A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s1.1

c15.s1.1

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.