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Aurel
Stein
Sir
Aurel Stein, born in Hungary, is the first person coming to plunder
the Library Cave of its relics.
He made three exploration tours to Central Asia with the support
of the British and Indian governments. In 1907, Stein excavated
a lot of bamboo slips (used for writing on in ancient times) of
Han Dynasty along the Great Wall near Dunhuang, then paid a visit
to the Mogao Grottoes and took mural paintings of Dunhuang. With
the help of his translator Jiang Xiaowan, Stein, capitalizing on
the ignorance of Wan Yuanlu, bought at low price 24 boxes of manuscripts,
five boxes of paintings on silk, silk fabrics and so on. His travel
note "Ruins of Desert Cathay"(1912) recorded in detail his experience
of beguiling Wang out of treasures. During his third exploration,
Stein visited the Mogao Grottoes again and obtained over 570 manuscripts
from Wang Yuanlu. His three explorations to Central Asia brought
him a total of more than 20,000 pieces of artifacts and documents
unearthed in Dunhuang. Now these cultural relics are mainly kept
in museums of Britain and India.
Apart
from 14,000 paper scrolls and fragments from this cave at Dunhuang,
the British Library Stein collection includes several thousand woodslips
and woodslip fragments with Chinese writing, thousands of Tibetan
and Tangut manuscripts, Prakrit wooden tablets in Brahmi and Kharosthi
scripts, along with documents in Khotanese, Uighur, Sogdian and
Eastern Turkic.
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