A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3.30

c10.s3.30

Communications between China and the western countries were first opened up during the time of the Early Han Dynasty (226 B.C. to A.D. 25)¹ by means of the mission of Chang-Kien, who was sent as envoy to the Oxus region, and died about 114 B.C. That mission resulted in the establishment of regular intercourse between China and the Scythian powers, but did not involve contact with India. In the year A.D. 8 the official relations of the Chinese government with the western states came to an end, and when the first Han dynasty ceased to exist in A.D. 25 Chinese influence in those countries had vanished. But in A.D. 73 a great general named Pan-chao 班超 reduced the King of Khotan to subjection, and from that date continued his victorious career until his death in A.D. 102, when the power of China attained its greatest western extension. In the last decade of the first century Pan-chao inflicted a severe defeat on the Kushān king of Kābul somewhere beyond the Pāmīrs in the Yārkand or Kāshgar country. Most probably that king was Kanishka. After Pan-chao's death the Kushān king retrieved his defeat and occupied Khotan, at some time between A.D. 102 and 123. To that Indo-Scythian conquest of Khotan I would attribute the rapid spread of Indian languages, scripts, religion, and art in Chinese Turkistan, as disclosed by the discoveries of recent years. I do not mean that Indian influence then first began to be felt, for there is reason to believe that it crossed the passes more than three hundred years earlier, in the age of Asoka, but its great extension appears not to go back further than the first quarter of the second century of the Christian era, the very time when the art of Gandhāra was at its best. Kanishka's defeat of the Chinese and conquest of Khotan afford an adequate explanation of the archaeological facts. Probably the Indo-Scythian occupation of Khotan did not last very long, but no documentary evidence on the subject has yet been discovered. During the third century Buddhism effected considerable progress in China, and from the beginning of the fifth century to the eighth a constant stream of learned pilgrims devoted themselves to the task of saturating Chinese Buddhism with Indian ideas and Indian art. Early in the seventh century Bajna and his son, Wei-tschü I-song, distinguished painters from Khotan, visited the Chinese court, and founded an Indo-Chinese school of painting. China transmitted the Indian forms of Buddhist art to Korea, whence they passed to Japan. That is the outline of the facts.¹ During all the centuries mentioned there is no indication of a reflex action of Chinese on Indian art, the supposed Chinese influence on the Ajanṭā paintings a little before or after A.D. 600 being very doubtful.