Page 327 - The Secret Museum

interesting. This world treasure only exists today because it was considered to be in

too poor a condition to be used in a temple.

It was found in a cave near Dunhuang, a town on the old Silk Road in north-west
China. The cave was part of a network of caves called the ‘Caves of a Thousand
Buddhas’, filled with thousands of other Buddhist texts, sculptures and paintings.

No one knows for sure why the creations were put into the caves, but one likely
explanation is that these Buddhist works of art were no longer of good enough quality
to be used in the local temples but, as they were religious items, they could not be
thrown away. Instead, they were hidden, walled up and forgotten about for centuries.
We don’t know this for sure, but it is what Frances Wood believes to have happened.

As time passed, the contents of the cave, once not fit for use, became rare and
precious treasures, and are now conserved in libraries and museums. The Diamond

Sutra, because of its date, is the most important object from the caves.

It made its way from China to England because of an archaeologist called Sir
Marc Aurel Stein. He heard about an Aladdin’s cave of Buddhist treasures on the
grapevine and managed to find it in 1900. He bought the scroll and a hoard of other
delights from a monk guarding the caves, and carried them across land by camel and
yak, to London. His contemporaries described what he did as ‘the most daring and
adventurous raid upon the ancient world that any archaeologist has attempted’.

Initially, the Diamond Sutra was kept in the Natural History Museum, but it was
moved to the British Museum, where many of Stein’s treasures are still stored, in the

vaults – silk paintings, carved tablets, pots and figures and then to the British Library.
For the first hundred years after its arrival in London, the sutra was in poor
condition. Then, about 20 years ago, the British Library decided to restore it. Mark

Bernard, the conservator, used a brilliant technique. He took tiny strips of paper, laid
them out on his desk – Frances said they looked like millipedes – and used them to
protect the back of the thin paper exactly where it needed it, rather than simply
backing up the entire scroll with fresh paper.

Before he would allow himself to touch the Diamond Sutra, he practised for years
on manuscripts of less importance from the same Chinese cave: he wanted to
understand perfectly the fibres of the paper.

Then he spent a thousand painstaking hours working on the Diamond Sutra, mostly

at weekends so he wouldn’t be disturbed. He removed glue and watermarks, and
repaired tiny holes in the paper so that now it is in almost as good a condition as it
would have been when it was first used in a temple in China in the 800s. As Frances
told Kirsty and the Radio 4 listeners – and pointed out to us in the British Library:
‘You can even see a trace of an indent of the wooden block that had been pressed
down when it was first created.’

You can see a copy of it online, and virtually turn the pages. It might go on display
occasionally, but it’s not likely to stay out for long. Paper is a delicate material and