Book review: Dong Wang,Longmen’s Stone Buddhas and Cultural Heritage: When Antiquity Met Modernity in China

The author, Dong Wang, was born in Luoyang and lived there until 1983. In a way, the book is also a personal journey of discovery of the famous Longmen Buddhist caves, now a World Heritage site. The author suggests that the interest of scholars in Europe, the USA and Japan in the cultural heritage of China, especially the Buddhist caves at Longmen in the nineteenth century, reflects recognition of the art of China as a source of spirituality and modernity, and this is an important dimension of the modern history of the country’s cultural heritage. Longmen means ‘dragon gate’ and is located 13 kilometres from the city of Luoyang in the Henan province of the North China plains. The 2,000 caves dating from 493 ce are carved in the limestone cliffs on both sides of the Yi river and extend for almost one kilometre. In addition to the fine sculptures and reliefs, the complex includes memorial stele and inscriptions. Activity at the site diminished after the Tang period (618–907), though additions continued to be intermittently made until the seventeenth century. Though the White Horse temple in Luoyang, considered one of the earliest temples in China, was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, yet miraculously the Longmen Buddhist caves escaped the wrath of the Red Guards, protected as they were by the city’s Party Secretary. In the post-Mao years of the 1980s and 1990s, tourism flourished, and in 2001, Longmen caves were inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list. The author argues that ‘notions of cultural heritage mediate the past in the present and are inti-mately associated with global affairs’ (p. 12). Since the turn of the twentieth century, Buddhist monuments of China were appreciated and promoted by art historians, intellectuals, collectors and Orientalists from Europe, the USA and Asia as equal in aesthetic value to the artistic productions of the West.

Chapter I explores how Longmen caves were remembered in Chinese political discourse from the fifth to the eighteenth centuries, prior to attempts at Sinicisation of Buddhism as evident from President Xi Jinping’s speech to UNESCO in 2014. Was ethnicity or Sinicisation a concern expressed by those who visited or wrote about Longmen prior to its rediscovery in the nineteenth century? Buddhism spread overland through Xinjiang in Chinese Turkistan into China from India between 147 and 189 ce. Luoyang was one of the early hubs of the religion in China with the Temple of the White Horse founded in 68 ce. From the seventh to the tenth centuries, Longmen was a multi-religious imperial and public space with Buddhism coexisting with Daoism, Nestorianism and Confucianism. By the end of the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368), at least ten Buddhist temples at Longmen fell into disrepair and were abandoned, and by the fifteenth century, Longmen was in ruins. Criticism of the stone Buddha images at Longmen became didactic and harsh during the Yuan (1271–1368) and Ming dynasties (1368–1644).

After an introduction to the history of the caves, in Chapter II, the discussion shifts to China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author negotiates between the binaries of tradition and modernity, often seen as incompatible in modern Chinese intellectual thought and discusses the role of Chinese philosopher and politician Kang Youwei (1858–1927), as well as Americans like Frederick McCormick (1870–1951), Secretary of the China Monument Society and of American Asiatic Institute, in raising awareness amongst the Chinese about their past. McCormick advocated state ownership and state guardianship of ancient monuments in China.

In continuing with the objective to establish the universal appeal of Longmen caves, Chapter III focuses on foreign fascination with China, especially the engagement of French Sinologists such as Édouard Chavannes (1865–1918), Phillipe Berthelot (1866–1934) with Longmen caves to suggest ways in which the East inspired modernity in the West. Dong Wang states that in the early nineteenth century, many thinkers in Europe invoked the Orient as a metaphor to argue against Christianity and Graeco-Roman classicism. Thereby the author argues against Chinese backwardness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and proposes an alternative to the dominant trope of seeing the superiority of the West in cultural terms. Instead she suggests that the Buddhist caves held universal appeal in terms of spirituality and aesthetic quality that represented the transmission of culture between Greece, India and China, especially since the French admired the sculptures for their Greek influence and coined the term Graeco-Buddhist. The author makes a case for a secular and scientific interest in the Orient by European scholars, though this reviewer does not find the discussion convincing, considering the huge art market in Europe that developed at this time and one that commanded exorbitant prices for Oriental antiquities.

The power of knowledge in an increasingly colonised world receives short shrift in the discussion. As Stanley Abe has argued (Abe, 1995, p. 79), implicit in the discourse developed by Alfred Foucher (1865–1952) and other French scholars on the Greek influence on Buddhist sculpture was the assumption that colonialism stimulated stagnant non-Western societies by introducing the inventions of Western civilisation, such as depicting the Buddha in human form. This is an issue that the author overlooks, though she quotes approvingly from Stanley Abe on page 99 and states that to date ‘the Chinese by and large have no issues with this conclusion, unlike their Japanese counterparts in history’ (p. 100). This line of thinking is followed in the next chapter with reference to the American industrialist and art collector Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919) who made large collections of Chinese antiquities and funded the Freer Gallery in Washington DC and its collection of Japanese, Chinese and Indian art. Also discussed is the contribution of the Japanese scholar Okakura Kakuzo (1862–1913) who visited Longmen caves in 1893, but whose interest lay in establishing Japanese art on an equal footing in the West.

In Chapter V, the spotlight shifts to Osvald Sirén (1879–1966), the Finnish–Swedish art historian. He was an early member of the Theosophist movement and was granted the Charles Lang Freer medal in 1956 for his work in promoting Chinese sculpture and paintings in the West. The author agrees that the worldwide Theosophical movement played an important part in his ‘extraordinary contribution to the modern re-appropriation of Chinese antiquity including those at Longmen’ (p. 140). Chapter VI discusses legal measures taken for the protection of cultural heritage in China as also globally, while the final chapter traces the status of Longmen caves from 1949 to the present, as the caves were inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2001.

An implicit message throughout the book is the Chinese perception and adaptation of Buddhism and Buddhist monuments supported by an admiration for Chinese cultural heritage by the West. Singularly missing from this narrative of China’s Buddhist heritage is an awareness of the interconnected networks of knowledge transfer across Buddhist Asia, including those in China. What is striking is the absence of any discussion relating to mobility and movement of Buddhist monks and nuns between Longmen Buddhist caves and other parts of central Asia, China and India in antiquity, which detracts from the understanding of a shared heritage and universal appeal that Longmen caves symbolise. The travels of the seventh century Chinese monk Xuanzang to Buddhist sites in India are well-known. Tansen Sen has shown the close links that the Tang court maintained with the kingdom of Kanauj in middle India. In the seventh century, Wang Xuance was sent as an ambassador to India, and it is no surprise that his inscription dated 29 October 665 in the south Binyang cave of Longmen records the installation of an image of Bodhisattva Maitreya (Sen, 2001, pp. 1–28). These travels continued and there are several references to Indian Buddhists travelling to China and vice versa (Guang, 2007; Mosca, 2020).

The author refers to increased mobility and communication in the nineteenth century as a motivating factor in the discovery of Chinese art and the caves of Longmen by the West but makes no mention of the fact that nineteenth-century Buddhism was itself a ‘construct’ of the West. The appeal of Buddhism lay in the European perception of its Protestant ethics, and a majority of Victorians easily comprehended this (Almond, 1988). At the same time, European interest in spirituality as exemplified by Osvald Sirén in Chapter V needs to be contextualised within larger global currents of interest in the occult as evident from the spread of the Theosophical Society across Asia, including India and Sri Lanka and its increased engagement with Buddhism worldwide (Ray, 2014, pp. 6, 21; Ray, 2021).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC), proclaimed in 1949, officially remains an avowedly atheistic Marxist–Leninist state under the ruling CCP, led since 2012 by Xi Jinping. The Buddhist Association of China (BAC) was set up in 1953 as a channel for state control, but the religion was stigmatised during the 1950s and its adherents persecuted during the Cultural Revolution… A gradual recovery, however, has been evident since the 1990s, with the state ready to co-opt Buddhism into its quest for a “harmonious society” (Scott, 2016).

The book under review is certainly a step in that direction.