‘ … rugs had traveled along the ancient Silk Road since Roman times: (/) The caravan routes of the Silk Road also passed the Buddhist monasteries of Greater Tibet (/)emperors and dignitaries would visit and take retreat in the Himalayan monasteries, and travelers would bring as gifts a wealth of silk and textiles (/) Thus, these monasteries became some of the greatest treasure houses of the world.’
During the 1980s and 1990s, two sources provided a continuous stream of fascinating carpets, both piled and flat-woven, which in some instances have necessitated the rewriting of the history of early weaving.
The first source was old Turkish collections (Balpinar and Hirsch 1988; Alexander 1993; Kirchheim et al. 1993; Ölçer and Denny 1999); the second was Tibetan monasteries.
Mandala of Yamantaka-Vajrabhairava ca. 1330–32 Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) Lila Acheson Wallace Gift Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1992)
It is well known that rugs had traveled along the ancient Silk Road since Roman times: in the early twentieth century Sir Aurel Stein discovered pile carpet fragments preserved in the deserts of Central Asia (http://ipd.bl.uk). The caravan routes of the Silk Road also passed the Buddhist monasteries of Greater Tibet, whose culture spread far beyond the present-day boundaries of the Tibet administrative region of China.
Chinese emperors and dignitaries would visit and take retreat in the Himalayan monasteries, and travelers would bring as gifts a wealth of silk and textiles, the currency of the Silk Road (Watt and Wardwell 1997). Thus, over a period of 2,000 years, these monasteries became some of the greatest treasure houses of the world.
After the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, and particularly during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of the physical evidence of the culture of ancient Tibet was deliberately and systematically destroyed.
The monasteries were torn down or put to secular uses. The art objects that they had preserved for centuries were largely burnt, defaced, or stolen, although the monks did manage to hide some. Others survived because a practical purpose was found for them: the enormous Yuan period tapestry-woven mandala in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1992.54), for example, was reportedly being used in the 1970s as a ceiling canopy in a grain mill, in what was originally a small monastery.
A number of monastic treasures were also publicly distributed to local residents, with the admonition that these were their possessions, in essence stolen from them by the monks during centuries of predation. Some of the recipients chopped up the textiles they were given and put them to use, while others stored them away.
The dealer Jeremy Pine related an account of an incident that took place in the 1970s at the Potala Palace in Lhasa. A large group of old carpets, which had been folded up for centuries and in some cases were worn or damaged, were gathered together from a storeroom by Chinese troops. They were loaded onto three lorries (one carpet alone is said to have required eight men to lift it) and dumped into a nearby river.
A Tibetan fisherman managed by chance to catch one fragment and took it home. Some years later he moved to Kathmandu and discovered that it was part of an extremely rare twelfth- or thirteenth-century carpet from Anatolia.
Between 1959 and 1990, many thousands of Tibetans left their country in fear of persecution. Often reliant on aid from international organizations to support themselves, these refugees consequently sold off the treasures they had acquired or saved from the monasteries. These included several carpets and textiles, among them masterpieces of textile art from Spain in the west to China in the east, some dating back more than 2,000 years. The Dalai Lama, writing about works of art from Tibet in a western
collection (1998), said: “When so much of the Tibetan cultural heritage has been destroyed in its own land, I am very happy to know that so many fine works of art from Tibet have been preserved [in collections throughout the world] We Tibetans would regard most of these artifacts as sacred All of them are a source of inspiration.”
This is a fragment from
This is a fragment from Michael Franses article An Early Anatolian Animal Carpetand Related Examples
