Western travelogue

Author: (British) Stein
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2000-10-01
Features: A hundred years ago, the British Stein came to China, bringing the once silent Western Regions back to life. In 1908, Stein, accompanied by his assistants and a camel caravan laden with cultural relics, braved the sandstorms and traversed the Taklamakan Desert along the path once walked by Xuanzang, finally returning to London. The text and numerous images in this book vividly recreate the prosperous Buddhist civilization and geographical features of ancient Taklamakan. Today, we can follow in their footsteps, traveling through time to enter the mysterious and fertile "Valley of Death." Across the Taklamakan is the sixth volume in the series Journey Through the Western Regions. The book Journey Through the Western Regions is a detailed report of Stein's archaeological surveys and excavations in western Xinjiang and Gansu, China, from 1906 to 1908, as well as a continuation of the Ancient Khotan report, which followed his first archaeological surveys and excavations in Xinjiang from 1900 to 1901. The geographical scope of the Journey Through the Western Regions is vast, stretching from west to east and including the current Hetian Prefecture, Aksu Prefecture, Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Turpan Prefecture, Hami Prefecture, and the Hexi Corridor. Key sites investigated and excavated in these regions include Akteke, Kadayik, Mazartage, Niya, Andir, the Mila Buddhist Temple, the Tibetan Castle, the ancient city of Loulan and its nearby sites, the Yanqi Ming House and its nearby caves and ruins, the Han Great Wall and beacon towers in western Gansu, the Mogao Caves and the Dunhuang Library Cave, among others. The main categories of artifacts discovered by Stein at these sites include sculptures, paintings, wooden slips (including Chinese, Sanskrit, Kharoshthi, Hetian, Kucha, Tibetan, Turkic, Sogdian, and Uyghur scripts), textiles (silk, wool, hemp, cotton, etc.), coins, inscriptions, fragments of Buddhist scriptures, and a large number of everyday utensils, production tools, decorative items, and weapons made of various materials such as pottery, wood, stone, metal (gold, silver, copper, iron, etc.), glass, and colored glass. It is also accompanied by numerous illustrations of site remains, plans and cross-sections of sites, as well as a volume of artifact illustrations and a volume of maps of the surveyed regions. The book is centered on archaeology and essentially covers the many academic fields mentioned above, making its content extremely rich.