An Ancient Block-Print from Khotan

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An Ancient Block-Print from Khotan

Hoernle, A. F. R. (A. F. Rudolf) [Hoernlé, Augustus Frederic Rudolf] 1 editions

8vo. pp. 13. Offprint from the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,’ April 1900, pp. 321-33, with two folding plates. In original yellow printed wrappers, stapled, fragile. First (and only?) description of a ‘block-printing’ from the Kingdom of Khotan, acquired by Captain H. H. P. Deasy in Khotan before April 1899, and sent by him to the German Indologist and philologist Rudolf Hoernle in December. It consisted of 72 leaves, measuring 8 x 5.5 inches, each page containing between 9 and 19 lines in characters that Hoernle could not (as yet) decipher, and was contained in a carved wooden cylindrical box which is described in detail, and pictured in the first plate. Samples of the text are reproduced in the second. Hoernle’s description supplements his credulous report of other genuine and spurious manuscripts in the ongoing ‘British Collection’, as just published in an extra number of the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal’ (1899). With the discovery in 1889 of the ‘Bower Manuscript’, a fifth-century medical treatise in Sanskrit, written on birch bark and now in the Bodleian Library, institutional collections in India, Russia, and latterly England began eagerly to seek out and acquire manuscript antiquities from the hitherto uninvestigated Central Asian settlements of Khotan and neighbouring cities in Chinese Turkestan along the historic ‘Silk Road.’ At first the international pursuit, though intense, was untainted by forgery (no forgeries of such material are known for certain before about 1894), but when native guides and traders became aware of the prices paid by government agents for genuine specimens, the manufacture of spurious ones commenced promptly. The great initiator seems to have been an ingenious treasure-hunter and con-artist named Islam [= Eslam] Akhun, who in 1895 sold to an Indian administrator a faked imitation of a manuscript in the Brāmī script of ancient Khotan, based on a genuine text from Dandan Uilik, a yet-unexcavated 6th-century oasis town and Buddhist site in the Taklamaken Desert between the Khotan and Keriya Rivers (modern Xinjiang Province). Akhun was soon joined by collaborators Muhammed Tari, Mulla Muhammed Siddiq, and Ibrahim Mullah, and when the forgers realized that no Europeans could actually read the copied (genuine) scripts, they ceased bothering to imitate them, and simply composed their own texts as they went along, basing them loosely on Brāmī, Aramaic, Uighur, Arabic and Chinese characters; one forger incorporated some Cyrillic as well, flummoxing the Russian curators in St Petersburg, and suspicions were unsurprisingly aroused before the end of the century. In Calcutta, the pioneering Sanskritologist and authority on the Bower Manuscript Rudolf Hoernle (1841-1918), who by then had begun to decipher genuine Khotanese texts, was defeated by those in ‘unknown characters,’ but declared in 1897 that, on balance, he believed them – and the ‘woodblock prints’ which had begun to emerge from a ‘factory’ established by Akhun – to be genuine too. And he repeated his confidence in 1899, relying upon the most time-honoured of exonerations: ‘How can Islam Akhun and his comparatively illiterate confederates be credited with the no mean ingenuity necessary for excogitating [the scripts]?’ He concluded ‘that the scripts [in unknown characters] are genuine, and that most, if not all, of the block-prints in the Collection [as now in the British Library] are also genuine antiquities, and that if any are forgeries, they can only be duplicates of others which are genuine.’ About this time, however, one of the young former workers in Akhun’s ‘factory’ described to a friend exactly how the faked block-prints were produced, from staining the paper with dye from the Togrug or poplar tree to hanging it up in smoky chimneys to ‘age’, and the tale got around. Inspired by Hoernle’s trusting report of 1899, the archaeologist and Indo-Iranian scholar (Sir) Marc Aurel Stein visited Khotan and tracked down Akhun, who had by now (1901) given up textual forgery, and was masquerading as a British anti-slavery agent to blackmail rustic hillmen, and posing as a Chinese ‘hakim’ or witch doctor. Stein had already failed to locate any of the sites that Akhun had reported as the sources of his finds, and now, with the evidence of Akhun’s earlier (refutable) claims of provenance, extracted from him a full confession. This he conveyed, as diplomatically as possible, to his mentor and sponsor Hoernle, upon returning to England in July 1901. Accepting the bad news, Hoernle wished that his earlier report could be destroyed, but it remains frozen in print, and the task of distinguishing true from forged ancient Khotanese documents continues to this day, see, e.g., U. Sims-Williams, ‘Forgeries from Chinese Turkestan in the British Library’s Hoernle and Stein Collections.’ Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 14 (2000), pp.111-29. See Hoernle’s various collection reports (1887-99); M. A. Stein, Ancient Khotan. Detailed report of archaeological explorations in Chinese Turkestan carried out and described under the orders of H. M. Indian government. Oxford, 1907 and id., Sand-buried Ruins of Khotan: Personal Narrative of a Journey of Archaeological and Geographical Exploration in Chinese Turkestan. London, 1903; H. H. P. Deasy, In Tibet and Chinese Turkestan: Being the Record of Three Years’ Exploration. New York, 1901; articles by U. Sims-Williams in Encyclopedia Iranica and elsewhere. A note on the controversy, and on the British Library holdings, is in M. Jones et al. (ed.), Fake? The Art of Deception. London, 1990, no. 249. <a href="https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/catalog/bib_5547585" rel="ugc nofollow">Click here to view the Johns Hopkins University catalog record. </a>

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An Ancient Block-Print from KhotanHoernle, A. F. R. (A. F. Rudolf) [Hoernlé, Augustus Frederic Rudolf]
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An Ancient Block-Print from Khotan
Hoernle, A. F. R. (A. F. Rudolf) [Hoernlé, Augustus Frederic Rudolf] | Cambridge University Press for the Royal Asiatic Society | 1900
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