Fig. 1. Pentad, Central Binyang Cave, 508–523 C.E., Longmen Caves, Luoyang, China, (Source: Miguel Discart (CC BY-SA 2.0))

Situated 12 km south of Luoyang, one of the traditional capitals of China, the Longmen grottoes line a pair of cliff faces which oppose each other, separated by the Ye River which flows between them. The grottoes consist of over 2000 Buddhist cave-shrines populated with tens of thousands of statues, ranging in size from palm-sized niches to three-story tall Buddhas. The cliff face to the West of the river is populated with many statues and larger scale caves; more numerous on the East cliff face are lots of smaller, meditative cave spaces. The Binyang Central Cave is the central cave in a triad of cave-shrines and is located on the West cliff face at the far north end. The caves in the region where the Binyang Central Cave sits were generally excavated and sponsored by imperial patrons. The Binyang Central cave specifically is believed to be sponsored by the Northwern Wei Emperor Xuanwu in honor of his father, carved at the end of the 5th century.

The cave contains a series of very notable and beautiful components, including detailed reliefs on the entrance and door jambs, a three-story tall central Buddha statue on the cave, and flanking bodhisattvas on either side of the central Buddha Sakyamuni. The cave was looted during modern discovery and many statues were effaced. But perhaps the most extensively damaged component of the Binyang Central Cave is the exit wall reliefs. The exit wall, in reference to the wall on either side of the entrance which a viewer would see when exiting the cave, is missing registers which have been removed and are now on display in American museums.

Fig. 2. Schematic representation of exit wall reliefs.

The exit wall reliefs are separated spatially into four levels of artwork which correspond with Buddhist cosmologies and doctrine. See Figure 2 for a schematic representation. The lowest level depicts spirit kinds, an element of local pre-Buddhist cultures imported from ancient Persian iconography which became incorporated as part of the religious vernacular of the region. The top-most registers show Buddhist legends (the debate between Bodhisattva Manjusri and Vimalakirti, the Prince Sudana Jataka, and the Mahassatva Jataka). The second to lowest registers are both missing: What would have been shown are an Emperor's procession on the left side of the doorframe and an Empress's procession on the right side. Currently, the Emperor's procession relief panel (Figure 3) is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Empress's procession relief panel (Figure 4) is at the Nelson Atkins Museum.

Fig. 3. Emperor Xiaowen and His Court, c. 522-23, China, Northern Wei dynasty, limestone with traces of pigment, 82″ x 12′ 11″ / 208.3 x 393.7 cm (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Fig. 4. Offering Procession of the Empress as Donor with Her Court, c. 522 C.E., fine, dark-gray limestone, 80″ x 9′ 1 1/2″ / 203.2 x 278.13 cm (Source: Nelson Atkins Museum)

The "rediscovery" of the Longmen grottoes in the modern era caused significant damage to the cave-shrines, particularly to the faces and heads of carvings and statues. Many reliefs and statues were effaced by looters catering to European art speculators and colonial interests, which mistook the head as the site of ontogenesis and area of most interest in the statuary. Even among the extensive damage incurred during the looting and excavation of these caves,  Emperor's procession panel is particularly well known for having been subject to an immensely difficult restoration process. The register was removed piecemeal in many separate illicit excavations of the site, primarily by local looters selling to an international market. The faces on the Emperor and Empress procession reliefs were salvaged and painstakingly collected by various independent collectors; the remainder of the reliefs are mostly plaster infill in the Emperor's procession, while the Empress's procession is more intact. Though the reliefs originally not only stretched across the flat plane of the exit wall, but also wrapped around the corners to extend slightly onto the adjacent cave walls, the reconstructed registers as they are displayed today are flat panels and do not reflect this dimensionality and contextual archetectonics of the cave-site.

The network of individuals involved in the removal of the pieces of these registers include some of the most famous art historians, such as Langdon Warner, the first professor of East Asian art at Harvard. This intricate web consisted of a local network of Chinese looters selling to a larger market of Western colonialist powers, whose demand for illicitly acquired art objects created the conditions that exploited the financial need of local Chinese people to transform them into tools of cultural destruction on a systematic scale.

Arguments of historians who look favorably upon the 'rescue' of the original fragments destroyed on site by local looters and their reconstruction in America by Laurence Sickman at the Nelson Gallery take the position that Western art speculators and collectors, by purchasing the fragments that had already been removed in situ by Chinese looters, were acting in favor of the preservation of global cultural heritage, regardless of possible original intentions for personal gain and collection. The reconstruction of the panels in American museums, from this point of view, was a solution to the local Chinese problem of ongoing looting and spoilage of the sites. Sickman and Warner have often been cast as heroic figures, whose tireless efforts at collecting the globally dispersed fragments finally allowed for a relatively precise reconstitution at the Nelson Gallery. However, this narrative ignores the ways in which the conditions that incentivized local Chinese looters to remove and efface the registers were created by Western colonial interests in the first place. Though the visual culture of Chinese Buddhism does not place an emphasis on faces or heads (rather, the site of ontogenesis and most critical element of statuary and reliefs are the hands of the figures depicted, because of deep iconographic traditions of the Buddhist mudra), heads and faces were nevertheless the most frequently looted part of the statuary in the Longmen grottoes. This detail in itself is enough to attest to the significance of Western collectors' interests on the behavior of local looters--why would a Chinese looter specifically collect pieces of the relief that held no relative significance in indigenous culture? The effacing of Buddhist art is not an isolated occurrence, but part of a much larger pattern of colonial interaction with Southeast Asian, South Asian, and East Asian Buddhist art. It is clear that the phenomenon of in situ destruction caused by Chinese looters cannot be understood as a locally isolated problem (an approach which would position Western art historians to be saviors of a global cultural inheritance that Chinese people were unfit to inherit themselves), but instead must be understood as contingent upon the motivations, agenda, and power exerted by Western interests abroad.

Rather than position Sickman and the Nelson Gallery as heroes who have rescued a significant object of global heritage which China was incapable of conserving on its own, the narrative surrounding the Emperor and Empress procession panels must be rewritten. The events surrounding the removal and reconstitution of the panels should be recoded to understand the destruction of the site by local looters within the context of a larger European-driven art speculation market for illicitly acquired goods. Furthermore, the provenance of the object and legitimacy of the Met and the Nelson Gallery's claims to the ownership of the panels should be reexamined. While stewardship claims are being renegotiated and contested, the Metropolitan and the Nelson Gallery should implement new solutions to better display the panels in context. The importance and meaning of the panels cannot be properly expressed to viewers without the archaeological, artistic, and ideological context provided by the surrounding registers that would have lain below and above the procession panels. Furthermore, the archetectonic ambience of a relief which wraps around multiple walls is lost in the flat reconstitution of the panels. Technological solutions may be implemented to reflect these contextual specificities: for example, a projection can illustrate the surrounding registers and dimensionality of the original panel. Even more traditional exhibition techniques can be deployed to better provide the context of the piece--simply locating the panel at a physically equivalent height to the original display on site would provide viewers with a better sense of the relief's suspension in space relative to the surrounding area.