The first foreign explorer who came to Dunhuang to steal the documents of the Tibetan Sutra Cave was Stan, who was originally from Hungary and later worked for the Indian government affiliated to Britain. Stein exchanged a few silver dollars and a guarantee of absolute secrecy for 24 boxes full of notebooks of Taoist King and 5 boxes of silk paintings or embroidery carefully wrapped, and entered the British Museum. 1965438+In March 2004, during Stein's third expedition to Central Asia, Taoist Wang gave Stein 570 volumes of Dunhuang documents, which he had already moved to a safe place. It can be said that Stein is the person who stole the most documents from the Tibetan Sutra Cave.
The second person who came to Dunhuang to steal treasures was pelliot, a Frenchman. Pelliot is a sinologist who specializes in China. Pelliot spent 600 taels of silver to buy the essence of the scriptures written in the Tibetan Sutra Cave. Although their quantity is not as much as Stein's "Enterprise", their quality is the highest, and it is impossible to say how many pieces are priceless. Pelliot and others ended their tour of Dunhuang, sent people to transport a large number of cultural relics to Paris, and at the same time entered the Central Plains along the Hexi Corridor. A large number of documents plundered from the Tibetan Sutra Cave have arrived safely in Paris and entered the French National Library.
The Qing government asked the Dunhuang county magistrate to check the documents of the Tibetan Sutra Cave and not to sell them to the outside world, and asked the Minister He of Gansu to escort them to Beijing and give them to the library (now Beijing Library) for collection. However, Taoist Wang has transferred some good manuscripts to the collection. The honest officials who came to escort were very careless and did not clean up the documents in the Tibetan Sutra Cave, which caused great losses along the way. When the cart carrying notebooks went to Beijing, the escort officer He did not immediately hand it over to the school, but pulled it to his home, and together with relatives and friends Li Shengduo, Liu and others, took many precious notebooks for himself, totaling about 9,000 pieces. He Jia's collection was later sold to Fujii Neighborhood Museum in Kyoto, Japan. Part of Li Jia's collection belongs to Nanjing National Central Library and is now in Taipei. Most of the rest were resold to Japan. Part of Wang Daoren's collection was later given to Stan, and part of it was bought by Koichiro Yoshikawa and Hiroyuki of Otani Expedition in Japan during the period of191-kloc-0/912, totaling hundreds of volumes. Later, it was scattered all over the country, and I don't even know where it is.
The last person who stole a treasure from the Tibetan Sutra Cave was Odenburg in Russia. He was a famous Buddhist during the Russian Empire. During the period of1914-1915, he led a Russian expedition to Dunhuang. They mapped more than 400 caves in the Mogao Grottoes and took many photos. It is said that they also dug in the cave of the Tibetan scriptures, where the notebooks have been emptied. As a result, they obtained a lot of data, most of which were fragments, but there were more than 10 thousand pieces in total, which were collected in Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Because Odenburg's work diary has been kept in the archives of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, it is still a mystery how Odenburg got so many Tibetan classics.
The theft of Dunhuang documents is one of the greatest losses in China's modern academic and cultural history.