page_title: German Turfan expeditions
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: German Turfan expeditions / History
caption_attribution_description: English: "Zorniger Arhat" collected by German expedition to Turkestan in the early 20th century. Painting on silk, from the foothills near Turfan. Dating from the 8/9th centuries CE. 29.0 x 47.5 cm Located in the Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin-Dahlem. Item 367; III 7241
context_page_description: The German Turfan expeditions were conducted between 1902 and 1914. The four expeditions to Turfan in Xinjiang, China, were initiated by Albert Grünwedel, a former director at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, and organized by Albert von Le Coq. Theodor Bartus, who was a technical member of the museum staff and was in charge of extricating paintings found during the expeditions from cave walls and ruins, accompanied all four expeditions. Both expedition leaders. Grünwedel and Le Coq, returned to Berlin with thousands of paintings and other art objects, as well as more than 40,000 fragments of text. In 1902, the first research team financed largely by Friedrich Krupp, the arms manufacturer, left for Turfan and returned a year later with 46 crates full of treasures. Kaiser Wilhelm II was enthusiastic and helped finance the second expedition along with Krupp. The third was financed by means of the Ministry of Culture. The fourth expedition under Le Coq was dogged by many difficulties and was finally cut short by the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
context_section_description: International attention was first drawn to Turfan by Sven Hedin (1865-1952), to European and Japanese archaeologists, as a potential and promising site in Central Asia for field explorations for archaeological finds. He could follow up the work in later years during his last expeditions between 1928 and 1935. His collections of that period are in the Stockholm Ethnographical Museum. After his first suggestion to the archeologist about the archaeological richness of the Turfan site, many Russian expeditions were mounted from September 27 to November 21, 1879 right up to 1914–1915, Finnish expeditions from 1906 to 1908, by Japan between July 1908 and June 1914, and also other explorers from Great Britain, France and America; and from 1928 Chinese archaeological campaigns continued the work of the foreign expeditions. German expeditions from 1902 and 1914 not only to Turfan but also other sites such as Kucha, Qarashahr and Tumshuq [Tumšuq] were most fruitful. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Germans were impressed by the discoveries and finds reported by Europeans traveling through the Silk Roads and the exposition made at the twelfth international Congress of Orientalists in Rome in the year 1899 prompted them to launch their own expeditions to the area. The finds of the four expeditions (packed and carted to Germany initially) were murals, other artefacts and about 40,000 pieces of texts. The four German expeditions covered Turfan but also Kucha, Qarashahr and Tumshuq [Tumšuq]. The expeditions were: 
  First Expedition: November 1902 – March 1903 led by Prof. Grünwedel along with the Orientalist scholar, Georg Huth, and Bartus, as fellow participants;
  Second Expedition: November 1904 – August 1905 led by Le Coq along with Bartus;
  Third Expedition: united with the second Expedition, from December 1905 to April 1907 led by Grünwedel and Le Coq, H. Pohrt and Bartus as fellow participants;
  Fourth Expedition: June 1913 – February 1914 led by Le Coq along with Bartus as a participant.
caption: Art work from the German Turfan expeditions
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