Bezeklik Caves

The Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves (Chinese: 柏孜克里克千佛洞; pinyin: Bózīkèlǐkè Qiānfódòng, Uyghur: بزقلیق مىڭ ئۆيى ) is a complex of Buddhist cave grottos dating from the 5th to 14th century between the cities of Turpan and Shanshan (Loulan) at the north-east of the Taklamakan Desert near the ancient ruins of Gaochang in the Mutou Valley, a gorge in the Flaming Mountains, in the Xinjiang region of western China. They are high on the cliffs of the west Mutou Valley under the Flaming Mountains,^[1] and most of the surviving caves date from the West Uyghur kingdom around the 10th to 13th centuries.^[2]

Bezeklik Caves
Bezeklik caves
Location of Bezeklik Caves in China
Coordinates	42°57′21″N 89°32′22″E / 42.95583°N 89.53944°E / 42.95583; 89.53944

Bezeklik murals

 

Praṇidhi scene, temple 9 (Cave 20), with kneeling figures with tributes praying in front of the Buddha who Albert von Le Coq assumed were Persians.^[3] However, modern scholarship has identified them as Sogdians,^[4] an Eastern Iranian people who inhabited Turfan during the phases of Tang Chinese (7th-8th century) and Uyghur rule (9th–13th centuries).^[5]

 

Phoenix headed konghou, 10th century A.D., Bezeklik Caves, cave 48.^[6]

There are 77 rock-cut caves at the site. Most have rectangular spaces with rounded arch ceilings often divided into four sections, each with a mural of the Buddha. The effect is of the entire ceiling covered with hundreds of Buddha murals. Some murals show a large Buddha surrounded by other figures, including Turks, Indians, and Europeans. The quality of the murals varies with some being artistically naive while others are masterpieces of religious art.^[7] The murals that best represent the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves are the large-sized murals, which were given the name the "Praṇidhi Scene", paintings depicting Sakyamuni’s "promise" or "praṇidhi" from his past life.^[8]

Professor James A. Millward described the original Uyghurs as physically Mongoloid, giving as an example the images in Bezeklik at temple 9 of the Uyghur patrons, until they began to mix with the Tarim Basin's original Indo-European Tocharian inhabitants.^[9] However, according to a genetic study of early Uyghur remains from the Uyghur Khaganate in Mongolia, the Uyghurs were actually predominantly West Eurasian, being modelled as genetically similar to the Iranian Alan and Sarmatian people, with significant East Eurasian admixture. The east–west admixture in the Uyghur Khaganate was said to have taken place around the year 500 AD.^[10] Buddhist Uyghurs created the Bezeklik murals.^[11] However, Peter B. Golden writes that the Uyghurs not only adopted the writing system and religious faiths of the Indo-European Sogdians, such as Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity, but also looked to the Sogdians as "mentors" while gradually replacing them in their roles as Silk Road traders and purveyors of culture.^[12] Indeed, Sogdians wearing silk robes are seen in the praṇidhi scenes of Bezeklik murals, particularly Scene 6 from Temple 9 showing Sogdian donors to the Buddha.^[4] The paintings of Bezeklik, while having a small amount of Indian influence, is primarily influenced by Chinese and Iranian styles, particularly Sasanian Persian landscape painting.^[13] Albert von Le Coq was the first to study the murals and published his findings in 1913. He noted how in Scene 14 from Temple 9 one of the West Eurasian-looking figures with green eyes, wearing a green fur-trimmed coat and presenting a bowl with what he assumed were bags of gold dust, wore a hat that he found reminiscent of the headgear of Sasanian Persian princes.^[14]

The Buddhist Uyghurs of the Kingdom of Qocho and Turfan were converted to Islam by conquest during a ghazat (holy war) at the hands of the Muslim Chagatai Khanate ruler Khizr Khoja (r. 1389–1399).^[15] After being converted to Islam, the descendants of the previously Buddhist Uyghurs in Turfan failed to retain the memory of their ancestral legacy and falsely believed that the "infidel Kalmuks" (Dzungars) were the ones who built Buddhist monuments in their area.^[16]

The murals at Bezeklik have suffered considerable damage. Many of the temples were damaged by the local Muslim population whose religion proscribed figurative images of sentient beings; all statues were destroyed, some paintings defaced, and others smeared with mud,^[17] the eyes and mouths were often gouged out due to the local belief that the figures may otherwise come to life at night.^[18] Michael Dillon considered Bezeklik's Thousand Buddha Caves is an example of the religiously motivated iconoclasm against the depiction of religious and human figures.^[19] Pieces of murals were also broken off for use as fertilizer by the locals.^[17] During the late nineteen and early twentieth century, European and Japanese explorers found intact murals buried in sand, and many were removed and dispersed around the world. Some of the best-preserved murals were removed by German explorer Albert von Le Coq and sent to Germany. Large pieces such as those showing the Praṇidhi scene were permanently fixed to walls in the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. During the Second World War they could not be removed for safekeeping and were thus destroyed when the museum was caught in the bombing of Berlin by the Allies.^[17] Other pieces may now be found in various museums around the world, such as the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tokyo National Museum in Japan, the British Museum in London, and the national museums of Korea and India.

A digital recreation of the Bezeklik murals removed by explorers was shown in Japan.^[2][20]

Gallery

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  View of the valley

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  View of caves

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  Closer view of caves

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  Frescoes of Buddhas

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  Frescoes of Buddhas

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  A Uyghur prince

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  Uyghur princesses, cave 9, Museum für Asiatische Kunst

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  Uyghur Princes wearing robes and headdresses, cave 9.

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  Praṇidhi scene No. 5, Temple No. 9

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  Details from Praṇidhi scene No. 5. Buddhist monks of Tocharian^[21] or Sogdian^[4] origin on left, and East Asian on right

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  A Uyghur painting from the Bezeklik murals

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  Praṇidhi scene No. 6, Temple No. 9

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  Details showing Sogdian donors to the Buddha

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  An Indian brahmin figure from Cave 9, dated 8th-9th century AD, wall painting

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  Fragment of a Buddhist Wall Painting

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  Tradesmen, Tang dynasty

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  Uyghur female donor from the Bezeklik murals

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  Uyghur noble from the Bezeklik murals

See also

• Ah-ai Grotto
• Mogao Caves
• Kizil Caves
• Tianlongshan Grottoes
• Silk Road transmission of Buddhism
• German Turfan expeditions

Footnotes

1. "Bizaklik Thousand Buddha Caves". travelchinaguide.com. Retrieved 2007-09-21.
2. Reconstruction of Bezeklik murals at Ryukoku Museum
3. von Le Coq, Albert. (1913). Chotscho: Facsimile-Wiedergaben der Wichtigeren Funde der Ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan 2016-12-04 at the Wayback Machine. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen), im Auftrage der Gernalverwaltung der Königlichen Museen aus Mitteln des Baessler-Institutes, p. 28, Tafel 20. (Accessed 3 September 2016).
4. Gasparini, Mariachiara. "A Mathematic Expression of Art: Sino-Iranian and Uighur Textile Interactions and the Turfan Textile Collection in Berlin," in Rudolf G. Wagner and Monica Juneja (eds), Transcultural Studies, Ruprecht-Karls Universität Heidelberg, No 1 (2014), pp 134–163. ISSN 2191-6411. See also endnote #32. (Accessed 3 September 2016.)
5. Hansen, Valerie (2012), The Silk Road: A New History, Oxford University Press, p. 98, ISBN 978-0-19-993921-3.
6. "箜篌故事：凤首丝绸之路上的凤首箜篌" [Konghou Story: The Phoenix-headed Konghou on the Silk Road] (in Chinese). 23 August 2016. 图4 柏孜克里克第48窟中的凤首箜篌 公元十世纪 (translation: Figure 4 The phoenix-headed Konghou in Cave 48, Bezeklik, 10th century AD)
7. "Bizaklik Thousand Buddha Caves". showcaves.com. Retrieved 2007-09-21.
8. The Lost Murals of Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves
9. Millward, James A. (2007). Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (illustrated ed.). Columbia University Press. p. 43. ISBN 978-0231139243. Retrieved 10 March 2014.
10. Jeong, Choongwon; Wang, Ke; Wilkin, Shevan; Taylor, William Timothy Treal (November 2020). "A Dynamic 6,000-Year Genetic History of Eurasia's Eastern Steppe". Cell. 183 (4): 890–904.e29. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.015. PMC 7664836. PMID 33157037. See figure 4. "The high genetic heterogeneity of the Early Medieval period is vividly exemplified by 12 individuals from the Uyghur period cemetery of Olon Dov (OLN; Figure 2) in the vicinity of the Uyghur capital of Ordu-Baliq. Six of these individuals came from a single tomb (grave 19), of whom only two are related (OLN002 and OLN003, second-degree; Table S2D); the absence of closer kinship ties raises questions about the function of such tombs and the social relationships of those buried within them. Most Uyghur-period individuals exhibit a high but variable degree of West Eurasian ancestry—best modeled as a mixture of Alans, a historic nomadic pastoral group likely descended from the Sarmatians and contemporaries of the Huns (Bachrach, 1973), and an Iranian-related (BMAC-related) ancestry—together with Ulaanzuukh_SlabGrave (ANA-related) ancestry (Figure 3E). The admixture dates estimated for the ancient Türkic and Uyghur individuals in this study correspond to ca. 500 CE: 8 ± 2 generations before the Türkic individuals and 12 ± 2 generations before the Uyghur individuals (represented by ZAA001 and Olon Dov individuals)."
11. Modern Chinese Religion I (2 vol.set): Song-Liao-Jin-Yuan (960-1368 AD). BRILL. 8 December 2014. pp. 895–. ISBN 978-90-04-27164-7.
12. Peter B. Golden (2011), Central Asia in World History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 47, ISBN 978-0-19-515947-9.
13. Sims, Eleanor, Boris I. Marshak, Ernst J. Grube, (2002), Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 154, ISBN 0-300-09038-2.
14. von Le Coq, Albert. (1913). Chotscho: Facsimile-Wiedergaben der Wichtigeren Funde der Ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan 2016-12-04 at the Wayback Machine. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen), im Auftrage der Gernalverwaltung der Königlichen Museen aus Mitteln des Baessler-Institutes, p. 28. (Accessed 3 September 2016).
15. James A. Millward (2007). Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. Columbia University Press. pp. 69ff. ISBN 978-0-231-13924-3.
16. Gibb, Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen; Lewis, Bernard; Kramers, Johannes Hendrik; Pellat, Charles; Schacht, Joseph (1998). The Encyclopaedia of Islam. Brill. p. 677.
17. Whitfield, Susan (2010). "A place of safekeeping? The vicissitudes of the Bezeklik murals". In Agnew, Neville (ed.). (PDF). Getty. pp. 95–106. ISBN 978-1-60606-013-1. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-10-30.
18. Hopkirk, Peter (2001). Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia. Oxford University Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0192802118.
19. Dillon, Michael (1 August 2014). Xinjiang and the Expansion of Chinese Communist Power: Kashgar in the Early Twentieth Century. Routledge. pp. 17ff. ISBN 978-1-317-64721-8.
20. Ryukoku University Digital Archives Research Center
21. von Le Coq, Albert. (1913). Chotscho: Facsimile-Wiedergaben der Wichtigeren Funde der Ersten Königlich Preussischen Expedition nach Turfan in Ost-Turkistan 2016-12-04 at the Wayback Machine. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer (Ernst Vohsen), im Auftrage der Gernalverwaltung der Königlichen Museen aus Mitteln des Baessler-Institutes, Tafel 19 2017-05-25 at the Wayback Machine. (Accessed 3 September 2016).

Further reading

• Chotscho : vol.1
• Altbuddhistische Kultstätten in Chinesisch-Turkistan : vol.1
• Kitsudo, Koichi (2013). "Historical Significance of Bezeklik cave 20 in the Uyghur Buddhism" in Buddhism and Art in Turfan: From the Perspective of Uyghur Buddhism: Buddhist Culture along the Silk Road: Gandhåra, Kucha, and Turfan, Section II. Kyoto: 141-168 (texts in English and Japanese).
• Polichetti, Massimiliano A.. 1999. “A Short Consideration Regarding Christian Elements in a Ninth Century Buddhist Wall-fainting from Bezeklik”. The Tibet Journal 24 (2). Library of Tibetan Works and Archives: 101–7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43302426.

External links

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bezeklik caves.

• Chotscho: Facsimile Reproduction of Important Findings of the First Royal Prussian Expedition to Turfan in East Turkistan, Berlin, 1913. A catalogue of the findings of the Second German Turfan Expedition (1904–1905) led by Le Coq, containing colour reproductions of the murals. (National Institute of Informatics – Digital Silk Road Project Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books)
• Reconstruction of Bezeklik murals at Ryukoku Museum
• [ Bezeklik mural at Hermitage Museum]
• Silk Route photos
• Silk Road site