(TibetanReview.net, Jul15’24) – China never misses an opportunity to contemporize or otherwise contextualize all archaeological discoveries in Tibet and other territories under its current occupation rule with corresponding historical “Chinese” dynasties as “proof” that they were part of its territory since ancient times. This is despite the fact that there may be nothing in the body of these discoveries to vindicate their assertion. For this purpose, China considers even Yuan and Qing dynasties also as Chinese, although they were, in their times, Mongol and Manchu foreign powers that ruled over the country for centuries.
Most recently, controversy has arisen after Chinese experts asserted that the ruins of an ancient Buddhist temple in the desert outside Kashgar, an oasis city in in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), were Chinese.
Two earthen pillars, eroded by sand, in barren terrain are all that’s left of the ancient Buddhist temple. Chinese historians and archaeologists have asserted that a 7th century Chinese empress ordered the construction of the Mo’er Temple — known locally as Mo’er, or “chimney” in the Uyghur language — one of the earliest Buddhist sites in the region.
The stupa and a temple next to it were probably built some 1,700 years ago and abandoned a few centuries later. Chinese archaeologists started excavating the site in 2019. They have dug up stone tools, copper coins and fragments of a Buddha statue, noted the economist.com Jul 11.
State media cited Chinese historians and archaeologists a saying the ruins show China’s influence in shaping the history and culture of the region — home today to 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs — going back centuries.
“They are a powerful testimony to the diversity, unity and inclusiveness of Chinese civilization,” rfa.org Jul 10 cited a Jun 3 report by the China News Service as saying.
They have also claimed to have found clear proof that Xinjiang has been part of China since ancient times. Official statements have claimed that the artefacts discovered at Mo’er temple are similar to those dug up thousands of miles to the east in areas dominated by the Han, China’s majority ethnic group. Parts of the temple were built in a “Han Buddhist” style. And its architectural features suggest that it was visited by a famous 7th-century monk from central China called Xuanzang. He is known for spreading Buddhism in the country.
But experts outside China dispute those claims, saying the Mo’er Stupa, or pagoda, and other temple structures were built in more of an Indian style, noted the rfa.org report.
And it’s highly unlikely that Wu Zetian, empress from 690-705 CE during the Tang Dynasty, was involved in the construction of pagodas because it was hundreds of miles away from her court in central China, they have said.
“Empress Wu, the famous female emperor of that time, was avidly promoting Buddhism but not necessarily was she promoting it out in Xinjiang,” Johan Elverskog, a professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and author of the book A History of Uyghur Buddhism has said.
“There is no way that the Tang was involved in building things that far to the west,” he has said.
According to Elverskog, documents indicate that the Kingdom of Khotan, in present-day Hotan, adopted Buddhism as the official state religion in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. While there was a Chinese military presence in the region during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), no Buddhist temples were built.
The report noted that the idea that Uyghur culture, including its ancient Buddhist history and structures, should be supplanted by Chinese culture was summed up in a speech by Pan Yue, head of the State Council’s National Ethnic Affairs Commission, at an international forum on Xinjiang’s history and future held in June in Kashgar.
“Although Xinjiang’s culture is diverse, it exists in unity, and the most important factor that unites them is Chinese culture,” Pan has said, occupying his current position since Jun 2022.
“Xinjiang should be studied from the perspective of the common history of the Chinese nation and the multipolar unity of the Chinese nation, and Xinjiang should be understood from the perspective of a region where many cultures and religions coexist and ethnic groups live together,” he has said.
Also, Kahar Barat, a Uyghur-American historian known for his work on Buddhism and Islam in Xinjiang, has said there was “absolutely no Chinese influence” in the Buddhist culture of places like Kashgar and Kucha, another city that once had many Buddhist temples.
He has said Kashgar and Kucha were part of the Hindu-Greek Gandhara Buddhist culture that existed in present-day Pakistan from the 3rd century BCE to the 12th century CE.
“They call it the Gandhara art,” he has said. “It’s the Gandhara culture created by the Buddhism developed in Kashmir and Pakistan. Therefore, the Buddha paintings and temples in Hotan, Kashgar, Kucha have the influence of Gandhara culture.”
Elverskog has agreed that the Mo’er Temple was built in Indian style.
“It’s obviously based on precedence in northwest India,” he has said. “That was the main source of the Buddhist culture in Hotan and particularly coming from India. … So the Buddhism, the iconography, the artwork, was heavily based on northwestern Indian models.”
Xia Ming, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island in New York, has said China’s interpretation of historical Uyghur Buddhism as part of Chinese Buddhism shows the tendency of the Chinese Communist Party to seek its current legitimacy from Chinese dynasties dating back thousands of years.
“If you look at the thousands of years of Chinese history,” he has said, “you will see that the Chinese Communist Party will pick and choose any historical node and talk about it if it is useful to them.”