German Turfan expeditions

Both expedition leaders, Grünwedel and Le Coq, returned to Berlin with thousands of paintings and other art objects, as well as more than 40,000 fragments of text.

In 1902, the first research team financed largely by Friedrich Krupp, the arms manufacturer, left for Turfan and returned a year later with 46 crates full of treasures.

The fourth expedition under Le Coq was dogged by many difficulties and was finally cut short by the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

They discovered important documents and works of art (including a magnificent wall-painting of a Manichaean bishop [mozhak], previously mistakenly identified as Mani[3]) and the remains of a Christian (Church of the East) church near ancient Khocho (Qara-khoja or Gaochang), a ruined ancient city, built of mud, 30 km (19 mi) east of Turfan.

This is the archaeological site to which expeditions were mounted by Germans to explore and collect precious art objects and texts written in many languages and scripts.

[5] International attention was first drawn to Turfan by Sven Hedin (1865-1952), to European and Japanese archaeologists, as a potential and promising site in Central Asia for field explorations for archaeological finds.

[5] Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Germans were impressed by the discoveries and finds reported by Europeans traveling through the Silk Roads and the exposition made at the twelfth international Congress of Orientalists in Rome in the year 1899 prompted them to launch their own expeditions to the area.

Since Grünwedel who was very enthusiastic about also leading the second expedition could not make it due to ill health, instead Dr. Albert von Le Coq (1860-1930) of the “Hilfsarbeiter bei dem Königlichen Museum für Völkerkunde”, headed the second expedition,[5] along with Theodor Bartus as his associate, followed the route from Ürümqi to Turfan Oasis (from November 1904 to August 1905).

Grünwedel and Bartus continued the work and covered the oases to the west of Turfan, including Kizil and its widespread complexes of Buddhist caves.

Reports of the second and third expeditions were published as "Gründwedel's Altbuddhistische Kultstätten in Chinesisch-Turkistan" (1912) and Le Coq's book of Auf Hellas Spuren in Ostturkistan (1926).