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The room occupies the part of the second floor of the
Winter Palace where the flats of the attending staff were originally
situated. The exhibition features the artifacts of the 12th and 13th
centuries from Khara-Khoto, a dead town on the boundary of the Gobi
desert and a major centre of the Tangutan state Xi-Xia destroyed in
the 13h century. The excavations on the site of Khara-Khoto, conducted
under the supervision of Piotr Kozlov in the early 20th century, yielded
valuable examples of Buddhist art, namely the paintings that had been
preserved under the layers of dry sand without air access for nearly
700 years. Displayed in the room are such rare items dating from the
11th and 12th centuries as the Buddhist silk-scroll icons Bodhisattva
Kuang-yin and The Apparition of Buddha Amitabha, as well as the paper
scroll Portrait of a Statesmen, a beautiful example of portraiture
of the Sung era. Of interest are also Tangutan and Chinese xylographs,
books with texts printed from engraved blocks of wood. |
