NEWS

1,500-year-old Head Looted from Buddhist Grottoes in China Returns After 90 Years

By Craig Lewis | | Buddhistdoor Global

More than 90 years after it was removed from a statue in the fabled Yungang Grottoes, a 1,500-year-old UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern China, an ancient stone head has been returned to its homeland and is now housed in the Shanxi Museum after being donated by an American benefactor on Friday. The carved head is believed to have originated in the Yungang Grottoes, a series of ancient Chinese Buddhist temple caves at the base of the Wuzhou mountains near the city of Datong in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. The grottoes, described by UNESCO as representing an “outstanding achievement of Buddhist cave art in China in the 5th and 6th centuries,” are one of three famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites in China, along with the Longmen Grottoes and the Mogao Caves. The head was donated to the museum last week by John Shun Chieh Wang, 71, a Chinese-American calligraphy teacher at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and his wife.



The head, believed to date to the Northern Wei dynasty

(386–535), was looted from the Yungang Grottoes.

From china.org.cn

“I was amazed by its delicate carving and the peaceful facial expression,” explained Wang, who said he had come across the carved head while working as an adviser at an auction house. He was cited by China’s Xinhua News Agency as saying that he had purchased it from a third-generation collector who did not appreciate the antique as much as his forebears. (XinhuaNews) Measuring 26.5 centimeters high and 12 centimeters wide, the head depicts a smiling face carved in the nomadic Xianbei* style. According to Zhao Kunyu, an expert from the Yungang Grottoes Research Institute, the head has been dated to the Northern Wei dynasty, an empire founded by the Turkic Tuoba clan of the Xianbei, who ruled what is now northern China from 386–534. Zhao observed that the head was likely looted during the mid-1920s, as a book published in 1925 contained an image of the original sculpture with the head still attached. “It could have been a little earlier or later than 1925, as we don’t know exactly when the photo was taken,” he noted. (South China Morning Post)