Great Treasures

This stone sculpture is from the Royal Ontario Museum's China collections. It is dated back to the Tang Dynasty (618 – 905). The Silk Road was booming and Buddhism thriving in China at the time. Caravans with monks and merchants trekked the Silk Road carrying Indian herbs and Buddhist scripts to the Middle Kingdom. Religious theme became an important feature of arts and deco during the period. 

The Seated Buddha sits with crossed legs on a carved wooden stand. The face of the Buddha is rotund and the expression calm, as if it is in a deep state of meditation. The garment is treated with several accurately repeated undulations, indicating the fineness and lightness of the fabric. 

The Seated Buddha sculpture is valued at $15,000.
 

This is a wooden model painted in colour. The piece excavated from the 2nd Century B.C. tomb in Wu Wei consists of a cart, a canopy, a horse and a horseman. It is the largest Han-period wooden model unearthed. The original piece is now stored in Gansu Provincial Museum in China.

This is a reproduction of another mural on the tomb wall. On the brick, there is a woman sketched in ink. Her left hand holds a compass. Her right hand reaches out to a full moon. In the moon, there sits a toad. This is the image of the Goddess “Nu Wa” of Chinese mythology. The original piece is now stored in Gaotai County Museum in China.
 

China's Xinhua News Agency has provided the Silk Road Display with dozens of colour photographs on the Silk Road. This picture was taken at Yang Guan Gate, 75 kilometres northwest of Dunhuang. Yang Guan Gate held a strategic position along the Silk Road. The great 7th-Century-poet Wang Wei, has a famous line, “West of Yang Guan Gate, you will find no friends,” indicating that to the west of Yang Guan Gate, there will be nothing or nobody but the desert.