National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

PLATES XII-XXXI

PAINTINGS FROM BEZEKLIK

EZEKLIK, the largest of the Buddhist sites of Turfán, lies in a mountain gorge

between Kara-khója on the south and Murtuk on the north, and about

twenty miles due east of Turfán town. The shrines are in a series of caves

excavated in the rocky walls of the gorge, and, as usual with such cave shrines,

entrance porches, and sometimes additional rooms, were constructed of timber

and masonry. Most of such added structures have long since perished or are in

ruins, but within, on the walls and vaults of the caves, a great amount of painted

decoration remained. Reference has been made to the exhaustive study of the

shrines by Professors Grünwedel and von Lecoq about forty years ago, when con-

siderable portions of the paintings were removed to Berlin. When Stein visited

them about two years later, he saw that the caves were suffering further denuda-

tion and destruction at the hands of ignorant local people. On his subsequent visit

in 1914 he found evidence of increased destruction, and he writes: `With the sad

proofs of progressive damage before my eyes I could feel no doubt that, as local

protection was out of the question, careful removal of as much of these mural

paintings as circumstances would permit, and artistic or iconographic interest

would warrant, offered the only means of assuring their security.' And so, giving

careful instructions to his two very capable Indian assistants, Naik Shamsuddin

and Afráz-gul Khán, he left them to remove and pack selected portions. The

result of their skilful work may now be seen in the Central Asian Antiquities

Museum in New Delhi, where I had the difficult, but congenial, task of reassemb-

ling and mounting them for, as I hope, permanent preservation and exhibition. It

is from these reassembled sections that the following reproductions have been

made. A general plan of the group of caves is given on plate c with the shrines

numbered to correspond with the numbers attached to the paintings reproduced,

and enlarged plans of individual shrines, showing positions originally occupied by

the paintings, are given on plates A and B.

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