Above Top: Langdon Warner on a camel at Kara-Khoto in 1923. Image from “Langdon Warner Through His Letters”.
Above Middle: Langdon Warner ~1910, or roughly thirty years old. Image from “Langdon Warner Through His Letters”.
Above Bottom: The Tang dynasty Boddhisattva removed by Langdon Warner from Cave 328 at Mogao and carted, wrapped in his under-clothes, all the way back to Xi’an, thence by train to the coast, and from there to America and the Fogg Art Museum.
Apologies for the very long hiatus in updates. I’m back in Boston now briefly, via Berkeley, China, Amdo, Berkeley again, and soon to be Berkeley once more. In the next few posts I’m going to try to shoot up a few of the collections I’ve been able to make over the last six months or so.
Langdon Warner (1881-1955) got his start as an archaeologist and art historian in Asia in 1903, when he was participated as a volunteer at the excavations at Anau in what’s now Turkmenistan, then the Russian Empire. His career did not truly begin, however, until 1906. In this year the Boston MFA and Harvard University decided that they needed expertise in the art of Japan. For this purpose two young men were selected and sent to that country to study the language and the high arts; one of those men was Langdon Warner. From this year until 1952, Langdon Warner made eighteen trips into Asia. Japan and Japanese art was always his passion, but he travelled elsewhere as well: most famously the two Fogg Expeditions to Dunhuang in 1923-25, but also long stays in Beijing, journeys to Longmen, to Yungang, to Ankor Wat, to Korea, as well as a ride north across Mongolia and into Russia during the First World War, where he served as an American liaison with the Czech Legion during their Trans-Siberian anabasis. By the outbreak Second World War, he had retired from adventurous collecting and was teaching at Harvard. (He never became a full professor; so far as I know he never even had a doctorate.) During the war years he taught a course on Japanese language and culture in Washington DC, and for a brief period at the war’s end became one of the “Monuments Men” in Japan and Korea.
He was also my grandfather. His son, Caleb Warner, is 94 years in 2017, and still living now in an Assisted Living Facility in Bedford MA. Caleb Warner’s daughter, Langdon Warner’s grand-daughter, is my mother.
Roughly two years ago, our family was contacted by the Fogg Museum at Harvard. It turned out that when Langdon Warner died, he had left a large number of objects in the possession of the museum, originally lent to them for teaching purposes. Although they had remained in the museum for over sixty years, the ownership still technically resided with LW’s heirs. We of course immediately stated that we would gift the objects to the museum where they already were, but we did ask as our only condition that we could arrange a viewing of the objects for family interest. This happened in January 2017.
Most of the items are minor pieces – a collection of Korean kiln cast-offs, small Chinese bronze objects presumably from the Beijing antique shops, some interesting clay figurines, a Japanese dharmapāla, some rubbings possibly from Xi’an, and sundry other odds and ends. Langdon Warner’s wife, my great-grandmother née Lorraine Roosevelt, also collected and wrote about Asian art; items probably gathered by her included some Korean kiln cast-offs and scraps of fabric perhaps once intended for clothing. I’ve put all the photos given to us by the museum up here, as well as some of my own highlights.
It’s also my strong opinion that if Langdon Warner wasn’t the most illustrious or successful of the Silk Road explorers, he was far and away the best writer. I’ve never seen PDFs of LW’s two “travel books” online, so I’ve stuck up links to my PDF copies here. Click to download, “Long Old Road in China” and “Langdon Warner Through His Letters“. Always my favorite excerpt, describing his entrance into the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang:
Chapter XIV (p 138): The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas
“After all these years and all these miles, and the hours spent examining the reproductions of M. Pelliot’s photographs, there was nothing to do but gasp. Hardly in ten days, during which I never left the caves except for food, could I bring myself to the task of critical study. For the holy men of fourteen centuries ago had left their gods in splendour on those walls. Tens of thousands of them, walking in slow procession, seated calm on flowering lotus blossoms, with hands raised to bless mankind, or wrapt in meditation or deeper still sunk in thoughtless Nirvana. They were the very gods whose existence I had only guessed. Sir Aurel Stein shows one or two in his book, and Professor Pelliot has five volumes of them and another volume still to come. Learned gentlemen, in books costing seventy-three shillings and sixpence net, discuss the ancestry and progeny of the Chinese pantheon and base their findings upon their study of these reproductions.
But in the very presence, such things are not. These dim figures, half faded from the walls in an irreligious age, and lit only by a half-reflected twilight from the winter sun outside, are a company of elder gods who have not left the earth with their noble companions long since fled. They people those high halls in silence so profound and full of meaning that for the first time I understood why I had crossed an ocean and two continents, plodding beside my cart these weary months, to assure myself of their presence. It was not so much active realizing of their surpassing beauty that made me satisfied and dulled my critical sense: it was this reality of the unreal. They were there not as living beings, certainly not as dead ones. I, who had come to attribute dates and glibly to refute the professors and to discover artistic influences, stood in the centre of the chapel with my hands dug deep in my pockets and tried to think. Surely I, an American and no Buddhist, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nine hundred and twenty four, had been vouchsafed a vision… It grew dark and I strolled back to my room wondering.
It was veritably Chien Fo Tung, the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, for big and little, half-obliterated or almost perfect, there were tens of thousands of figures on those walls. Many of the most superb were so nearly gone that one must stand at a distant and discreet angle to know that they were there at all. They seemed to be retiring gradually from the light of common day. Perhaps they were already gone to the peak of the Sumeru Mountain, whence the storks fly off with pine boughs in their long bills and where there is a gentle rain of lotus petals all the sunless, shadowless day, which stretches nightless to eternity. Often it seemed as if they were indeed gone and had left but shadows and pictures of themselves on the walls. And yet among the shadows and the pictures I came on figures which gave forth a sombre glow and looked through and past my gaze with such ineffable, dispassionate calm that I knew them to be there in the very spirit, a spirit much more themselves than the blood and flesh which made up my body and was the real I. …”
The things I liked from the Fogg collection:
Below: Bronze Belt Buckles:
Below: A TLV mirror. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by these things, but never held one in my hands before that.
Below: Fabric samples, perhaps collected for sewing projects by Lorraine:
Below: One of Lorraine’s Korean celadon pieces:
Below: The torso of the Japanese Dharmapāla:
This below here is actually my favorite set of pieces, and the catalyst of a small but very good adventure, were these wood-blocks. The label on the back reads, “Used to impress designs on clay doorways of farmhouses. West Kansu Province, China, 1925”, and the Chinese on the blocks gives apotropaic characters and recipes.
The odd thing, however, was this block, set with the others, but in a totally different style, with much finer workmanship. The figure didn’t look like any Gansu-nese village iconography I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen more than most people. The block also wasn’t labeled as being from Gansu like the other two.
I brought this to my friend at Berkeley, Ryosuke K. Ueda, who after a quick search online identified the block as representing Akiba Gongben 秋葉権現, the patron deity and fire-prevention spirit of the Akihabara District of Tokyo. Langdon Warner or someone else must have purchased the block in Tokyo and then stuck it together with the two Gansu-nese blocks, to illustrate the common technique of woodblock printing apotropaic charms. Afterwards, the exact provenance of the Japanese block was lost.
Here are the rest of the pictures, as provided by the university. You can view the file concordance they gave us here.