Just about a century ago, Chinese intellectuals and politicians began to insist that antiquities found in China should remain in China because they represented and belonged to the Chinese nation. Such objects were seen, in Justin M. Jacobs's term, as “priceless,” or in other words beyond valuation and hence not fungible. In the late Qing period, however, objects and texts found in caves or dug out of tombs may have been “precious” but could be traded for appropriate compensation.
This beautifully written and theoretically sophisticated study focuses on Western expeditions to Xinjiang and the Dunhuang region from 1900 to 1930, particularly those of Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. The stories of these two men and other explorers are well-known from their own publicity machines, but Jacobs explores their private archives and, most importantly, the textual evidence from the Chinese side, primarily official correspondence and diaries. This gives us not two separate national stories but a multivocal and nuanced analysis of antiquities collecting—long an elite Chinese practice, a major element of Western empire building, and a part of the birth of modern Chinese nationalism. The Compensations of Plunder also speaks to the politics of the Chinese frontier, Western culturalism and racism, and the development of Chinese archaeology.
Jacobs argues that the Western expeditions were able to collect so many antiquities and texts to send back to European museums and libraries because the peoples and rulers of Xinjiang were happy to receive various kinds of economic, social, and political “compensation.” Nobody at the time regarded the Westerners as thieves; today's nationalist framework of bullies and victims is anachronistic. For ordinary Muslims of Xinjiang, the expeditions offered good wages and customers for their goods; for village leaders, prestige as well. For Han Chinese rulers, the Westerners seemed to fit into long-accepted practices of treating ancient antiquities as private property and finders keepers: property to be displayed for prestige, traded or gifted for goodwill, or sold by necessity. There was nothing surprising or untoward about the Westerners’ desire for antiquities. It was unfortunate that they grabbed so much stuff and took it out of circulation, but few raised questions of morality or national identity until roughly the time of the 1911 Revolution. (Indeed, one could further relate this to late Qing views of imperialism more generally: elites seldom moralized about the evils of Western aggression but focused instead on finding solutions—that is, strengthening China.)
Both Jacobs and the Chinese and Central Asians involved in the antiquities trade—as he shows—were fully aware that the Western archaeologists were operating with the diplomatic and military protections provided by the imperialist powers. Yet, while Western armies were looting antiquities in Beijing, China's Far West provided a more cooperative environment. “During the late Qing and early Republican eras, foreign archaeologists in Xinjiang were both emblems and purveyors of a Western modernity that was highly coveted by the local ruling classes” (p. 122). By way of more specific compensation, Chinese elites on the frontier also received technical advice, scientific instruments, medicines, and guns. In addition, Jacobs argues that Chinese elites on the frontier and Western explorers found themselves sharing a common cultural identity as “gentlemen of empire”—essentially a class identity as carriers of civilization vis-à-vis the lower classes and barbarous foreign peoples. (Dunhuang, in Gansu, was a special case insofar as Wang Yuanlu, the illiterate Daoist priest who discovered its hidden treasures, dispersed them slowly, keeping up prices by convincing all comers that they were getting the last of the bunch.)
Western explorers in Xinjiang were involved in imperialist and racist projects, the first seen, for example, in mapmaking for potential military expeditions and the second in the explorers’ initial intellectual goal: the pursuit of supposedly decadent forms of Greek-Alexandrian civilization to bolster European identity. For the Western explorers, the antiquities they found were “priceless” not as national patrimony but as symbols of their respective empires: they ratified the legitimacy of European claims to rule many nations. Westerners also treated their discoveries as “priceless” examples of human achievement demanding scientific analysis (which could only be done in Europe).
As I read Jacobs's subtitle, China's “loss” can be understood in two ways. One is simply the story of how literally tons of stuff from Central Asia—Buddhist paintings, Tibetan statues, Tang dynasty manuscripts—were collected to be sorted and studied back in the northwestern tip of the Eurasian continent, while a second story tells how this movement of objects came to be regarded as “loss” by a “China” that was coming into its modern existence. The second half of the book, which describes growing Chinese efforts to curtail the activities of Western antiquities hunters, is not as cohesive as the first half. Nationalist consciousness, after all, arose in fits and starts, as did professionalization of the field of archaeology. Although Jacobs cannot discuss the emergence of new attitudes toward history and antiquities, much less the rise of nationalism, in detail, the strength of the later chapters is twofold. First, they show how the Chinese themselves were frequently divided, different groups seeking to deal with Westerners’ proposals for expeditions in different ways. And second, they highlight how slow the Westerners were to understand they no longer had carte blanche. (Also, the descriptions of these last expeditions are fascinating.) On the one hand, Jacobs points to the commonalities between the Westerners and China's new Western-educated professionals, who shared an Enlightenment-style “ideological commitment” (p. 171) rather than the class-based political ethos of the late Qing's “gentlemen of empire.” On the other hand, the Chinese were slowly but surely enforcing the principle that all the stuff buried in the sands within the territories claimed by China remain in China.
Jacobs furthermore offers stimulating comparisons to archaeologists working in Egypt and other part of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, is it misleading to call the likes of Stein and Pelliot archaeologists? Jacobs says nothing of whether the extent of their work met the scientific standards of nineteenth-century archaeology, much less those of today, or of what they contributed to archaeological knowledge. They strike this reader more as collectors (and spies—which the Chinese were well aware of) and boys-own adventurers, and if not thieves, still pretty close to vandals as they stripped paintings from cave walls and ripped statues off their bases.
