Langdon Warner at Dunhuang: What Really Happened?

LANGDON WARNER AT DUNHUANG: WHAT REALLY HAPPENED? Justin M. Jacobs American University rom 1923 to 1925, Harvard art historian Langdon Devils Along the Silk Road (1980) introduced an entire FWarner led two separate expeditions to the Thou- new generation of scholars and armchair travelers sand-Buddha Caves (qianfodong 千佛洞) at Dunhuang to the romance and intrigue of Western archaeologi- 敦煌, in the far northwestern corner of China’s Gansu cal adventurers, Warner represented the hubris of 甘肅 province. The goals of both expeditions were the Western imperialist enterprise. Though all Euro- simple: to procure a modest stockpile of Asian art and Americans still set out with what they believed were artifacts so as to assist in the development of the “Ori- good intentions, their unprecedented achievements ental collections” of the fl edgling Fogg Museum, and had ultimately blinded them to the realization that to encourage “advanced studies in Far Eastern art and they could not dictate the terms of their craft forever. archaeology” at Harvard University (Bowie 1966, p. 106). The expeditions themselves, however, coming as Over the past decade, Western expeditions in pur- they did on the tail end of the heyday of Western and suit of antiquities in colonial and semi-colonial lands Japanese excavations in northwestern China, have — invariably carried out in the name of science — have come to be regarded as something less than a suc- garnered signifi cant scholarly attention (see, for exam- cess for their undertakers. The material harvest of the ple, Reid 2002, Hevia 2007, Balachandran 2007, Goode fi rst expedition, leaving behind the scars of Warner’s 2007, Colla 2007, Pettitt 2007, Heaney 2010). More makeshift removal techniques, elicited a “lukewarm often than not, however, these studies are more con- reaction” among his colleagues in Cambridge and cerned with drawing theoretical connections among failed to impress prominent art collectors in Boston transnational “cultural imperialisms” writ large than (Balachandran 2007, p. 16). As for the second, more in revisiting the empirical evidence of the expeditions infamous expedition to Dunhuang in 1925, even War- themselves. Recent articles by Sanchita Balachandran ner himself readily conceded that it had been some- (2007) and this author (Jacobs 2010) both illustrate this thing of a fi asco, as the Americans were forced to exit trend with regard to the Warner expeditions: while China with little more than photographs (Bowie 1966, Balachandran seldom shies away from condemning p. 130). the haughty sense of entitlement Warner exhibited as an agent of Western imperialism, I pass similar judg- The Fogg Museum expeditions to Dunhuang in the ment on Warner’s nationalist counterparts in China, mid-1920s signaled the fi rst time a foreign scholar whom I portray as engaged in a comparable enter- encountered insurmountable obstacles to his expe- prise of cultural and intellectual disenfranchisement dition in China. It comes as something of a surprise, directed toward their own subalterns. Though both then, to fi nd that so few scholars have attempted to authors do make use of a novel empirical source base, understand just why Warner met with such an igno- such evidence is treated more as a means to a theo- minious end. Much of this complacency stems from retical or ideological end rather than a tool with which the fact that Warner himself was quick to establish his to revise the received narrative of the Warner expedi- own “authoritative” version of the events, fi rst made tions themselves. public in his book, The Long Old Road in China (1926a). For one reason or another, Warner’s narrative, embel- A different perspective can be gained by looking lished further in his Buddhist Wall-Paintings: A Study more closely at Warner’s version of events, along with of a Ninth-Century Grotto at Wan Fo Hsia (1938), has evidence, long available, which his infl uential public tended to be accepted by later historians at face value. narrative has distorted. In 1926, the same year that For Theodore Bowie, a former colleague and editor of Warner published The Long Old Road in China, Chen Langdon Warner Through His Letters (1966), Warner’s Wanli 陳萬里, a Chinese member of the second expe- tales of Chinese perfi dy and xenophobia served to dition (Fig. 1), published his own record of the party’s rehabilitate well-meaning Western scholars whose journey to Dunhuang just one year previously. Over reputations had suffered through the long decades the ensuing nine decades since the appearance of of decolonization. For Peter Hopkirk, whose Foreign Chen’s Diary of Westward Travels (Xixing riji 西行日記), The Silk Road 11 (2013): 1–11 1 Copyright © 2013 Justin M. Jacobs Copyright © 2013 The Silkroad Foundation whether or not Warner’s accusations were warranted? The answer, I believe, is to be found in Warner’s delib- erate attempts to absolve himself of responsibility for his failures in China by distorting the historical record to make it appear as if forces beyond his control were ultimately responsible for the scant return his donors received on their investment. In this regard, Warner was extremely fortunate that the second expedition partially overlapped with one of the cardinal events in the narrative of modern Chinese nationalism: the May 30, 1925 incident in Shanghai, when British soldiers opened fi re upon unarmed Chinese protesters, result- ing in numerous fatalities. Never mind that news of the bloodshed in Shanghai did not reach Warner’s party in northwestern Gansu until they had already completed most of their survey work at Wanfoxia 萬佛峽 (Myriad Buddha Gorge; what is now known as Yulin ku 榆林窟 “Yulin Grottoes”), or that the Ameri- cans had departed from Dunhuang a full week before the May 30th incident broke out. The much publicized anti-foreign backlash occasioned by the tragedy, har- nessed to great rhetorical effect by the nascent Na- tionalist and Communist parties, offered Warner an airtight alibi that few Westerners would think to ques- tion. Just one year after his ignominious retreat, Warner had already begun to confl ate the May 30th incident with the troubles experienced by the second Fogg Fig. 1. Chen Wanli in a photo taken by one of the American mem- Museum expedition in China. In his conclusion to The bers of the expedition. After: Chen 1926, p. 3. Long Old Road in China (1926) — a book chiefl y con- however, not a single scholar has attempted to com- cerned with the slightly more successful fi rst expedi- pare Chen’s version of events to that of Warner. This tion — Warner alluded to that which would bedevil is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that War- him on the second: ner himself accused Chen of nothing less than treason I could not guess that in a short seven months toward the Americans, a charge repeated by nearly the whole Chinese nation was to stir in its sleep every Western scholar who has had reason to examine and yawn so portentously that all we foreigners Warner’s fate in China (see, for example, Bowie 1966, would be scuttling back to our Legations. … But p. 129; Hopkirk 1980, p. 225; Balanchandran 2007, p. in those months of the fi rst return from the border, the 20).1 Publicly, Warner wrote in the introduction to his Shanghai shooting and the marchings and counter- Buddhist Wall-Paintings (1938, pp. xiv–xv) that Chen marchings of Feng and Chang and Wu were not later published a book that “explains his association guessed. We had no idea of the serious troubles a with the Americans as being for the express purpose few months were to bring forth. [Warner 1926a, pp. of keeping track of their actions and preventing them 149–50, emphases mine] from marauding. He further took the trouble to at- This is a gross misrepresentation of the course of tempt to cast discredit on the characters of my party events that preceded the second expedition. The fi rst in a way that is perhaps worth a fl at denial from me.” expedition returned to Beijing in the spring of 1924. In a private letter to the British archaeologist Aurel For Warner to suggest that the “Shanghai shootings” Stein, however, Warner referred not to a slanderous occurred in those amorphous “months of the fi rst re- book but rather to “a series of articles about his amaz- turn from the border” (or, as he puts it in the following ing adventures with the foreigners,” in which Chen sentence, in the space of “a few months”) is deliber- attributes “to my young assistants the vilest motives” ately to mislead his readers into thinking that the May (Warner 1926b). 30th incident happened at some point in the second Chen’s book has sat gathering dust in the libraries half of 1924, at least half a year—if not more—before of several prominent American universities for nearly its actual date. In Buddhist Wall-Paintings (1938), War- a century. Why has no one thought to pick it up to see ner strengthened this misperception by declaring that 2 their time in the northwest coincided with the death vania Museum in Philadelphia (now the Philadelphia of “Old China,” and that “nowhere were we welcome Museum of Art), the second expedition included fi ve and seldom were we tolerated by the people, and little additional young men who brought with them techni- of our mission could be accomplished” (p. xv). cal expertise in various aesthetic specialties. Once in Beijing, Warner was asked to take along as a traveling In his popular treatment of Warner’s expedition, companion Chen Wanli, of the Peking University 北 read by nearly every student of Western archaeologi- 京大學 School of Medicine.

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