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Original Title: Stunning Stage Appearance at the Spring Festival Gala
The Head of the Buddha in the Tianlongshan Grottoes “Go home”
The head of the Buddha in the Tianlongshan Grottoes (screenshot from CCTV Spring Festival Gala video).
On the evening of February 11, in the 2021 CCTV Spring Festival special gala program “The National Treasure Back Home”, the narrator Zhang Guoli and the guest of the School of Archeology, Culture and Museum of the Peking University Hang Kan and the Dean of Yungang Research Institute jointly announced exciting news: the main Buddha on the north wall of Cave 8 of the Tianlongshan Grottoes, which has been lost abroad for nearly a century, has returned to the homeland and met people from all over the country for the first time on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala. In the next few minutes, the content of the Buddha’s head “going home” in the Tianlongshan Grottoes projected the “circle of friends” of the Taiyuan people.
The Taiyuan Tianlongshan Grottoes are a national unit for the protection of key cultural relics, excavated from the late Northern Dynasty to the Sui and Tang Dynasties. In the 1920s, the Tianlongshan Grottoes were robbed on a grand scale and more than 240 statues were stolen. They are now in collections in Japanese, European and American museums and in private hands. The damage is the most tragic among Chinese cave temples.
The return of this Buddha head is understood to have originated at auction. On September 14, 2020, the Buddha’s head appeared up for auction at a Japanese auction house. On October 15, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage sent a letter to the auction house requesting the cessation of the auction and the advertising and exhibition activities related to the head of Buddha and the withdrawal of the auction. On October 16, the auction house actively cooperated and made the decision to withdraw the auction and terminate the relevant advertising. The State Administration of Cultural Heritage contacted Zhang Rong, Chairman of the Auction House (Overseas Chinese in Japan, from Hangzhou, Zhejiang) to encourage the return of cultural relics.
Zhang Guoli said on the special program of the Spring Festival Gala that in 2020, despite the impact of the new corona epidemic, my country will still receive close to a hundred cultural relics from the UK, Egypt and other countries. This Buddha head was donated by Mr. Zhang Rong to the National Administration of Cultural Heritage for free., It returned to the motherland on December 12, 2020. This is also the 100th Chinese cultural relic returned from abroad in 2020.
Hang Kan introduced into the program that Cave 8 is the largest cave on the north wall of the Tianlongshan Grottoes and was built in the Sui Dynasty, more than 1,400 years ago. The Tianlong Mountain Grottoes were robbed on a large scale in the first half of the last century, resulting in the loss of many cultural relics abroad. Today there are almost no Buddha statues in the Tianlongshan Grottoes. This is the first Tianlongshan Buddha head to return from Japan. This Buddha with a slight smile witnessed the superb artistic level of the Tianlongshan Grottoes. It has significant physical significance and high artistic value, and has been identified as a first-class national cultural relic. Hang Kan said that the lost cultural relics must be returned to their place of origin. This is an international consensus on the protection of cultural relics. When the time is right, the relevant departments will send the Buddha’s head back to Tianlong Mountain. (Li Xiaobing)
