The Compensations of Plunder by Justin M. Jacobs

Author:Justin M. Jacobs [Jacobs, Justin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: HIS000000 History / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE FIRST FOGG EXPEDITION

The first American expedition to northwestern China appears to have been inspired by the French sinologist Paul Pelliot. In 1913, five years after Pelliot’s famous visit to Dunhuang, the American art historian Langdon Warner (figure 21) tracked him down in Paris and told him of plans for the development of an American School of Archaeology in Beijing. Warner, then working as a curator of Asian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, was traveling the world in search of Chinese and Japanese sculpture for his museum. Pelliot advised Warner to visit the French Archaeological School at Hanoi and to begin the task of amassing a great American collection of Asian art with a corpus of early Chinese inscriptions. After the outbreak of World War I, Warner once again crossed paths with Pelliot, this time in Beijing and Siberia. Both men were in the Far East on behalf of their respective governments, carrying out wartime intelligence operations under the guise of archaeology. When Warner told Pelliot of several failed proposals to establish an American archaeological presence in China, Pelliot proposed that he and Warner undertake a new expedition to Xinjiang after the war was over. “That would be an immense feather in our caps,” Warner wrote to Frederick A. Whiting, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, “as he is the one who collected all the Tun-huang mss. and brought back the great T’ang paintings. Also he has several new sites for excavation up his sleeve, but will have no money to work them.”29

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