British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
A HUNDRED YEARS OF DUNHUANG, 1907-2007
Abstracts
The Politics of Preservation and Museum Building in Western China in the Early Twentieth Century
Sanchita Balachandran
The preservation of cultural property is never a neutral activity. The question of who is to possess, care for and interpret artifacts is highly politically charged, particularly when cultural property was acquired or removed under imperial or colonial rule. This paper examines how preservation was used as a justification for the removal of not only movable artifacts but also pieces of immovable archaeological sites, and was therefore an essential tool in building museum collections in the early twentieth century. This study focuses on a collection of twelve wall painting fragments from the site of Dunhuang, China, which were removed by art historian Langdon Warner in 1924 for the Fogg Art Museum. The removal process resulted in significant damage to some of the painting fragments as well as to the site itself, calling into question what is preserved: an intact ancient artifact or an ancient artifact scarred by and embedded with its modern collection history? How do pedagogical institutions such as museums grapple with unsuccessful examples of preservation? Drawing from the Harvard collection as an example, this paper examines the contradictions of preservation ethics in the early twentieth century, and considers their legacies both for museums with such entangled objects, as well as for the sites from which they were originally removed.