re­cep­tion and col­lec­tion his­to­ries; and in­ter­pre­
ta­tive stud­ies of source ma­te­ri­als. That is followed by
a more ex­ten­sive re­view of Archaeological and Visual
Sources of Meditation in the Ancient Monasteries of Kuča
(2015) by Angela F. Howard and Giuseppe Vignato,
which in my opin­ion is one of the most im­por­tant
stud­ies on the sub­ject to have appeared in re­cent years.
Compilations of Source Materials
In the study of the art and ar­chae­­ol­ogy of Kucha, sur­
veys of cave sites and cat­a­logs of mu­seum col­lec­tions
are in­dis­pens­able to re­search­ers. In the past de­cade
the Kucha Research Academy (for­merly Kucha Caves
Research Institute, established in 1985 by the Xinjiang
Ministry of Culture to take charge of the man­age­ment,
re­search, and con­ser­va­tion of all­cave complexes in
Kucha) and the var­i­ous mu­se­ums with ma­jor hold­ings
of ar­ti­facts from the re­gion have been ac­tive in mak­
ing pub­lic source ma­te­ri­als un­der their re­spec­tive cus­
to­di­an­ships. This de­vel­op­ment can be seen as part of a
broader trend in the study of cul­tures along the an­cient
Silk Road, in which in­creased at­ten­tion has been paid
to the phys­i­cal struc­tures and pic­to­rial con­tents of
the cave complexes in ad­di­tion to the re­cov­ered man­
u­scripts. Although Grünwedel and Le Coq more than
their contemporaries such as Aurel Stein and Paul
Pelliot exhibited a strong in­ter­est in both ma­te­rial
re­mains and texts in their sem­i­nal stud­ies, it was not
un­til the 1970s that the caves them­selves be­came the
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 217

Figure 3.  Near Cave 47 at Kizil Caves, China, fourth–sixth
century. Photograph: Sonya S. Lee.
fo­cus of more sys­tem­atic and in-depth in­ves­ti­ga­tion.
Researchers from the Department of Archaeology of
Peking University un­der­took field­work at Kizil start­
ing from 1979 and car­ried on in­ter­mit­tently un­til 1997
with the pub­li­ca­tion of an ar­chae­o­log­i­cal re­port on a
group of fif­teen caves.4 This marked the first im­por­
tant step by Chi­nese schol­ars and au­thor­i­ties to­ward
pre­serv­ing the Kucha cave tem­ples as protected cul­
tural prop­er­ties. Their ef­forts co­in­cided with a grad­ual
shift in at­ti­tude among many mu­se­ums in the West
to­ward their own col­lec­tions of Central Asian ar­ti­facts,
which un­til re­cent years had remained understudied
or sim­ply neglected in stor­age. Activities in the past
de­cade in many ways re­flect the con­tin­u­a­tion of this
over­all trend.
Within this con­text, one of the most no­ta­ble
de­vel­op­ments is the pub­li­ca­tion of com­pre­hen­sive
con­tents cat­a­logs (neirong zonglu 内容总录), which pro­
vide ba­sic in­for­ma­tion on the lo­ca­tion, ar­chi­tec­tural
lay­out, cur­rent con­di­tion, and icon­o­graphic iden­ti­fi­ca­
tion of pic­to­rial im­ages of all­units at a given site. The
Kucha Research Academy be­gan work on its first con­
tents cat­a­log for Kizil, the larg­est cave tem­ple com­plex
in the re­gion (Figure 3), in the 1990s and com­pleted it
for pub­li­ca­tion in 2000.5 By 2010 ad­di­tional cat­a­logs
de­voted to three other ma­jor sites—Kumtura, Simsim,
and Kizilgargha—have appeared in book form, whereas
pre­lim­i­nary re­ports on four less­er-known sites—Ma­
zabaha, Taitai’er, Tograk-ekan, and Wenbashi—were
218 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
published for the first time.6 These new pub­li­ca­tions
help ex­pand the scope of pub­lic knowl­edge on cave
tem­ples in Kucha, and also sup­ple­ment and cor­rect
in­for­ma­tion from the ear­lier sur­veys by Grünwedel
and Le Coq, which nev­er­the­less re­main an in­valu­able
re­source de­spite inaccuracies and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions
of cer­tain sub­jects.
In ad­di­tion to the con­tents cat­a­logs, the Kucha
Research Academy has also partnered with sev­eral
pub­lish­ers in China to pro­duce beau­ti­fully il­lus­trated
cat­a­logs of wall paint­ings from se­lected caves. Among
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them are a vol­ume in the se­ries ti­tled Wall Painting from
Xinjiang, China (Zhongguo Xinjiang bihua, 2008) and
a standalone work from Wenwu Press ti­tled Murals in
Kucha (Qiuci zaoxiang, 2007). Although the il­lus­tra­
tions in these vol­umes are clear and in high qual­i­ty, the
se­lec­tion tends to fo­cus on close-up de­tails of mu­rals
rather than over­views of en­tire com­po­si­tions. As a
re­sult, the use­ful­ness of these pub­li­ca­tions is lim­it­ed,
es­pe­cially when com­pared with the vol­umes on Kizil
and Kumtura from the se­ries on cave tem­ples in China
jointly published by Wenwu Press in Bejing and Hei­
bonsha in Tokyo some two de­cades ago.7 In the lat­ter,
ef­forts were made to pro­vide cov­er­age of a wider range
of caves at each site through a good se­lec­tion of de­tails
and over­views of the in­te­ri­or. As the Kucha Research
Academy does not ap­pear to have any plan to un­der­
take the kind of se­ri­al, com­pre­hen­sive ar­chae­o­log­i­
cal re­ports that the Dunhuang Academy has ini­ti­ated
for Mogao Caves a few years ago, the se­ries by Wenwu
Press and Heibonsha will re­main the most use­ful for
re­search­ers for many years to come.8
Outside China, mu­se­ums with ma­jor hold­ings of
ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ar­ti­facts from Xinjiang have pro­duced
im­por­tant cat­a­logs in re­cent years. Particularly no­ta­
ble are those from the National Museum of Korea in
Seoul, the State Her­mi­tage Museum in St. Petersburg,
and the Asian Art Museum of Berlin, as they each have
presented new in­for­ma­tion about their re­spec­tive col­
lec­tions. The mu­seum in Seoul houses part of the mas­
sive col­lec­tion of ob­jects from three ar­chae­o­log­i­cal
ex­pe­di­tions to Xinjiang that were or­ga­nized and spon­
sored by Ōtani Kōzui, the ab­bot of the Bud­dhist Tem­
ple Nishi Honganji in Kyoto, be­tween 1902 and 1914.
Objects from the Ōtani Collection first came to Korea
af­ter Kuhara Husanosuke bought the ab­bot’s villa in
Kobe and the remaining part of his Central Asian col­
lec­tion in 1916, and gifted them to Terauchi Masatake,
the first gov­er­nor-gen­eral of Korea dur­ing the Jap­a­
nese co­lo­nial pe­ri­od.9 The Ōtani ob­jects were then held
by the Colonial Government Museum and were inher­

Figure 4.  Objects from the Ōtani Collection on display at Sojeongjeon in Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul, Korea, 1930s. Photograph:
courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.
ited by the National Museum of Korea in 1945 upon
Japan’s with­drawal from the pen­in­sula (Figure 4).
While cu­ra­tors in the mu­seum be­gan to study the ma­te­
ri­als in ear­nest af­ter the end of the Ko­rean War, the
first cat­al­og of the Central Asian col­lec­tion did not
ap­pear un­til 1986.10 In 2013 two new cat­al­ ogs were pub­
lished, one de­voted to mu­ral frag­ments and paint­ings
on tex­tiles, the other to sculp­tures in clay, wood, and
bronze.11 The cat­al­og on paint­ings is rel­e­vant here, for
it con­tains de­tailed entries on a dozen or so pieces
from Kucha that hith­erto were lit­tle known out­side
Korea. Also in­valu­able is that these cat­a­logs pro­vide
am­ple pho­to­graphic doc­u­men­ta­tion as well as care­ful
an­a­ly­ses of the works’ prov­e­nance, ico­nog­ra­phy, and
ma­te­rial prop­er­ties based on in­ves­ti­ga­tions by the
mu­se­um’s con­ser­va­tion sci­en­tists.12 The com­bi­na­tion
of art-his­tor­i­cal re­search with sci­en­tific anal­y­sis us­ing
the lat­est meth­ods and tech­niques in to­day’s con­ser­
va­tion sci­ence offers a par­tic­u­larly fruit­ful way of
study­ing ma­te­rial re­mains from Kucha that ma­jor
mu­se­ums are uniquely qual­i­fied to un­der­take. In ad­di­
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tion to the National Museum of Korea, this ap­proach
has so far been em­braced by its peer in­sti­tu­tions, such
as the Asian Art Museum of Berlin and the State Her­
mi­tage Museum in St. Petersburg.13
The Her­mi­tage has re­cently been ac­tive in show­
cas­ing its im­pres­sive col­lec­tions of Central Asian art
in Russia and abroad. After mount­ing the land­mark
ex­hi­bi­tion “Caves of One Thousand Bud­dhas: Rus­sian
Expeditions along the Silk Route” in St. Petersburg in
2008, the mu­seum or­ga­nized an­other ex­hi­bi­tion in
col­lab­o­ra­tion with its sat­el­lite lo­ca­tion in Amsterdam
in 2014.14 Titled “Expedition Silk Road: A Journey to
the West,” that show fea­tured 250 works from Middle
Asia, a term that cu­ra­tors Pavel Lurje and Kira Sam­
soyuk pre­fer to use in ref­er­ence to a vast re­gion span­
ning northwest China, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Tajik­
istan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, as
well as the neigh­bor­ing parts of Afghanistan north
of the Hindu Kush.15 Accordingly, both east­ern and
west­ern parts of the Silk Road were well represented
at Her­mi­tage Amsterdam, where ob­jects from China’s
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 219
 Central Asia that Rus­sian ex­plor­ers amassed in the late
nineteenth and early twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ries were shown
along­side those that were un­cov­ered more re­cently
through ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ex­ca­va­tions in the var­i­ous for­
mer Soviet re­pub­lics. The ex­panded geo­graph­i­cal scope
of the Amsterdam show thus dif­fered from that of the
ear­lier ex­hi­bi­tion in St. Petersburg, which fo­cused on
six ma­jor cul­tures in the east­ern part of Middle Asia.
Another no­ta­ble dif­fer­ence is the di­vi­sion of the
2014 cat­a­log into two parts: the first part is de­voted
to the­matic es­says on the his­tory of Rus­sian ex­plo­ra­
tion of the Silk Road as well as trade, cul­tural con­tacts,
and the arts of Middle Asia; the sec­ond half is a cat­a­
log of entries show­cas­ing ob­jects from thir­teen ar­eas,
each pref­aced by a short in­tro­duc­tion on the his­tory
and key sites of that ar­ea; a gen­eral cat­a­log of coins
from these sites ap­pear at the end. The or­ga­ni­za­tion in
many ways makes it eas­ier for read­ers who are new to
the sub­ject to ex­plore the ma­te­ri­als on their own. Spe­
cialists, how­ev­er, would likely find the 2008 cat­a­log a
more use­ful tool, be­cause it includes more ob­jects and
de­tailed entries than the 2014 one.
Given the scope and na­ture of the over­all pro­
ject, it is not a sur­prise to see that Kucha has a some­
what lim­ited pres­ence in the 2014 cat­a­log, with only
ten items show­cased there­in, all­pertaining to mu­ral
frag­ments and clay sculp­tures that were col­lected by
Mikhail Berezovsky and Sergey Oldenburg, re­spec­
tive­ly, in the early twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. By con­trast, the
2008 ex­hi­bi­tion fea­tured thir­ty-three items represent­
ing a wider range of ma­te­ri­als. Also of con­sid­er­able
sig­nif­i­cance is the ab­sence of any works from the so-
called Grünwedel Collection in the Her­mi­tage, which
was com­posed of ob­jects that the Soviet Army took
from Berlin in April–May 1945 and later transported to
var­i­ous se­cret re­pos­i­to­ries in Russia. Indeed, the 2008
ex­hibit marked the first time since the end of World
War II that some of these ob­jects had been exhibited
in pub­lic.16 The Kucha Research Academy is cur­rently
ne­go­ti­at­ing with the Her­mi­tage to jointly pub­lish all­
the works in Russia. is would cer­tainly help clar­
ify the ex­tent of the losses that the Turfan Collection
in Berlin had suf­fered dur­ing the war.17 It would also
pro­vide an im­pe­tus for new re­search, as many of the
works re­moved to Russia have been out of reach for
more than half a cen­tu­ry—or have not been stud­ied at
all­since they were brought to Germany by Grünwedel
and Le Coq from Chi­nese Turkestan.
e re­main­der of the Turfan Collection in Ger­
many, which was housed in the Museum of In­dian
Art from 1963 to 2006, is cur­rently man­aged by the
220 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
Museum of Asian Art, a mem­ber of the State Museums
of Berlin. In 2012 the mu­seum mounted an ex­hi­bi­tion
ti­tled “On Grünwedel’s Tracks,” in which many of the
schol­ar’s draw­ings and notes were fea­tured along­side
se­lect mu­ral frag­ments from the col­lec­tion. In ad­di­
tion to a book­let by Caren Dreyer that contained a cat­
a­log of Grünwedel’s works, the mu­seum also published
a vol­ume of fif­teen es­says, edited by Toralf Gabsch,
detailing new re­search on var­i­ous as­pects of the col­lec­
tion’s his­to­r y, the re­con­struc­tion of mu­ral frag­ments
in the mu­seum as well as the re­sults from a num­ber of
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sci­en­tific re­search pro­jects and tech­ni­cal stud­ies con­
ducted in re­cent years.18 As the con­tents of the Tur­
fan Collection are well known through pre­vi­ous ex­hi­
bi­tions, what is new in terms of source ma­te­ri­als lies
in the pre­sen­ta­tion of Grünwedel’s draw­ings as vi­tal
sup­ple­men­tary re­sources for the study of the mu­rals
and also as part of the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of Kucha stud­
ies and the col­lec­tion’s his­to­r y.19 Grünwedel him­self
had made ex­ten­sive use of his own draw­ings and plans
in his re­search on the ma­te­rial re­mains of Kucha and
Turfan, but he also pro­duced cre­a­tive com­po­si­tions
based on Central Asian mo­tifs for such non­ac­a­demic
pur­poses as the cal­en­dar pic­tures he made in 1909.
Accordingly, Dreyer’s cat­a­log has reproduced a good
range of Grünwedel’s ar­tis­tic out­put, whereas Gabsch’s
vol­ume am­ply dem­on­strates the value of his draw­ings
for re­search to­day. In the pre­sen­ta­tion of the planned
re­con­struc­tion of Kizil Cave 8 by Gabsch and Ulf
Palitza, for ex­am­ple, these vi­sual ma­te­ri­als form part
of the doc­u­men­ta­tion of the cave’s his­tory on which
fu­ture pro­jects on mu­ral con­ser­va­tion and re­con­struc­
tion of lost mu­rals are to be based.20 In the study of the
icon­o­graphic pro­gram in Kizil Cave 207 by Jana Bulir
and Satomi Hiyama, pho­to­graphs of per­ti­nent mu­ral
frag­ments are cut and pasted di­rectly onto a draw­ing
by Grünwedel which serves as the foun­da­tion for the
re­con­struc­tion.21 With to­day’s ad­vances in dig­i­tal tech­
nol­o­gies, it has be­come pos­si­ble to make use of his­toric
pho­to­graphs, study sketches, and an­a­lyt­i­cal im­ag­ing
in di­verse ways to en­hance the effec­tive­ness of any
given ar­gu­ment as well as to cross-check for er­rors and
discrepancies in the doc­u­men­ta­tion.
Reception and Collection Histories
Museums with hold­ings of Kucha ar­t i­facts have
played an im­por­tant role in pro­duc­ing new schol­ar­
ship on the his­tory of the re­spec­tive col­lec­tions. The
cat­a­log ac­com­pa­ny­ing the afore­men­tioned ex­hi­bi­tion
“On Grünwedel’s Tracks,” for ex­am­ple, con­tains sev­
eral es­says on the his­tory of the Turfan Collection that
go be­yond the main­stay nar­ra­tive of ear­lier ac­counts,
most of which tend to fo­cus on the Ger­man ex­pe­di­
tions to Chi­nese Turkestan and the sub­se­quent “dis­
cov­er­ies” of the cave tem­ple sites.22 Caren Dreyer
of­fers an au­thor­i­ta­tive bi­og­ra­phy on Grünwedel, shed­
ding new lights on the schol­ar’s life af­ter he returned
from the ex­pe­di­tions. Aloïs van Tongerloo, Mi­chael
Knüppel, and Toralf Gabsch fo­cus on eodor Bar­
tus, the mu­seum tech­ni­cian who ac­com­pa­nied Grün­
wedel and Le Coq on all­four ex­pe­di­tions and who
was re­spon­si­ble for re­mov­ing the wall paint­ings from
the cave tem­ples and transporting them back to Ger­
many, and then re­stor­ing them for ex­hi­bi­tions in the
Berlin mu­seum (Figure 5). In a sep­a­rate es­say, Gabsch
re­counts the evac­u­a­tion of the Turfan Collection from
the mu­seum dur­ing the Nazi era and the af­ter­math
of the harrowing bomb­ing by the Allies and the loot­
ing by the Soviet armies. By detailing how the var­i­ous
works in the col­lec­tion were se­lected for evac­u­a­tion to
des­ig­nated hid­den de­pos­its in Berlin and else­where
in Germany, the au­thor was ­able to de­ter­mine that
about 40 per­cent of the existing col­lec­tion had sur­
vived. rough pains­tak­ing ar­chi­val work, Gabsch
has also made an in­valu­able con­tri­bu­tion to a grow­ing
body of lit­er­a­ture on the fate of art col­lec­tions dur­ing
World War II, complementing the main­stream fo­cus
on col­lec­tions of Western art.23 The es­say con­trib­uted
by Ulf Palitz and Barbara Haussmann takes the reader
to more re­cent de­cades with a dis­cus­sion of the res­to­
ra­tion and re­con­struc­tion in­side the mu­seum of Kizil
Cave 123, also known as the Cave with Ring-bear­ing
Doves, which was re­al­ized through the com­bi­na­tion
of ac­tual mu­ral frag­ments and cop­ies of remaining
sec­tions in­side the cave (Figure 6). The fo­cus on the
re­con­struc­tion adds a much-needed di­men­sion to the
his­tory of the Turfan Collection, which so far has been
un­der­stood pri­mar­ily in terms of the ob­jects’ ac­qui­si­
tion and in­ter­pre­ta­tion rather than their trans­for­ma­
tion within the mu­seum space and phys­i­cal al­ter­ation
through con­ser­va­tion treat­ments.
In a spe­cial is­sue on Asian art col­lec­tions for the
Journal of the History of Collections, I wrote on the dis­
play of the Turfan Collection in the Museum of Eth­
nology in Berlin be­tween the two world wars and the
sub­se­quent dis­persal of some of the mu­ral frag­ments
from there to the United States.24 is is the first
crit­i­cal study of how Central Asian an­tiq­ui­ties were
exhibited in Western mu­se­ums in the first half of the
twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Through a mix of dis­play and in­ter­
pre­ta­tive strat­e­gies appropriated from di­verse sources,
Albert von Le Coq presented Central Asia as a re­gion
in which civ­i­li­za­tions with highly so­phis­ti­cated ar­tis­tic
and re­li­gious tra­di­tions rooted in Bud­dhism had once
flourished, bear­ing wit­ness to the pur­ported spread
of the cul­tural her­i­tage of an­cient Greece and Rome
across Eurasia. Significantly, in or­der to fi­nance this
ex­hi­bi­tion pro­gram, through var­i­ous deal­ers Le Coq
sold off pieces from the Turfan Collection that were
deemed “du­pli­cates.” How the frag­ments changed
hands tells a re­mark­able story about their trans­for­ma­
tion from ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ar­ti­facts into art com­mod­i­
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ties, which is well il­lus­trated in the case of the six­teen
pieces ac­quired by the New York–based col­lec­tor John
Gellatly, who later do­nated them, along with his en­tire
art col­lec­tion, to the Smithsonian Institution in Wash­
ington, DC.25 The dis­persal pro­cess and the net­work
of those in­volved in the trans­ac­tions also pro­vide cru­
cial in­for­ma­tion for to­day’s re­search­ers who seek to
re­unite the frag­ments over­seas with the wall paint­ings
still in situ in re­con­struc­tions, on which any fur­ther
ex­pli­ca­tion of the orig­i­nal pic­to­rial pro­grams in Kucha
caves can be based.
In the same spe­cial is­sue of Journal of the History of
Collections, Adele Di Ruocco ex­am­ines the Rus­sian con­
cep­tu­al­i­za­tions of Asia as ev­i­dent in the collecting
prac­tices at the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.26 Of par­
tic­u­lar rel­e­vance to the pres­ent dis­cus­sion is her ar­gu­
ment that the suc­cess of the Ger­man ex­pe­di­tions to
Chi­nese Turkestan prompted a change in strat­egy
among Rus­sian ex­plor­ers in Central Asia. Although the
Rus­sians had car­ried out var­i­ous ex­pe­di­tions in the
re­gion since the 1860s, they did not be­gin to remove a
large num­b er of ar­ti­facts and man­u­scripts from
an­cient ru­ins un­til the first de­cade of the twen­ti­eth
cen­tu­r y, with Sergei Oldenburg’s first ex­pe­di­tion in
1909 mark­ing the be­gin­ning of this prac­tice. Di Ruoc­
co’s dis­cus­sion on the grow­ing sense of ri­valry felt
among the Rus­sians to­ward their Ger­man col­leagues
in the ex­plo­ra­tion of Central Asia adds more com­plex­
ity to the per­vad­ing nar­ra­tive on the sub­ject hith­erto
put forth by schol­ars from Germany, which tends to
stress har­mony rather than dis­cord in the re­la­tion­
ships among these ex­plor­ers.27
Miki Morita’s re­cent ar­ti­cle on the Kucha frag­
ments that are now in the col­lec­tion of the Metropoli­
tan Museum of Art in New York pres­ents a some­what
differ­ent ap­proach to the collecting his­tory of these
ob­jects.28 After a brief dis­cus­sion of how the frag­ments
en­tered into the mu­seum through var­i­ous deal­ers and
art col­lec­tors, mainly in the 1940s and 1950s, the au­thor
con­cen­trates on iden­ti­fy­ing their orig­i­nal lo­ca­tions in
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 221
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Figure 5.  Theodor Bartus in the Restoration Studio of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, Germany, 1932. From Gabsch, Auf
Grünwedels Spuren, 39. Photograph: © Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Figure 6.  Reconstruction of Kizil Cave 123 in the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin, Germany. From Gabsch, Auf Grünwedels
Spuren, cover. Photograph: © Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

222 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018

Kucha caves. Painstaking and te­dious as it may seem,
this ex­er­cise in prov­e­nance re­search is nec­es­sary for the
study of Kucha paint­ings. Due to the me­thod­i­cal na­ture
of the re­moval of mu­ral paint­ings un­der­taken by mem­
bers of the Ger­man Turfan Expeditions, nearly all­ex­tant
painted caves at Kizil and other complexes in Kucha are
left in a dam­aged, in­com­plete state with holes scattered
through­out the in­te­ri­or.29 Hence, returning the mu­ral
frag­ments to their pur­ported home units through vir­
tual re­con­struc­tion is crit­i­cal to any mean­ing­ful in­ves­ti­
ga­tion of the orig­i­nal pic­to­rial pro­gram and its broader
sig­nifi­cance. e task of com­plet­ing this enor­mous,
com­plex jig­saw puz­zle is not al­to­gether im­pos­si­ble,
given that Grünwedel and Le Coq did pub­lish the lo­ca­
tions of cer­tain pieces and that some ba­sic in­for­ma­tion
has been pre­served in writ­ing on the plas­ter-reinforced
back of each frag­ment.30 Yet a rea­son­able re­con­struc­
tion also de­pends on proper sty­lis­tic and icon­o­graphic
an­a­ly­ses of the frag­ments and the remaining paint­ings
in­side the caves. Decades ear­lier the Jap­a­nese schol­ars
Kumagai Nobuo and Ueno Aki had pioneered the kind
of re­search on which the work of Morita and oth­ers is
partly based.31 In more re­cent years Zhao Li, formerly
of the Kucha Research Academy, has been work­ing on
the re­con­struc­tion of many pic­to­rial pro­grams at Kizil,
which will be published jointly with the Museum of
Asian Art in Berlin in the near fu­ture. Some of her work
was presented in a small exhibition, organized by the
academy, that opened in July 2018.
In ad­di­tion to Kucha ar­ti­facts in Western mu­se­
ums, there have been new stud­ies on the Ōtani Collec­
tion in re­cent years. Haewon Kim of­fers a clear, in­for­
ma­tive ac­count on the Central Asian col­lec­tion in the
National Museum of Korea, trac­ing its com­plex his­tory
step-by-step from the ini­tial trans­fer of ob­jects from
Ōtani’s es­tate in Kobe to Korea in 1916 to the open­ing
of the per­ma­nent gal­lery in the new mu­seum build­
ing in Seoul in 2005.32 Building on the pioneering work
of her in­sti­tu­tional pre­de­ces­sor Young-pil Kwon, Kim
makes ex­ten­sive use of the mu­se­um’s ar­chives to de­ter­
mine the col­lec­tion’s ev­er-chang­ing lo­ca­tion and dis­
play as well as the re­search conducted by the mu­seum
staff over the years.33 The me­tic­u­lous, me­thod­i­cal doc­
u­men­ta­tion is par­tic­u­larly help­ful for un­der­stand­
ing the fate of mu­seum col­lec­tions in Korea in times
of con­flicts and chaos such as dur­ing the Ko­rean War.
Although also based on solid ar­chi­val re­search, the
study by Imre Galambos and Kitsudō Kōichi on the
Ōtani Collection is quite dif­fer­ent from Kim’s in that
it aims to ex­plore, through doc­um ­ ents pre­served in
the Archives of the Royal Geographical Society in Lon­
don, the in­ter­ac­tion be­tween the Jap­a­nese and Brit­
ish schol­arly cir­cles.34 The em­pha­sis on the in­tel­lec­tual
di­men­sion of the Jap­a­nese ex­plor­ers’ ac­tiv­i­ties is part
of a long over­due at­tempt in re­cent years to cor­rect the
char­ac­ter­iza­tion of these young men as spies, which had
per­vaded in Western ac­counts from the early twen­ti­eth
cen­tury on­ward. With the steady in­crease in stud­ies on
the Ōtani Expeditions and Collections along­side crit­i­
cal reassessments of their Eu­ro­pean coun­ter­parts, we
are now in a po­si­tion to de­velop a more bal­anced un­der­
stand­ing of Silk Road ex­plo­ra­tion and its world­wide leg­
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a­cy. It is hoped this will con­trib­ute to a more in­formed
dis­cus­sion on is­sues of cul­tural pat­ri­mony and stew­
ard­ship of ar­ti­facts from Kucha now in mu­seum col­lec­
tions out­side China.
Interpretative Studies
In Kucha stud­ies, wall paint­ings at ma­jor cave com­
plexes such as Kizil and Kumtura have been one of the
main foci in mod­ern schol­ar­ship. Both Grünwedel and
Le Coq had de­voted much of their schol­arly out­put to
iden­ti­fy­ing and interpreting the paint­ings, thus lay­
ing the foun­da­tion for all­sub­se­quent re­search on these
works. Although their gen­eral un­der­stand­ing of Bud­
dhist art in Kucha—and more broadly the en­tire Tarim
Basin—as the prod­uct of Classical her­i­tage spread­ing
east­ward across Eurasia had al­ready been out­dated dur­
ing their life­time, the clas­si­fi­ca­tion scheme they in­tro­
duced to group pic­to­rial styles of Kucha into three main
types and pe­ri­ods according to their pur­ported sources
of in­flu­ence (re­spec­tively, Gandharan, Ira­ni­an, and Chi­
nese) re­main in­flu­en­tial to­day.35 This ty­pol­o­gy, which
was supplemented with dates by Ernst Waldschmidt in
1924, has been fur­ther clar­i­fied and re­fined in the past
de­cade, as there were con­certed ef­forts in reinterpret­
ing the con­tents of wall paint­ings at Kizil and other
sites that were stim­u­lated in large part by ad­vances
in the study of the Ku­chean lan­guage and To­char­ian
Bud­dhism.36 Spearheaded by Monika Zin, a team of
re­search­ers based in Germany has pro­duced a siz­able
body of icon­o­graphic stud­ies on Kucha paint­ings.37
They draw on dif­fer­ent tra­di­tions of Bud­dhist texts and
ar­chae­o­log­i­cal ma­te­ri­als from di­verse parts of Central
and South Asia to iden­tify hith­erto un­known mo­tifs
while chal­leng­ing pre­vi­ous in­ter­pre­ta­tions with new
pro­pos­als. The un­der­ly­ing ob­jec­tive is to un­der­stand
the Bud­dhism prac­ticed in Kucha through close an­a­
ly­ses of the lit­er­ary tra­di­tion on which the wall paint­
ings were based. One com­mon point made in many of
these stud­ies is the tre­men­dous de­gree of eclec­ti­cism in
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 223
 bor­row­ing pic­to­rial and tex­tual sources from neigh­bor­
ing re­gions in the for­ma­tion of a dis­tinc­tive lo­cal tra­di­
tion of Bud­dhist ico­nog­ra­phy. While the or­i­gin of many
mo­tifs in Kucha can be traced to Gandhara, Ines Kon­
czak, for in­stance, in her study of Hindu gods in Kizil
wall painting, has dem­on­strated that some also bore
af ­fi n­i­ties with com­pa­ra­ble ex­am­ples from other neigh­
bor­ing re­gions, such as Kash­mir.38 But once a mo­tif
was in­tro­duced to Kucha, the lo­cal paint­ers would
in­vari­ably mod­ify it so that it fit in­side its new home
in Kucha. This pro­cess, as Zin has per­cep­tively noted in
her study of nar­ra­tive paint­ings, of­ten entailed sig­nif­i­
cant sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of the sub­jects portrayed, at times
to the ex­tent that it would have been im­pos­si­ble for the
vis­i­tor to rec­og­nize the theme at all­.39 Rather than put­
ting forth a de­fin­i­tive ex­pla­na­tion for why pic­to­rial pro­
grams in Kucha caves were designed like this, she leaves
sev­eral pos­si­bil­i­ties open, while urg­ing the reader to
re­flect on the very pur­pose of dec­o­rat­ing the struc­tures
with such beau­ti­fully painted, care­fully cu­rated nar­ra­
tive stories about the Bud­dha that per­haps were not
meant to be rec­og­niz­able.
Besides the schol­ars work­ing in Germany, re­search­
ers in China and Japan have also pro­duced a sig­nif­i­cant
num­ber of in­ter­pre­ta­tive stud­ies of Kucha wall paint­
ing in the past sev­eral de­cades. The pa­pers col­lected
in the 2011 International Conference Proceedings
edited by the Kucha Research Academy of­fers a re­veal­
ing snap­shot of some of the lat­est de­vel­op­ments.40
As expected, reinterpreting the ico­nog­ra­phy of key
ex­am­ples based on new ma­te­ri­als or per­spec­tives was
regarded as a vi­a­ble way of gen­er­at­ing new schol­ar­ship.
Huo Xuchu’s study of the pic­to­rial pro­gram in Cave 110
at Kizil is a case in point.41 His pro­posal to reread the
many biographical nar­ra­tives therein in re­la­tion to the
Sarvastivadin con­cept of Siddhartha as the “last-in­car­
na­tion bo­dhi­satt­va” (antima bo­dhi­satt­va) rather than
sim­ply as ep­i­sodes from the Bud­dha’s life story marks
an at­tempt to un­der­stand the wall paint­ings as an in­te­
gral part of lo­cal Bud­dhist prac­tice. e fo­cus on pro­
cesses of lo­cal ad­ap­ta­tion re­flects the grow­ing trend in
Kucha stud­ies to iden­tify and ex­pli­cate fea­tures unique
to the ar­ea, which was greatly fa­cil­i­tated by a deeper
un­der­stand­ing of texts and in­scrip­tions in Ku­chean
as noted ear­li­er. ere are, how­ev­er, re­search­ers who
ad­here to the ear­lier ap­proach to ico­nog­ra­phy by re­ly­
ing chiefly on tex­tual sources to ex­plain any per­ceived
the­matic con­nec­tions be­tween mo­tifs in Kucha and
com­pa­ra­ble ex­am­ples from much later times and more
dis­tant re­gions. This is the case with Li Jingjie’s anal­
y­sis of the Viryabala jataka and the avadana based on
224 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
the six paths of ex­is­tence, two mo­tifs that de­pict as­cet­
ics prac­tic­ing med­i­ta­tion in the wild with an­i­mals.42 Li
ar­gues that Kucha was a place of in­ter­change be­tween
two dis­tinct Bud­dhist tra­di­tions of as­cet­i­cism, name­ly,
the early In­dian and the Chi­nese. Yet no ex­pla­na­
tion is given as to how the wall paint­ings in Kizil are
re­lated to the cliff-side reliefs at Baodingshan from
the twelfth and thir­teenth cen­tu­ries, which Li claims
share the same theme but ap­pear to have lit­tle in com­
mon with the Xinjiang ex­am­ples in terms of me­di­um,
com­po­si­tion, or po­si­tion­ing at each re­spec­tive site. As
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the au­thor does not pro­vide any de­tails on how the
Kucha pre­ce­dents came to be known in south­west
China many cen­tu­ries lat­er, the reader is left to won­
der about the rel­e­vance of such a com­par­i­son in the
first place.
Two pa­pers by re­search­ers from Japan in the same
con­fer­ence vol­ume ad­dress the thorny ques­tions of
dat­ing and style in Kucha Caves with dif­fer­ent strat­
e­gies. Nakagawara Ikuko chal­lenges the chro­nol­ogy of
styles pro­posed by Waldschmidt with a close sty­lis­tic
anal­y­sis of spec­i­mens in Caves 8, 69, and 114 at Kizil.43
Contrary to the as­sump­tion that dif­fer­ences in paint­
ing style point to dis­pa­rate dates, she ar­gues that the
vi­sual discrepancies were in­stead the re­sult of mul­ti­
ple painter groups work­ing in the same cave us­ing dif­
fer­ent paining tech­niques and ma­te­ri­als. To make her
case, Nakagawara con­cen­trates on caves with paint­ings
ex­em­pli­fy­ing both Type One and Type Two in Wald­
schmidt’s scheme. The se­lec­tion of sam­ples is ef­fec­tive
in ad­vanc­ing the au­thor’s point, but an ar­gu­ment based
on per­sonal ob­ser­va­tions of sty­lis­tic dif­fer­ences would
ben­e­fit greatly from cor­rob­o­ra­tion with sci­en­tific data
that can be obtained from performing pig­ment an­a­ly­
ses on the two types of paint­ings in ques­tion. Incorpo­
rating sci­en­tific anal­y­sis into an in­ter­pre­ta­tive study of
this kind, as it turns out, has been a no­ta­ble as­pect of
the study of Kucha Caves in the past sev­eral de­cades,
and greater co­op­er­a­tion be­tween con­ser ­va­tion sci­
en­tists and art his­to­ri­ans could yield im­por­tant new
in­for­ma­tion on com­plex top­ics raised by Nakagawara’s
re­search, such as paint­ers’ work­shops and res­to­ra­
tion prac­tices in Kucha. Meanwhile, a reexamination
of existing data can be use­ful for con­sid­er­ing anew the
cen­tral ques­tion of dat­ing. This is ev­i­dently the goal in
the re­view by Mai Murofushi and Yoko Taniguchi of
two sets of data from car­bon-14 an­al­y­ses performed
by Peking University and the Museum of In­dian Art,
re­spec­tive­ly, on se­lect cave tem­ples at Kizil and frag­
ments from Kucha in the the Museum of In­dian Art’s
hold­ing.44 Although no new in­for­ma­tion is in­tro­duced,
the au­thors aim to rec­on­cile the two sets of data so as
to cre­ate a more nu­anced chro­nol­ogy for the en­tire site.
Particularly note­wor­thy is their ac­cep­tance of the pro­
posal by Su Bai and his col­leagues from the Peking Uni­
versity to date the be­gin­ning of Kizil to the late third–
early fourth cen­tu­ry, which is con­sid­er­ably ear­lier than
other ma­jor Bud­dhist sites in Central Asia. With her
ex­ten­sive ex­pe­ri­ence in conducting tech­ni­cal an­a­ly­ses
on Bamiyan wall paint­ings, Taniguchi’s con­fir­ma­tion
helps dis­pel some of the crit­i­cism di­rected to­ward the
Chi­nese team by of­fer­ing in­ter­re­gional per­spec­tives on
crit­i­cal sci­en­tific data from Kizil.45
New Book by Howard and Vignato
One of the most am­bi­tious works to ap­pear in re­cent
years is Archaeological and Visual Sources of Meditation
in the Ancient Monasteries of Kuča (2015), coauthored
by Angela F. Howard and Giuseppe Vignato. This book
is with­out a doubt a mile­stone in the field of Kucha
stud­ies, as it is the first mono­graphic study de­voted
to interpreting all­ma­jor Bud­dhist cave tem­ples in
the re­gion as ex­pres­sions of a lo­cal form of mo­nas­ti­
cism. The au­thors strive for a more in­clu­sive dis­cus­
sion of the topic through in-depth an­a­ly­ses of the
ar­chi­tec­ture and paint­ing of the bet­ter-known Kizil
and Kumtura as well as smaller but equally im­por­
tant sites near­by, such as Kizilgargha, Simsim, Maza­
baha, Tograk-eken, Taitai’er, and Wenbashi. They also
rely on the stud­ies by Dieter Schlingloff on Bud­dhism
in Kucha and Central Asia as well as more re­cent stud­
ies in­spired by his sem­in ­ al works.46 While the fo­cus
on the re­li­gious mean­ings of cave tem­ples is in keep­
ing with many of the more re­cent icon­o­graphic stud­ies
discussed above, what distinguishes the treat­ment by
Howard and Vignato is their ho­lis­tic ap­proach to the
sub­ject. This encompasses not only a broader scope of
in­ves­ti­ga­tion but also a stron­ger em­pha­sis on ar­chi­
tec­ture as the foun­da­tion of their main ar­gu­ment con­
cerning the cen­tral­ity of med­i­ta­tion in the daily prac­
tice of the Ku­chean mo­nas­tic com­mu­ni­ty. The aim, as
the two au­thors have stat­ed, is to achieve a more bal­
anced un­der­stand­ing of a Kucha cave com­plex in its
en­tirety by tak­ing into ac­count both the un­painted
units, which rep­re­sent more than three quar­ters of the
to­tal num­ber, and the painted ones, which have long
been the nearly ex­clu­sive fo­cus of pre­vi­ous re­search.47
Vignato of­fers a re­con­struc­tion of the eight cave com­
plexes in terms of their lay­out and de­vel­op­ment in the
first two chap­ters, draw­ing mostly on ar­chae­o­log­i­cal
data he col­lected dur­ing his de­cades-long field­work in
the re­gion. The in­for­ma­tion presented through­out the
book is par­tic­u­larly valu­able be­cause it not only sup­
ple­ments the con­tent cat­al­ ogs published by the Kucha
Research Academy, but it also cor­rects some of the mis­
takes therein while pro­vid­ing crit­i­cal an­a­ly­ses of the
avail­­able da­ta, which are lacking in the cur­rent lit­er­a­
ture. Howard, in two other chap­ters, an­al­ yzes the over­
all pic­to­rial pro­gram in many of the so-called cen­tral
pil­lar caves, con­cen­trat­ing on the se­lec­tion of pic­to­
rial mo­tifs and their par­tic­u­lar place­ments within the
struc­ture. The crit­i­cal role that she has assigned to the
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im­me­di­ate ar­chi­tec­tural en­vi­ron­ment in ex­pli­cat­ing
the paint­ings and their sig­nif­i­cance to mo­nas­tic view­
ers marks a wel­come meth­od­o­log­i­cal turn in Kucha
schol­ar­ship. Unlike other re­search­ers in the field who
tend to con­strue the mu­ral frag­ments as some se­mi­
o­log­i­cal signs to be interpreted mainly through texts,
Howard grounds her dis­cus­sion in the phys­i­cal space of
which the mu­rals were a part. Her in­ter­est in ex­plor­
ing the pos­si­ble ef­fects of the pic­to­rial im­ages on their
view­ers within the cave ar­chi­tec­ture cer­tainly ech­oes
an on­go­ing trend in the study of cave tem­ples in Dun­
huang and other parts of China, where is­sues of view­
er­ship, pa­tron­age, rit­ual per­for­mance, and agency of
ma­te­rial ob­jects and struc­tures are the fre­quent top­
ics of dis­cus­sion.48 It is also im­por­tant to note that
Howard’s ef­forts to con­tex­tu­al­ize the Kucha ma­te­ri­
als in re­la­tion to China and Eastern Turkestan dif­fer
from those of Eu­ro­pean schol­ars—Zin, for ex­am­ple—
who tend to em­pha­size the con­nec­tions with Gand­
hara and the sub­con­ti­nent.
Vignato’s re­con­struc­tion of the eight ma­jor cave
complexes in Kucha has high­lighted a dis­tinct pat­tern
of de­vel­op­ment, whereby each site grew over time as
a con­glom­er­ate of dis­crete groups, each com­posed of
sev­eral cave types with dif­fer­ent func­tions, in­clud­ing
cen­tral pil­lar caves, mon­u­men­tal im­age caves, square
caves, and mo­nas­tic cells. Such group­ings of dif­fer­ent
types of caves were first no­ticed by re­search­ers work­
ing on the ar­chae­o­log­i­cal sur­vey of Kizil led by Su Bai of
Peking University in the 1970s, which yielded a re­port
on only a small group of caves (Nos. 1–23).49 After more
than a de­cade of ex­ten­sive field­work, Vignato, a stu­
dent of Su’s and now a pro­fes­sor of ar­chae­­ol­ogy at the
same uni­ver­si­ty, has fur­ther de­vel­oped this con­cept
into a com­pre­hen­sive in­ter­pre­ta­tive frame­work that
can ac­count for the dis­tri­bu­tion of nearly all­ cave types
at Kucha sites. It also en­ables him to pro­pose a rel­a­tive
dat­ing scheme that he be­lieves is more in­clu­sive than
the chro­nol­ogy pro­posed by Waldschmidt, be­cause it
is based on cave ar­chi­tec­ture rather than on wall paint­
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 225

Figure 7.  District 5 (Caves 157–175) at Kizil Caves, China.
From Howard and Vignato, Archaeological and Visual Sources of
Meditation, fig. 38 [photo only]. Diagram by Giuseppe Vignato.
Photograph: © Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche
Museen zu Berlin.
ings that are found in only a small frac­tion of all­units.
His scheme re­veals that each site tends to be di­vided
into sev­eral “dis­tricts” or func­tional units with clear
bound­aries, with each dis­trict consisting of a num­ber
of groups of caves.50 At Kizil, cer­tainly the most com­
plex site in Kucha, the nearly four hun­dred units (of
which only 235 have been num­bered) can be are di­vided
into seven dis­tricts, whereas smaller ones like Kizilgar­
gha and Tograk-eken each have three (Figure 7). Typi­
cally, one or more dis­tricts were designed for wor­ship
and com­mu­nal ac­tiv­i­ties, and oth­ers for liv­ing fa­cil­i­ties;
a sig­nif­i­cant area was also des­ig­nated for med­i­ta­tion
cells, which were sep­a­rate from the rest in a given site.
Besides map­ping the over­all lay­out of each ma­jor
site, Vignato also pro­vi­des ex­ten­sive dis­cus­sions on the
six most com­mon types of cave struc­tures: an­te­cham­
bers and linking struc­tures; mo­nas­tic cells; cen­tral pil­
lar caves; lec­ture halls; mon­um ­ en­tal im­age caves; and
places for med­i­ta­tion.51 Particularly sig­nif­i­cant is his
dis­cus­sion of med­i­ta­tion cells (Figure 8), which helps
lay the foun­da­tion for Howard’s anal­y­sis in the sec­
ond half of the book. Because these units were prone
to col­lapse due to their small size and ex­po­sure to the
el­em
­ ents, they were mostly neglected in past stud­
ies. Despite the in­com­plete na­ture of the ar­chae­o­log­
i­cal data at hand, Vignato man­ages to make two com­
pel­ling points about med­i­ta­tion cells in Kucha. First,
they were ex­ceed­ingly com­mon through­out Kucha, as
they existed in dif­fer­ent types that were closely con­
nected with the kind of mon­as­ter­ies to which they were
226 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
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Figure 8.  Meditation cells at Kizil Caves, China, date unknown.
Photograph: Sonya S. Lee.
at­tached. On the one hand, small cells that were carved
in iso­la­tion or in rows are usu­ally found in rock-cut
mon­as­ter­ies, where they tend to con­cen­trate in spe­cific
dis­tricts as ev­i­dent at Kizilgargha, Tograk-eken, and
Kumtura. On the other hand, units connected by tun­
nels in a clus­ter are lo­cated on the fringe of large sur­face
sites like Subeshi and Duldur Aqur. Second, the con­sid­
er­able range of set­tings for med­i­ta­tion cells at Bud­dhist
mon­as­ter­ies in­di­cates that dif­fer­ent types of med­i­ta­
tion were prac­ticed both in­di­vid­u­ally and as a com­mu­
nal ac­tiv­ity in Kucha. The ubiq­uity of these struc­tures at
mo­nas­tic complexes con­firms the im­por­tance of med­
i­ta­tion in Ku­chean Bud­dhism, as they pro­vide a cru­cial
ma­te­rial link to what was de­scribed in the Yoga Manual,
a frag­men­tary med­i­ta­tion man­ual found at Kizil by the
Ger­man ex­plor­ers dur­ing the Third Turfan Expedition.
How the prac­tices of med­i­ta­tion manifested in
the pic­to­rial pro­grams in­side Kucha caves is the cen­
tral ques­tion taken up by Howard in the two remain­
ing chap­ters in the book. Focusing on cen­tral pil­lar and
mon­u­men­tal im­age caves where most painted mu­rals
were con­cen­trat­ed, she pro­poses that the typ­i­cal pic­
to­rial pro­gram found in­side these struc­tures was not
only about the Bud­dha Shakyamuni’s last and pre­vi­ous
lives, as most schol­ars have iden­ti­fied so far, but also
about the ex­traor­di­nary power the Bud­dha had gained
through med­i­ta­tion. The in­ter­est in representing the
effects of med­i­ta­tion man­i­fests most clearly in the
se­lec­tion of events that took place af­ter the Bud­dha’s
Enlightenment, es­pe­cially those concerning mir­a­cle-
mak­ing, at­tain­ment of won­drous vi­sions, and the­oph­
a­nies. These im­ages, according to Howard, form more
or less the in­ner core of the en­tire pic­to­rial pro­gram
around which other themes re­lated to the Bud­dha’s
last and pre­vi­ous lives were or­ga­nized. In ad­vanc­ing
this new in­ter­pre­ta­tion on the in­ter­re­la­tion of dif­fer­
ent mo­tifs in­side cen­tral pil­lar caves, Howard main­
tains many of the icon­o­graphic iden­ti­fi­ca­tions from
past stud­ies, though with a few ex­cep­tions (for ex­am­
ple, the bo­dhi­sattva depicted in the en­trance lu­nette,
which she now in­ter­prets as Shakyamuni rather than
Maitreya).52 She de­votes much of chap­ter 3 to ex­pli­cat­
ing how key com­po­nents in the pro­gram were re­lated
to med­i­ta­tion, no­ta­bly Indra’s visit to the Bud­dha while
med­i­tat­ing on Mount Vediya, which an­chors the en­tire
pro­gram in the fa­cade of the cen­tral pil­lar; the mir­a­
cles of Shravasti depicted on the ceil­ing; and the pari­
nirvana nar­ra­tive in the back cham­ber. She also delves
into great de­tail about the Cosmological Bud­dha, a
theme which, she ar­gues, de­picts the vi­sions gen­er­
ated by the prac­ti­tioner dur­ing his med­i­ta­tion rather
than as the Shravasti mir­a­cle prop­er.53 The key to this
is the du­pli­ca­tion of the Bud­dha’s stand­ing fig­ure, for
ex­am­ple, as a mirroring pair on op­po­site walls at Kizil
Cave 123, or in a row of mul­ti­ples at Simsim Cave 48.
The fo­cus on the mo­tif’s con­nec­tion with med­i­ta­tion
marks the lat­est at­tempt by Howard to ex­plain this fas­
ci­nat­ing yet com­plex im­age, which has been the sub­
ject of many of her pre­vi­ous works through­out her
long ca­reer.54 What is new about the cur­rent in­ter­pre­
ta­tion is that she has reconsidered the mean­ings of the
vi­sual ma­te­ri­als at hand in re­la­tion to what we know
about Bud­dhism in Kucha and Gandhara. In par­tic­u­
lar, Schlingloff’s re­con­struc­tion and trans­la­tion of the
Yoga Manual from Kizil serves as the ba­sis on which
Howard ex­plains the per­ti­nent im­ages in­side Kucha
caves. Specific pas­sages from this text are thus an­a­
lyzed in chap­ter 4, along­side a dis­cus­sion of its con­nec­
tions with Gandharan Bud­dhist prac­tices through the
Dharmaguptaka and Sarvastivadin schools.
In stak­ing her in­ter­pre­ta­tion of pic­to­rial mo­tifs
in Kucha caves so firmly to the lo­cal tra­di­tion of medi­
tational prac­tices, Howard has pro­vided an anal­y­sis of
pic­to­rial im­ages found in­side Kucha caves that matches
the level of com­pre­hen­sive­ness in Vignato’s study of
the cave ar­chi­tec­ture. e de­gree of spec­i­fic­ity with
which each mo­tif is interpreted in re­la­tion to the over­
arch­ing theme of med­i­ta­tion sets Howard’s work apart
from those by Zin and other re­search­ers of Ku­chean
ico­nog­ra­phy. As discussed ear­li­er, the lat­ter are more
in­clined to leave room for other in­ter­pre­ta­tive pos­si­
bil­i­ties, even though they too seek ex­pla­na­tion of the
vi­sual ma­te­ri­als in terms of their re­li­gious func­tion and
sig­nif­i­cance. While mak­ing a strong case for the im­por­
tance of med­i­ta­tion in the lo­cal mo­nas­tic com­mu­ni­ties
who oc­cu­pied and maintained the cave units, Howard
is care­ful in spec­i­fy­ing how the pic­to­rial im­ages might
have worked for those who used the caves. Far from
asserting that these im­ages were intended as vi­sual
aids for med­i­ta­tion prac­tices, she con­tends that they
were meant to un­der­scores the ef­fects that med­i­ta­tion
could gen­er­ate for prac­ti­tion­ers. In other words, they
were meant to il­lus­trate the ben­e­fits of such prac­tices
through the fa­mous ex­am­ple of Shakyamuni Bud­dha,
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not just for prac­ti­tion­ers to gaze upon in or­der to form
cer­tain im­ages in their mind while med­i­tat­ing. Her
po­si­tion is thus the op­po­site of that of Robert Sharf,
who re­cently pro­posed to read cave tem­ples in Western
China (in­clu­sive of Dunhuang and Kucha) as mor­tu­
ary shrines in honor of pa­trons’ de­ceased rel­a­tives, an
in­ter­pre­ta­tion that es­sen­tially re­jects vi­sual forms as a
vi­a­ble means to in­fer the pur­ported func­tion or mean­
ing of any re­li­gious ob­ject or struc­ture.55
In light of the sub­stan­tial vi­sual and tex­tual ev­i­
dence from Dunhuang attesting to the ac­tive in­volve­
ment of lay pa­trons in the cre­a­tion and re­cep­tion of cave
tem­ples, Sharf’s prop­o­si­tion might well be ap­pli­ca­ble to
a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of units at Mogao Caves. But the
sit­u­a­tion in Kucha is de­cid­edly dif­fer­ent, as both ar­chae­
o­log­i­cal data and ex­tant writ­ten re­cords from the cave
tem­ples point to a more ro­bust pres­ence of mo­nas­tic
com­mu­ni­ties and, by ex­ten­sion, a pri­mar­ily mo­nas­tic
us­age of these sites. It thus seems un­likely that Kucha
caves were intended as “mor­tu­ary shrines” for their lay
pa­trons, or that the painted mu­rals in­side were meant
to stay, quite lit­er­al­ly, in the dark. As the un­suit­abil­
ity of Sharf’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion for Kucha caves be­comes
ap­par­ent, the ques­tion of what the pic­to­rial im­ages
in­side tell us about the caves’ func­tions re­mains. How­
ard’s re­sponse to this ques­tion is far more com­pel­ling,
even though she has taken con­sid­er­able in­ter­pre­ta­tive
license in linking the im­ages with the kind of med­i­ta­tion
prac­tices de­scribed in the Yoga Manual, which con­tains
no ex­plicit ref­er­ences to such im­ages in cave tem­ples.
Her ho­lis­tic ap­proach has brought to light the tre­men­
dous de­gree of so­phis­ti­ca­tion in the de­sign of the pic­to­
rial pro­gram, prompting the read­ers to re­think the in­tri­
cate con­nec­tions be­tween fa­mil­iar mo­tifs. At the same
time, it has left lit­tle room for anom­a­lies or ex­am­ples
that do not read­ily fit within the over­all scheme. Such
de­par­tures from the main ar­gu­ment could have been
addressed as in­di­ca­tors of de­vel­op­ment of cer­tain prac­
tices over time or com­pet­ing agen­das that coexisted at
the same mon­as­tery. They could also have been taken as
Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 227
 a point of en­try into a dis­cus­sion about chro­nol­ogy as
ev­i­dent in the changes in the ico­nog­ra­phy.
All in all­, Archaeological and Visual Sources of Medita­
tion in the Ancient Monasteries of Kuča offers a me­thod­
i­cal, com­pre­hen­sive ac­count of the cave tem­ples in the
area as well as a nu­anced re­sponse to some of the lat­
est schol­arly view­points concerning these ma­te­ri­als.
While set­ting a high stan­dard for re­search, the book also
re­veals how much more work needs to be done in or­der
to ad­vance our un­der­stand­ing of Kucha caves be­yond
the cur­rent state of af­fairs. For their part at least, both
Vignato and Howard have im­pres­sively dem­on­strated
how much one can do de­spite all­the lim­i­ta­tions at hand.
Conclusion
Kucha stud­ies have made ma­jor strides in the early
twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. As this re­view ar­ti­cle has shown,
im­por­tant pub­li­ca­tions have appeared in the past
de­cade in the form of source-ma­te­rial com­pi­la­tions,
re­cep­tion and col­lec­tion his­to­ries, and in­ter­pre­ta­tive
stud­ies. e renewed in­ter­est in the art and ar­chae­­
ol­ogy of this area has been driven in large part by the
in­creased will­ing­ness of the Chi­nese state to al­low schol­
arly pro­jects in­volv­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tion of in­ter­na­tional
in­sti­tu­tions with lo­cal re­search cen­ters in Xinjiang. As
a re­sult, it be­came pos­si­ble for re­search­ers to study the
cave complexes of Kucha in per­son and to­gether with
the large quan­tity of an­cient man­u­scripts, wall paint­ing
frag­ments, and other ar­ti­facts that had been re­moved
from the sites but have be­come in­creas­ingly avail­­able.
The op­por­tu­nity to re­unite the over­seas col­lec­tions of
mu­rals frag­ments and man­u­scripts with in-depth an­a­ly­
ses of the cave tem­ples has given rise to new ap­proaches,
view­points, and ques­tions that help shed light on the
ma­te­rial cul­ture of an­cient Kucha.
In the wake of a re­mark­able de­cade of growth in
schol­ar­ship, re­search­ers in Kucha stud­ies are poised
to take on chal­lenges crit­i­cal to ad­vanc­ing their field
as well as the hu­man­i­ties and so­cial sci­ences at large.
It is thus mean­ing­ful to con­sider some of the pos­si­ble
di­rec­tions for fu­ture re­search on Kucha art and ar­chae­­
ol­ogy by reflecting on is­sues that still re­main out­stand­
ing or un­re­solved. Without a doubt the most press­ing
is the lack of re­li­able meth­od­ol­o­gies for dat­ing cave
tem­ples and the pic­to­rial con­tents in­side. Vignato has
urged strongly in his book for more sys­tem­atic sur­veys
and ex­ca­va­tions at all­ma­jor sites. Projects of this kind,
when prop­erly con­ceived and ex­e­cut­ed, are bound to
gen­er­ate data that could sig­nif­i­cantly al­ter our un­der­
stand­ing of these places. But launching such pro­jects
228 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
in a re­gion plagued by eth­nic ten­sion and so­cial un­rest
would re­quire not only sub­stan­tial fi­nan­cial re­sources
but im­mense po­lit­i­cal will as well. With the des­ig­na­tion
in 2014 of Kizil Caves as a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
Chi­nese au­thor­i­ties at both the lo­cal and na­tional lev­
els have shown great will­ing­ness to in­vest in the proper
con­ser­va­tion of the site and oth­ers in the vi­cin­i­ty. This
could well mean new op­por­tu­ni­ties for his­tor­i­cal and
sci­en­tific re­search, es­pe­cially pro­jects that could con­
trib­ute to the de­vel­op­ment of bet­ter site man­age­ment
and pres­er­va­tion treat­ments for ob­jects and struc­tures
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at protected sites. Within this con­text, re­search­ers can
pro­pose stud­ies that aim to im­prove how his­tor­i­cal
de­vel­op­ments of ar­chi­tec­tural struc­tures and painted
mu­rals might be mea­sured. Additional rounds of car­
bon-14 dat­ing tests, for ex­am­ple, could be car­ried out at
se­lect lo­ca­tions in or­der to re­fine the re­sults from pre­
vi­ous tests. To prop­erly an­a­lyze any new da­ta, it is crit­i­
cal to col­lect a wide-rang­ing set of sam­ples from in-situ
lo­ca­tions and from ob­jects in over­seas col­lec­tions with
which to com­pare the ma­te­ri­als at hand. To this end,
more sci­en­tific an­a­ly­ses need to be performed on the
ma­te­ri­als of painted mu­rals—from color pig­ments to
bind­ing me­dia and ren­der­ing lay­ers—us­ing dif­fer­ent
forms of an­a­lyt­i­cal im­ag­ing and chemical test­ing on
se­lect sam­ples; sim­i­lar work can be done with the wood
and clay sculp­tures as well. Some of the pre­lim­i­nary
stud­ies made by con­ser­va­tion pro­fes­sion­als at mu­se­
ums in Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Seoul could serve as
the ba­sis for any fu­ture pro­jects in this ar­ea.
The Kucha Research Academy’s in­creased col­lab­o­
ra­tion with in­ter­na­tional in­sti­tu­tions paved the way for
a num­ber of joint pub­li­ca­tions in the past de­cade. is
trend will likely con­tinue for the fore­see­able fu­ture.
Currently, the acad­emy is work­ing on a num­ber of pro­
jects to­gether with the Asian Art Museum in Berlin as
well as the State Her­mi­tage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Besides mak­ing avail­­able the source ma­te­ri­als in their
re­spec­tive col­lec­tions, the next im­por­tant step for these
in­sti­tu­tions to take to­gether is to de­velop ex­hi­bi­tions
that aim to re­unite the pic­to­rial con­tents of the caves
through re­con­struc­tions with ac­tual frag­ments, mod­
ern cop­ies of the wall paint­ings, pho­to­graphs, and/or
dig­i­tal means. These re­con­struc­tions would help ed­u­
cate the view­ing pub­lic about the sites and their his­to­ry.
With the reopening of its new venue at the Humboldt
Forum slated for 2019, the Berlin mu­seum could play
a vi­tal role in redefining how such dis­plays might be
done for the view­ing pub­lic in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry.
It would also be in­ter­est­ing to see how this mu­seum
might take on the task of ex­plor­ing more com­plex top­
ics, such as the broader his­tor­i­cal pro­cesses that led to
the frag­men­ta­tion of these sites; chal­lenges in the pres­
er­va­tion of cul­tural sites along the an­cient Silk Road
to­day; his­tory of collecting and displaying ar­ti­facts
from Kucha; and dif­fer­ent con­cepts of ar­chae­o­log­i­cal
re­con­struc­tion in the mu­se­um, all­of which, so far, have
been taken up chiefly by ac­a­demic re­search­ers. With
pos­i­tive re­sults from these joint ven­tures, it is hoped
the Chi­nese au­thor­i­ties will be per­suaded to al­low for a
greater de­gree of pub­lic shar­ing of ma­te­ri­als at the sites
through open-ac­cess online da­ta­bases.
many of the cave sites are part can be stud­ied more thor­
oughly with his­tor­i­cal re­cords and sci­en­tific field­work. In
ad­di­tion to the phys­i­cal set­ting, mu­ral paint­ings in­side
the cave tem­ples of­fers an­other way to chart the ecol­ogy
of their ar­tis­tic leg­a­cy. Take, for ex­am­ple, an anal­y­sis of
pic­to­rial rep­re­sen­ta­tion of plants and an­i­mals as a pos­
si­ble source of in­fer­ence for any en­vi­ron­men­tal changes
that marked a cer­tain time and place. Although most
pic­to­rial themes from Kucha per­tain to some imag­i­
nary realms pop­u­lated with Bud­dhist de­i­ties of all­sorts,
lo­cal paint­ers of­ten im­bued these re­li­gious scenes with a

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On the do­m es­t ic front, the Kucha Research
Academy has al­ready partnered with the Dunhuang
Research Academy on sev­eral pro­jects re­lated to the
re­pair and con­ser­va­tion of cave tem­ples and the wall
paint­ings, as the lat­ter was des­ig­nated by the Chi­nese
gov­ern­ment as the leader in the re­search and con­
ser­va­tion of cul­tural sites in the en­tire north­west­ern
re­gion. It would make sense to ex­pand such col­lab­o­ra­
tion to in­clude other lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties in China on
fu­ture pro­jects. By bring­ing in re­search­ers and con­ser­
va­tion pro­fes­sion­als from the out­side for spe­cial pro­
jects, the Kucha Research Academy can op­ti­mize the
lim­ited re­sources it has while mak­ing use of out­side
ex­per­tise to nur­ture its own pro­fes­sional staff.
In ad­di­tion to such multi-in­sti­tu­tional col­lab­o­ra­tive
pro­jects, in­di­vid­ual re­search­ers can bring a great deal
more to the art and ar­chae­­ol­ogy of Kucha with per­spec­
tives from the en­vi­ron­men­tal hu­man­i­ties, one of the
most prom­is­ing in­ter­dis­ci­plin­ary re­search trends in the
acad­emy to­day. The im­me­di­ate en­vi­ron­ment of which
touch of re­al­ity from their times. Indeed, plants and an­i­
mals were of­ten depicted with such re­mark­able ac­cu­racy
that one can iden­tify the spe­cies and track when they
be­came prev­al­ent sub­jects in Kucha paint­ing or disap­
peared from the ar­tis­tic rep­er­toire. These changes could
pro­vide re­search­ers with im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion about
sig­nif­i­cant changes in cli­mate pat­tern that con­trib­uted
to the growth or de­cline of cer­tain an­i­mal and plant spe­
cies in Xinjiang or be­yond.
SONYA S. LEE is Associate Professor of Chi­nese Art and
Visual Culture at the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles. She has published widely on the ma­te­rial cul­ture of
Chi­nese Bud­dhism, in­clud­ing Surviving Nirvana: Death of the
Bud­dha in Chi­nese Visual Culture (Hong Kong University Press,
2010). Currently Dr. Lee is com­plet­ing a book manuscript
ti­tled Cave Temples of Sichuan and Chongqing in Eco–Art
History, in which she ex­plores art, her­i­tage, and ecol­ogy in her
anal­y­sis of Bud­dhist sites with mon­u­men­tal cliff-side carv­ings
in south­west China. [sonyasle@usc.edu]

Notes
1. The im­por­tance of the Northern
Liang in the de­vel­op­ment of Chi­nese
Bud­dhist art in the northwest was first
discussed by Soper in “Northern Liang.”
Su Bai later for­mu­lated his fa­mous in­ter­
pre­ta­tion based on more re­cent ar­chae­o­
log­i­cal finds in his “Liangzhou shiku.”
2. Grünwedel, Altbuddhistische
Kultstätten; and Alt-Kutscha; Le Coq, Die
Buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien.
3. See de­tails concerning this in­scrip­
tion at http://whc.unesco.org/en​­/ list​
/1442/ (accessed 12 March 2017).
4. Beijing daxue kaoguxuexi and Kezier
qianfodong wenwu baoguansuo, Xinjiang
Kezier shiku.
5. Xinjiang Qiuci shiku yanjiusuo,
Kezier shiku neirong zonglu. An ear­li­er,
shorter ver­sion of the con­tents cat­al­ og
was in­cluded in Kezier shiku zhi.
6. Xinjiang Qiuci shiku yanjiusuo,
Kumutula shiku neirong zonglu; Senmusaimu
shiku neirong zonglu; Keziergaha shiku
neirong zonglu; and “Baicheng Wenbashi
shiku. Xinjiang Qiuci yanjiu yu­an, “Kuche
Mazabaha shiku”; “Taitaier shiku”; and
“Tuohulakeaiken shiku.”
7. Xinjiang Weiwuer Zizhiqu wenwu
guanli weiyuanhui, Kezier shiku; and
Xinjiang Weiwuer Zizhiqu wenwu guanli
weiyuanhui, Kumutula shiku.
8. See Dunhuang yanjiu yu­an, Mogaoku
di 266–275 kaogu baogao.
9. Kim, “History of the Central Asian
Collection,” 164–65.
10. Ibid., 167.
11. Kim, Gungnip jungang bangmulgwan
sojang jungang asia jonggyo hoehwa; and
Kim, Gungnip jungang bangmulgwan sojang
jungang asia jonggyo jogak.
12. An ab­bre­vi­ated ver­sion of the find­
ings in the cat­al­ og has been published
in En­glish as: Kim, “New Research on
Central Asian Paintings.” See also Jo et al.,
“Conservation of Central Asian Murals.”
13. See, e.g., Gabsch, Auf Grünwedels
Spuren.
14. Deshpande, Peshchery Tysiachi
Budd.
15. Lurje and Samosjoek, Expedition
Silk Road.
16. The re­moval of art ob­jects from
Germany to Russia at the end of World
War II re­mains a sen­si­tive sub­ject. It has
been reported that more than two hun­dred
crates of ob­jects were taken from the Berlin
Museum of Ethnology (where the Central
Asian Collection was housed), many of
which were even­tu­ally de­pos­ited at the
Her­mi­tage. For a gen­eral ac­count of the
Rus­sian in­volve­ment in the re­moval of art­
work from Berlin, see Akinsha and Kozlov,
Beautiful Loot, 52–104.
17. The war losses pertaining to the
Central Asian Collection in Berlin are
documented in Dreyer, Sander, and Weis,
Dokumentation der Verluste, 104–297. For a
re­cent in­ven­tory of works in the Museum

Lee  Recent Publications on Kucha 229

 of Asian Art in Berlin, see Zhao, “Deguo
bolin yazhou yishuguan.”
18. Respectively Dreyer, Albert
Grünwedel; and Gabsch, Auf Grünwedels
Spuren. For a preliminary report on the
works now in the collection of Russia’s
Hermitage Museum, see Zhao, Samasyk,
and Pchelin, “Eluosi guoli Aiermitashi
bowuguan.”
19. One of the first ex­hi­bi­tions
outside Germany fea­tur­ing works from
the Turfan Collection was held in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1982. See
Härtel and Yaldiz, Along the Ancient Silk
Routes.
20. Gabsch, Auf Grünwedels Spuren,
74–91.
21. Ibid., 147–48.
22. See, e.g., Härtel and Yaldiz, Along
the Ancient Silk Routes, 24–46; and Yaldiz,
“History of the Turfan Collection.”
23. Notably, Akinsha and Kozlov,
Beautiful Loot; and Nicholas, Rape of
Eu­ro­pa.
24. Lee, “Central Asia Coming to the
Museum.”
25. There is a forth­com­ing es­say by
Keith Wilson that will pro­vide more de­tails
on the his­tory of the Kucha frag­ments that
are in the Smithsonian.
26. Di Ruocco, “Rus­sian
Conceptualizations of Asia.”
27. See, e.g., Härtel and Yaldiz, Along
the Ancient Silk Routes, 25–28; and Dreyer,
“Rus­sian Archaeological Explorations in
Chi­nese Turkestan.”
28. Morita, “Kizil Paintings in the
Metropolitan Museum.”
29. Le Coq has pro­vided de­tailed
de­scrip­tions of the mu­ral re­moval and
pack­ing meth­ods in his Buried Treasures of
Chi­nese Turkestan, 126–28. It is also im­por­
tant to point out that mem­bers of the
Ōtani Expeditions also cut away paint­ings
from a hand­ful of caves at Kizil, for ex­am­
ples Caves 179 and 224.
30. It is be­lieved that Theodor Bartus,
the tech­ni­cian who served on all­four
Turfan Expeditions, was re­spon­si­ble for
reinforcing all­ re­moved mu­ral frag­ments
with plas­ter back­ing and la­bel­ing them
with prov­e­nance in­for­ma­tion af­ter they
ar­rived in Germany. The in­for­ma­tion is
based on per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with
Toralf Gabsch, con­ser­va­tor in the Museum
of Asian Art, Berlin.
31. Kumagai, “Kijiru dai san ku Maya
dō”; Ueno, “Kijiru dai san ku Maya dō.”
32. Kim, “History of the Central Asian
Collection”; the Ko­rean ver­sion ap­pears in
Kim, Gungnip jungang bangmulgwan sojang
jungang asia jonggyo hoehwa, 32–43.
33. See, e.g., Kwon, “Ōtani Collection.”
34. Galambos and Kitsudō, “Jap­a­nese
Exploration of Central Asia.”
230 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018
35. Grünwedel, Altbuddhistische
Kultstätten, 5–6, 42–43.
36. Specifically, Waldschmidt dated
Style One to 500–600 ce and Style Two
to 600–650 ce. (Style Three was in­tro­
duced to Kucha af­ter the Chi­nese con­quest
in the mid-sev­enth cen­tu­r y.) See Le Coq,
Die Buddhistische Spätantike in Mittelasien,
7: 24–31. On the Ku­chean lan­guage, see
Pinault, Chrestomathie tokharienne. A
collec­tion of pa­pers de­voted to To­kharian
Bud­dhism was published in the Journal
of the International Association of Bud­dhist
Studies 38 (2015).
37. See, e.g., the se­ries of ar­ti­cles by
Monika Zin ti­tled “Identification of Kizil
Paintings.” See also Konczak, “Praṇidhi
Darstellung”; Hiyama, “Wall Paintings
of the ‘Painters’ Cave”; Arlt and Hiyama,
“Fruits of Research on the History of
Central Asian Art in Berlin”; and Arlt and
Hiyama, “Theatrical Figures in the Mural
Paintings of Kucha.”
38. Konczak, “Hindu Deities in a Bud­
dhist Wall Painting,” 360–61.
39. Zin, “Reflections on the Purpose of
the Kucha Paintings.”
40. Xinjiang Qiuci yanjiu yu­an, 2011
Qiuci shiku baohu yu yanjiu guoji xueshu
yantanhui lunwenji.
41. Huo, “Kezier di 110 ku zai jiedu.”
42. Li Jingjie, “Qiuci shiku bihua.”
43. Nakagawara, “Kezier bihua fengge
yanjiu.”
44. Murofushi and Taniguchi, “Re-
exam­in­ing the Chronology of the Kizil
Caves.”
45. See, e.g., Taniguchi, “Conserving
the Bud­dhist Wall Paintings of Bamiyan in
Afghanistan.”
46. Especially Schlingloff, Ein
buddhistisches Yogalehrbuch.
47. Howard and Vignato, Archaeological
and Visual Sources of Meditation.
48. See, e.g., Wu, “What Is Bianxiang?”;
Schmid, “Material Culture of Exegesis and
Liturgy”; Lee, Surviving Nirvana, 139–201.
49. Beijing daxue kaoguxuexi and
Kezier qianfodong wenwu baoguansuo,
Xinjiang Kezier shiku kaogu baogao.
50. Howard and Vignato, Archaeological
and Visual Sources of Meditation, 100–103.
51. Vignato is cur­rently ex­am­in­ing the
dif­fer­ent ar­chi­tec­tural fea­tures connecting
var­i­ous units within a cer­tain dis­trict such
as an­te­cham­bers, tun­nels, stair­ways, and
court­yards, which he be­lieves provide
im­por­tant clues to un­der­stand­ing the rit­
ual prac­tices in Kucha caves. See also
Viganto’s forth­com­ing study “Monastic
Fingerprints.”
52. For ear­lier stud­ies on pic­to­rial
mo­tifs in­side cen­tral pil­lar caves, see
Miyaji, Nehan to Miroku, 492–524; and Li
Chongfeng, Fojiao kaogu, 107–30.
53. Howard and Vignato, Archaeological
and Visual Sources of Meditation, 125–36.
54. See, e.g., Howard, Imagery of the
Cosmological Bud­dha.
55. Sharf, “Art in the Dark.” See also
Howard’s published re­sponse to Sharf’s
ar­gu­ment in Howard, “On ‘Art in the
Dark.’”
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232 Archives of Asian Art  68:2  Oc­to­ber 2018