Silk Road Expeditions

Western explorers and archaeologists began expeditions to the deserts of Western China and Central Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The trade routes of the Silk Road once passed through this region and early explorers were hoping to find the artistic and archaeological treasures of prosperous civilizations that used to inhabit this area. Some of these men were semi-independent explorers like Sven Hedin, Sir Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, and Albert Von Le Coq who crisscrossed the region and made spectacular discoveries along the early trade route. Most of the artifacts collected by these explorers were brought to foreign countries and were used to build museum collections.
This period is also known as the "Great Game." Great Game refers to the nineteenth century power struggle between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. Russians were interested in getting India and Northwest China. They were gradually moving southward towards British India conquering cities on their way. For their military purposes, Russians dispatched explorers such as Nikolai Przhevalsky to map the region and to gather information. Russians were interested in Central Asia not only as a way to get to India and China but also because the area had enormous mineral potential that could be exploited for the purpose of industrialization of European nations. British also sent their own explorers to survey and map the region. During this period, British were mainly concerned with protecting their most important colony, India. Most of the surveyors and spies were disguised as religious pilgrims or explorers.
In addition to British and Russian, there were other European and even American explorers who made expeditions in the Central Asia. What were the pros and cons of such expeditions. Most of the maps, surveys, travel accounts, and discoveries of these early explorers are still valued for their great contributions to our understanding of lands, animals and botanical specimens, cultures, languages, and religions of the Silk Road. Even the accounts of those who aimed solely to gather information for military purposes contain valuable information about the aforemnetioned things. However, there are many political and economical reasons behind these military expeditions that might not be very moral or acceptable.
How about these explorer's archaeological raids? Were they of any good? Did they have a right to remove precious artifacts from their original place? For instance, should we blame scholars such as Stein or Pelliot for depriving the Chinese of their cultural heritage? Should we blame the Chinese for letting these archaeological raids happen? Maybe we should blame the custodian of Tuan-huang. The answers to these questions are not that simple. Early explorers justified their archaeological raids by asserting that artifacts collected from Silk Road sites could be better preserved in Western Museums. Maybe they were right: they were working during a period when the Chinese government or governments of most of the regions in the Central Asia neither had laws against exporting archaeological objects nor cared about protecting such treasures. Moreover, the detailed accounts that these explorers kept of found manuscripts, wall paintings, and similar artifacts is a great source of information. The question of who should possess, care for, study, and interpret artifacts is a controvercial and politically charged topic. Today, we have stricter ethical rules governing archaeological endeavors. For instance, scholars try not to remove artifacts from their original sites if they can be safely preserved there. Considering the example of Tuan-huang manuscripts and wall paintings, regardless of our opinion about the ethics involved in acquiring them, it appears that they likely had a better chance of being preserved in European museums than being stacked in the walled library hidden in the middle of a cave.