Viewing page 68 of 234

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

61

ICHOU, CHINCHOWFU, KUAN NING

[[underline]] NORTH WEI SITE [[/underline]] As early as the year 1907 I had heard while in Japan, reports of some cave chapels in Manchuria which had been visited by two Japanese engineers. They had brought back with them partly legible rubbings from rock inscriptions and snapshots of sculptures which indicated that the work probably dated from the fifth or sixth century A.D. The importance of this evidence lay not so much in the possible excellence of the sculptures as the fact that the two engineers, though not expert critics, were convinced that some frescoes which remained on the walls must be co-eval with the sculptures. They had been unable to photograph them as their party was attacked by villagers, but they described the frescoes in such a way as to convince certain Japanese scholars that there was at least a possibility of seeing actual dated examples of the painting of North Wei period.
North Wei being in some ways the most fruitful era for Chinese investigation, as it includes the very years when Indian thought and culture were carried across Asia to vitalize China, Korea and Japan on the great wave of Buddhism, I made every effort to explore these chapels. Three separate attempts on my part to raise funds in America for the trip had failed on account of the slight character of the evidence. I believed that none of my plans gave such promise of service to the School as the one to establish this isolated mark of a wave which had left traces at Lungmen and Tat'ungfu, but none further east till it reached the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan.