In the early centuries A.D., miniature Buddhist sculpture from Gandhara became wide spread on the territory of Eastern Turkestan and Middle Asia. This is supported by the finds of archaeological expeditions, as well as by numerous research publications. Samples of Gandharan miniature sculpture carved of stone and ivory were found in Khotan by the 1900–01 expedition of Aurel Stein. One of the first research publications on the subject was S. F Oldenburg’s article dedicated to Gandharan art relics found in Khotan. The majority of works described by S.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Berezovsky (1848–1912) graduated as zoologist from the Biology Faculty of St. Petersburg University. From 1876 on he repeatedly took part in G. N. Potanin’s expeditions to Mongolia, Northwestern China, Eastern Turkestan and Northeastern Tibet. In all, Berezovsky participated in fourteen expeditions, initially as zoologist and botanist and in 1902–08 as head of expeditions to China and Central Asia, geographer and ethnographer.
In 1896 the Russian Geographic Society handed over to the Asiatic Museum (IOM RAS) a sack of shreds of ancient manuscripts collected in Turfan oasis by the 1893–95 expedition of V. I. Roborovsky and P. K. Kozlov. The manuscript fragments from a Buddhist cave monastery near Toyuq-Mazar and from the ruins of Idiqutshari were initially sorted out by A. O. Ivanovsky and S. F. Oldenburg; afterwards, in December 1897, they were examined by V. V. Radloff, who picked out four Old Uighur fragments from the collection.
During the Middle Ages Central Asia for a long time remained a terra incognita for Europeans. With the discovery of the sea route linking western, chiefly Mediterranean countries with Southern Asia, the Silk Road as the main trade route between East and West became increasingly untravelled. Arab navigators, whose ships were trading all over the Western part of the Indian Ocean, from the Indian coast to the eastern coast of Africa, made the most valuable contribution to opening up the sea routes to India and China.
In 1960 the participants in the International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow were offered an excursion to Leningrad. During the trip, two Sinologists (one of them from a western country, the other from the East) visited the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of the Peoples of Asia of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences) and discovered for themselves the collection of manuscripts from Dunhuang, of which nearly nothing had been previously known abroad.
Oldenburg’s Second Russian Turkestan Expedition was organized for the special purpose of studying the Buddhist monastery complex in Mogaoku, in the Caves of a Thousand Buddhas — south-east of the town of Dunhuang in the Chinese Province of Gansu.
The expedition was inspired by the outstanding Indologist Sergei Fyodorovich Oldenburg (1863–1934). A graduate of St. Petersburg University (1885), he began teaching at the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the same university in 1889, gaining the title of Professor in 1894. In 1900 he was elected Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, held the posts of the Academy’s Permanent Secretary (1904–29) and of the Director of the Asiatic Museum, later the Institute of Oriental Studies (1916–34).
The Tangut Collection of the IOM RAS originated from the dead city called Khara-Khoto by the Mongols, Heishuicheng by the Chinese and Ejina by the Tanguts themselves. The ruins of Khara-Khoto are located at a distance of about 40 km from the aimag (district) Ejina of the Autonomous Province of Inner Mongolia in the People’s Republic of China.
