One of the First to Emerge from the Library Cave: A Buddhist Sutra and the Belgian Mandarin

In 1932, a twenty-year-old university student gifted a fragment of a Buddhist sutra manuscript to their English professor in Beijing. Now in the collection of Seattle Art Museum, this Tang-dynasty fragment came from a scroll that once belonged to their grandfather, provincial governor of Xinjiang province in far Western China. It had emerged after nearly a thousand years from a hidden cache sealed inside the “Library Cave,” Cave 17 at Mogao, Dunhuang. The governor likely received the scroll from another Qing-dynasty official, a Belgian man, before the man’s hurried escape across the Gobi Desert in the tumultuous year of the Boxer Rebellion.

The sensational discovery of Cave 17 in 1900 founded an entire field of medieval studies, but the period before the first Western explorers arrived continues to elude scholars. The ownership history of this sutra fragment contains definitive evidence that fills a conspicuous gap in our knowledge about Dunhuang. This lecture presents new archival research on the lore of the “Belgian Mandarin” and explains how the scroll came into the hands of the governor, a Chinese collector, years before Hungarian-born British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein reached Mogao in 1907.

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FOONG Ping is Foster Foundation Curator of Chinese Art at the Seattle Art Museum and Affiliate Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Dr. Foong received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, and her experience spans the academic and curatorial realms. She began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, and then taught at the University of Chicago as Assistant Professor and at the University of California, Berkeley. Her monograph on eleventh-century Chinese ink painting, The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court won the Joseph Levenson Book Prize. An ongoing book project treats the titular recognition of painters and calligraphers as a facet of Chinese spatial imagination. Her present focus is on the material histories of medieval Buddhist calligraphy and their reception during the late Qing dynasty and early Republican era. 

Dr. Foong oversees the SAM’s extensive collection of Chinese art, from historic to modern and contemporary, in its presentation, research, care, and interpretation. Alongside two co-curators, Foong led an extensive effort to expand and modernize the landmark 1933 art deco building of the Seattle Asian Art Museum. Envisioning its global future, the building reopened in 2020 with an innovative thematic presentation of the permanent collection. She is currently organizing Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei, the largest US retrospective exhibition on the acclaimed Chinese contemporary artist, opening soon in March 2025.

About Sammy Yukuan Lee Lecture Series
First presented in 1982 in celebration of his 80th birthday, the Sammy Yukuan Lee Lectures on Chinese Art and Archaeology honors the life and philanthropy of respected businessman, art collector, and Chinese art authority, Sammy Yukuan Lee. The Friday Seminar series began in 2013 to allow for more in-depth discussions between the speakers and the students and faculty members. This series is presented annually by the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies with support from the Sammy Yukuan Lee Foundation, and in partnership with the Fowler Museum at UCLA.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies