Buddhistdoor Global

A groundbreaking exhibition, titled “Cultural Exchange Along the Silk Road: Masterpieces of the Tubo Period (7th–9th Century),” opened in Dunhuang in China’s Gansu Province on 2 July. Jointly organized by the Dunhuang Academy and the Pritzker Art Collaborative, the exhibition is intended to illustrate the dynamic and complex cultural landscape when Tubo, more commonly known as the Tibetan empire in English, flourished on the Silk Road.

In the spirit of the Silk Road, the exhibition brought together 140 artifacts from 31 international museums and cultural institutions. Among them, the Abegg-Stiftung in Switzerland, the Art Institute of Chicago, the State Hermitage Museum in Russia, the Al Thani Collection in Qatar, the Hirayama Ikuo Silk Road Museum in Japan, and more than 20 Chinese counterparts ranging from the Palace Museum to the Ngari Prefecture Zhada County Cultural Relics Bureau in the Tibet Autonomous Region, alongside several private collections. Despite the remoteness of the venue, people flew in from across the world to celebrate this great occasion of international collaboration and cultural exchange.

While most people expect to see only Buddhist art in an exhibition focused on Tibet, the Dunhuang exhibition aims to enrich the current narratives of Tibetan history and culture. Curator Dr. David Pritzker, while recognizing Indian and Chinese influences on Tibetan Buddhism, and the influence of the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) on the administration of the Tibetan state, made a special effort to gather objects from other cultures, including Bactrian, Greek, Kashmiri, Sassanian, Sogdian, Turkish, and Uyghur. The purpose is to enable the audience to see Tubo’s eclectic cultural context with their own eyes and also to see how Tibetans at the time transformed varied ideas and motifs into something uniquely Tibetan.

Among the many outstanding examples, Dr. Pritzker highlighted a majestic gold ewer as it was where his vision for the whole exhibition began. Many years ago, after examining a wide range of material culture along the Silk Road and—albeit scarce—contemporary texts, Dr. Pritzker eloquently argued that the ewer was made by a Sogdian artist for the Tubo court. He traced how its shape evolved from classical Iranian prototypes, how the iconography was informed by both Central Asian and Tang Chinese imagery, and how it retained a distinctive Tibetan flavor, such as the stylized wings of a phoenix motif and the turquoise inlay.*

In the same exhibition space, Dr. Pritzker managed to juxtapose several similar objects: a parcel-gilt silver ewer of Greco-Bactrian origin unearthed in a tomb dated to 569 in Ningxia Province; a Chinese stoneware ewer from the sixth to the early seventh century; and a parcel-gilt silver ewer from Central Asia dated to the eighth century. It becomes clear that the ewer mentioned in the previous paragraph is a testament to the artistic and technical virtue of Tubo art. Fifty centimeters high, it is the largest known ewer of its kind, demonstrating extremely refined repoussé and intricate turquoise inlay, which is even more prominent in another Tubo gold ewer in the exhibition, as shown below.