Turpan Research: a Russian-German joint project

On March 14-15th, 2013, a working meeting dedicated to the beginning of the joint Russian-German Turpan studies project was held in Berlin. The project was organized under the aegis of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Russian participants were the State Hermitage Museum and the Institute of Eastern Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences; the German participants were the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Museum of Asian Art and the Berlin State Library. The goal of the project is joint investigation of artistic and written artifacts from Central Asia preserved in the aforementioned Russian and German institutions, the creation of an accessible online database on those artifacts, cataloguing and digitizing them.

The State Hermitage Museum and the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin have rich collections of work of painting and sculpture as well as archaeological materials connected with the Great Silk Road from the Turpan, Karashar, Kucha and Hotan oases of Eastern Turkestan (now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China). The Hermitage is also home to world famous artifacts from the Magao Buddhist cave monastery, located not far from the city of Dunhuang (now Gansu Province, PRC) and the Tangut city of Khara-Khoto (eastern part of Inner Mongolia). These collections were gathered and brought to Saint Petersburg and Berlin in the early 20th century by Russian expeditions by S.F. Oldenburg, M.M. Berezovsky, P.K. Kozlov and German expeditions by A. Gru"nwedel and A. von Le Coq. Thousands of written artifacts, collected by the same expeditions are located either in the Saint Petersburg Institute of Eastern Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Science. The Hermitage collection of Central Asian artifacts is supplemented by items from the former Museum of Ethnography in Berlin (the A. Gru"nwedel collection) that were brought to Russia after the Second World War.

The participants in the working meeting included employees of all of the Russian and German institutions participating in the joint project. The delegation from the State Hermitage Museum was headed by Deputy General Director G.V. Vilinbakhov, while the delegation from the Institute of Eastern Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences was the Institute’s Director, I.F. Popova. The sessions held in the Academy of Sciences (March 14) and the Museum of Asian Art (15 March) hosted more than twenty reports: a presentation of the Russian and German Central Asian collection, the contemporary state of the cataloguing and digitization of those collections and related problems. A discussion of the prospects of joint work was held at the end of the meeting, and the parties agreed on the possibility of exchanging information (specifically on the questions of restoring wall paintings), internships for scientific employees and restorers, joint publications of the catalogues of the collections as well as the need for digitization and the creation of a data base of the expedition documents (photographs and drawings) preserved in the Saint Petersburg and Berlin collections.