Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

III. Far East, South and South-East Asia / Дальний Восток, Южная и Юго-Восточная Азия Доклады Международного конгресса по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки. Т. 1. 2020 567 Silk Road, as this town was situated on a well-known crossroad of two major trade routes within the network. Indeed, if the latter theory is true, the monks’ fears were confirmed several centuries later to a certain extent. Immediately after monkWangYuanlu’s discovery of the cave, some of the manuscripts and paintings were selected by him and gifted to the military command in Suzhou (now Jiuquan). He also repeatedly presented separate manuscripts to various official departments and officials of Dunhuang. These actions marked the beginning of subsequent dramatic events related to the dispersal and loss of some of the most valuable treasures of the Dunhuang collection. Despite the March 1904 order by the Gansu province government and the mayor of DunhuangWang Zonghan, stating the immediate need to take stock and check the collection of the cave containing the library, monkWangYuanlu, who was appointed to guard, take stock and seal its contents, could not fully fulfill his duty. In 1907, he sold 20,000 manuscripts and drawings on silk and paper to British archaeologist Sir Aurel Marc Stein 1 for next to nothing, and then over 10,000 manuscripts and 1 Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1943), a British archaeologist of Hungarian origin under- took four expeditions to Central Asia. In 1907, he traveled to the Mogao caves, when he learned about the library. He persuaded monk Wang to sell him 24 boxes of manuscripts and 5 boxes of illustrations drawn on silk and paper for an extremely low price. During his third expedition to China in 1914, Stein returned to Dunhuang and bought another 500 man- uscripts from the monk. Currently, the documents are stored in the British Museum, the Fig. 1b. Monument to monk Hongbian in Cave № 16 where manuscripts were sealed in for 900 years, including a manuscript of the work “Dispute of Tea and Wine” (materials from E. Voytishek’s trip to the Mogao caves in October 2017)