A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s1: Section II. Chinese Turkistan
A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s1
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Section II. Chinese Turkistan
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The explorations carried on since 1896 by Dr. Stein, Professor Grünwedel, Dr. v. Le Coq, and other savants, in the vast regions of Chinese Turkistan, lying north of Tibet, to the west of China, and both north and south of the Taklamakān Desert ('Gobi' of the older maps), have revealed 'sand-buried' and other ruins full of the remains of ancient civilizations.³ Those remains, which include thousands of manuscripts written in many scripts and languages, known and unknown, also comprise multitudes of works of art, pictorial and plastic, which, by their characteristics, mark Chinese Turkistan as the meeting-ground of Hellenistic, Indian, Persian, and Chinese forms of civilization.
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³ The word 'Gobi' simply means 'desert' (Stein).
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The wide extension of Indian languages, literature, and art from the second century of the Christian era thus demonstrated has been a surprise to the learned world, but the huge mass of material collected is so unmanageable that many years must elapse before 'the most interesting subject', as Dr. v. Le Coq calls it, of the relations between the early civilizations of India, Persia, China, and the Far East can be worked out so as to admit of firmly established conclusions. The accumulations brought back by Dr. Stein from his second expedition, known to be full of fascinating material, some of which I have seen, have been hardly touched as yet; and the, perhaps, equally bulky and valuable collections of the recent German and French explorers have been only imperfectly examined. At present, therefore, it is not possible to present in a few pages a satisfactory abstract of the new knowledge concerning the diffusion of Indian art and learning in the Chinese Turkistan countries. The paintings seem to be assignable mostly to the seventh or eighth centuries, and so help to fill up the gap in the story of Indian painting between Ajaṇṭā and Akbar. In this section no more can be attempted than a slight indication of the extent to which Indian schools of painting, modified by external influences, penetrated Turkistan, and, through it, the Far East.
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The discoveries made by Dr. Stein during his first expedition to the south of the Desert having been published in considerable detail, a fair idea can be formed of the achievements of painters following Indian models more or less closely during the seventh and eighth centuries in Turkistan.
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Numerous fresco or distemper paintings on wood and plaster were found at a place called Dandān-Uiliq, which was abandoned soon after A.D. 791. All these works may be referred with confidence to the eighth century, and thus afford evidence of a sufficiently dated stage in the evolution of Indian painting when exposed to the influence of the Persian and Chinese schools. A few of the more striking examples are reproduced by permission.
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One of the best preserved paintings is that on a panel (D. vii, 5), 15 inches high and nearly 7 inches broad, which represents two sacred or princely personages, mounted, one on a piebald Yārkandi pony and the other on a camel (Fig. 214). The nimbus behind the head of each rider indicates either his high rank or his sacred character. The artists of the Mughal court in India were accustomed to give this emblem of sanctity to the emperors and even to members of their families, and in Khotan during the eighth century the same practice seems to have prevailed. The picture speaks for itself so clearly that detailed description is unnecessary, but the blending of Indian and Chinese features in the face of the horseman may be noted, and the free drawing of the camel deserves commendation. The horseman is repeated on D. x, 5 (Stein, Pl. LXII), but the identity of either figure has not yet been determined.
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The ugly picture on the obverse of panel D. vii, 6, measuring 12¾×8 inches, representing a three-faced, four-armed deity, supposed to be a Tantric form of Avalokitesvara, squatting on a chequered cushion supported by two white bulls, is purely Indian, and is so closely related to the modern Lamaist compositions that it might be described as the oldest extant Tibetan painting. The body and front face of the deity are dark blue, the face on the proper right, with a feminine expression, is white, and the demoniac face on the proper left is yellow. The outline is drawn in thick black lines, and the work has little aesthetic merit (Stein, Pl. LX).
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The reverse of the same panel offers a surprise by presenting a picture of a four-armed Buddhist saint or Bodhisattva in the guise of a Persian with black beard and whiskers, holding a thunderbolt (*vajra*) in his left hand. The combination on one panel of this almost purely Persian figure with the Indian image on the other side suggests questions, at present insoluble, concerning the forms which Buddhism may have assumed in Iranian lands. The art, seemingly of higher quality than that of the obverse picture, is certainly more pleasing. The four arms are a distinctly Indian feature (Plate LXI). The existence of this queer figure may help us in some measure to understand the introduction of Persian figures into the Buddhist pictures of Ajaṇṭā, which may yet be proved to be an Indian development of Central Asiatic Buddhist art. But that hypothesis at present lacks historical support.
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FIG. 214. Mounted princes or saints; wooden panel from Dandān-Uiliq. (Stein, *Ancient Khotan*, Pl. LIX, D. vii, 5.)
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The most interesting of the Dandān-Uiliq paintings is the fresco depicting some legend connected with a female water-sprite, probably the tale told by Hiuen Tsang of the minister who married the widow of the Nāga king in order to secure the flow of water over the lands of Khotan. However that may be, the design and execution of the composition are of considerable merit, and well illustrate the variety of elements combined in the mediaeval art of Khotan. The pose of the lady, whose figure in the original projects about 18 inches above the water, is plainly a reminiscence of some Hellenistic Venus, such as the de’ Medici or the Capitoline, and the vine-leaf guarding her modesty equally recalls the conventional fig-leaf. Her ornaments are Indian, her face Chinese. Thus in this one figure we can trace the meeting of the three civilizations, Greek, Indian, and Chinese. The seated figures are more Chinese in type than anything else. I do not perceive any Persian factors in this work (Fig. 215).
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Another painting (D. x, 4), more primitive in style, illustrates the story of the Queen of Khotan, a Chinese princess, who secretly introduced silk cocoons into her adopted country by concealing them in the folds of her head-dress. The central effigy of the princess, boldly sketched with a few etching-like strokes, will suffice as an example of the style (Fig. 216). It will be observed that the head of the princess, like the heads of the three other persons in the picture, is surrounded by a nimbus or halo, apparently affording clear evidence that in Khotan art of the eighth century, as
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[Figure: FIG. 215. Water-sprite, &c.; fresco at Dandān-Uiliq. (Stein, *Ancient Khotan*, Pl. II.)]
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in Mughal art of the seventeenth, the nimbus was given to persons of royal birth as well as to divinities and saints. The lady's features are Indian rather than Chinese.
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Further east, at Endere, between Niya and Cherchen, in ruins of somewhat earlier date than those at Dandān-Uiliq, Dr. Stein found a scrap of faded fresco on stucco with 'delicate and harmonious colouring', and an Indian-ink sketch on paper depicting a Bactrian she-camel suckling her calf, drawn in the fewest possible bold strokes with considerable spirit and vigour. A slight attempt to indicate the solidity or roundness of the body has been made by adding a wash of faint colour round the contours (Fig. 217). The drawing seems to have been executed with a brush, not a pen, and is free from conventionality.
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[Figure: FIG. 216. Chinese princess; fresco at Dandān-Uiliq. (Stein, *Anc. Khotan*, Pl. LXIII, D. x, 4, central figure.)]
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[Figure: FIG. 217. Bactrian camel; Indian-ink drawing on paper from Endere. (Stein, *Anc. Khotan*, Pl. LXXIX, E. i, 19, a; p. 438.)]
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The countries to the north of the great desert have proved to be equally fertile in finds of astonishing richness. At the ruined city of Idiqūt-i-Shahri the German explorers found the remains of Buddhist, Manichean, and Nestorian buildings and art associated in such a way as to show that for centuries the adherents of the rival creeds managed to live together. Ultimately, in or about the ninth century, the Buddhists were massacred by the Chinese, a fact of which Dr. v. Le Coq discovered terrible proof when he opened a chamber filled with the skeletons of monks and other signs of ruthless slaughter. At this site curious votive flags, both Manichean and Buddhist, were found, with designs painted on plaster applied to long strips of cotton, in the manner still practised by Tibetan Lamas.
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At Yār-Khoto, to the west of Turfān, paintings on silk, described as being exquisitely wrought and harmoniously coloured, were obtained. Dr. Stein has brought home from his second expedition a large quantity of similar silk designs obtained in a walled-up temple near the Kan-su border, many of which are in the finest condition.¹ The Yār-Khoto pictures are both Manichean and Buddhist, the latter never failing to retain a distinctly Indian character. At the Bäsäklik monastery Dr. v. Le Coq discovered wall-paintings executed on a surface of plaster composed of loam and chopped straw.
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¹ A series was exhibited in the Indian Court of the Festival of Empire, 1911, and described by Dr. Stein in the *Catalogue of the Court*, pp. 14–26.
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The pictures at Chiqqan Kōl and Toyoq are in the archaic Indian style, whereas in other places the Indian features have been much modified by Chinese and Persian influence. It is evident that the Turkistan paintings range over a long time, and that, when their sequence shall have been worked out, much light will be thrown upon the development of the pictorial art of Asia, including India.
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Students of Chinese and Japanese painting have been aware for some years past that the specially Buddhist forms of art in China were derived from India through Khotan, and passed on through Korea to Japan, the principal agent in the transmission to Korea, and so to Japan, having been Wei-ch’ï I-song, son of Bajna of Khotan. Bajna was one of the numerous foreign artists in the service of the Chinese Emperor, Yang-ti (a.d. 605–17), and had been preceded at the imperial court by two Indian monks, with names something like Kabōdha and Dharmakuksha. Both Bajna and his son, according to Chinese critics, worked in a foreign, that is to say, Indian manner, and enjoyed high repute as Buddhist artists. The marked Indian element in early Japanese art is thus amply accounted for.²
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² Hirth, *Ueber fremde Einflüsse in der chines. Kunst*, pp. 34, 38, 39, 43–60.
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Although the descent of the specially Buddhist varieties of the art of the Far East from India, and more particularly from Indo-Greek prototypes in Gandhāra on the north-western frontier, is abundantly proved, the evidence does not warrant the larger inference drawn by Mr. Anderson that ‘a previously undeveloped art’ in China was dependent upon importations from India for its growth and development.³ The earliest extant Chinese painting, the fourth-century picture by Ku K’ai-chih in the British Museum, does not show the slightest trace of either Indian or Greek influence. Buddhist pictures form but a single subdivision of Chinese painting, the subjects of which, according to Professor Giles, may be classified under seven heads, namely—(1) history, (2) religion (including Buddhism and Taoism), (3) landscape, (4) flowers, (5) birds, (6) beasts, and (7) portraiture.⁴ Excepting the Buddhist designs under the second head, China learned nothing, and had nothing to learn from ‘the land of the Brahmans’. I am disposed to agree with Mr. Binyon, who finds in China ‘if not the parent art of Asia, its earliest mature flower in painting’.¹
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³ Anderson, *Descriptive and Hist. Catal. of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Pictures, in the B. M.* (1886), p. 482.
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⁴ *An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art*, 1905, p. 7.
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¹ *Painting in the Far East* (1908), p. 48.
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Mr. Griffiths thought that he could discern marks of Chinese influence in the paintings at Ajaṇṭā; and he may be right, although such marks are not very distinct, and may, perhaps, be explained as derived from the common stock of Asiatic art. However that may be, the art of Ajaṇṭā certainly produced no effect upon the general development of painting in China; and in Japan the only conspicuous instance of imitation of the Ajaṇṭā style is the wall-painting in the temple of Hōriūji at Nara, supposed by some critics to date from A. D. 607, but according to others about a century later.²
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² A tracing (No. 148, Anderson’s *Catal.*) is in the B. M. Mr. Okakura favours the later date.