Abstract
The biography of a Tang-dynasty Buddhist sutra manuscript fragment in the Seattle Art Museum collection is unique because its provenance can be reliably traced from the discovery of the Library Cave at Mogao in June 1900 to the fragment’s arrival in Hawaii around 1938. For decades, the fragment was mounted together with an English-language gift letter dated 1932. The fortuitous retrieval of the author’s identity—a twenty-year old student at Tsinghua University—leads us to their grandfather, provincial governor of Xinjiang and Gansu province, Rao Yingqi 饒應祺, who owned the scroll until his death in January 1903. The fragment’s ownership history is thus conclusively established between 1900 and 1903, before the arrival of Marc Aurel Stein at Mogao in 1907.
Governor Rao Yingqi probably obtained his scroll from one of three people who gained early access to the Library Cave’s contents: Governor-General Wei Guangdao 魏光燾; the Manchu prince Aisin Gioro Zailan 愛新覺羅 · 載瀾; and Belgian tax collector Paul Splingaerd 林輔臣, a long-term Gansu resident who appears the most likely source. This foreigner is known from Dunhuang oral history recorded by artist Xie Zhiliu 謝稚柳 in the 1940s, where Splingaerd was rumored to have received Library Cave scrolls from Manchu circuit intendant Yan Dong 延棟, which he then regifted to officials in Xinjiang. Xie Zhiliu’s description is substantiated by Splingaerd’s letters and that of Scheut missionaries in Gansu and Mongolia kept in the CICM archives. The European correspondence indeed places Splingaerd guiding an expedition in Northern Gansu in June 1900, coinciding with the Library Cave’s discovery, before reaching Xinjiang in July on the eve of the Boxer Uprising. This study of the SAM sutra fragment illuminates the Library Cave’s early dispersal period by recovering the heretofore unknown connection between Splingaerd and Governor Rao Yingqi.