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XL., p. 203.
Marco Polo comes to a city called Sachiu belonging to a
province called Tangut. "The people are for the most part Idolaters....
The Idolaters have a peculiar language, and are no traders, but live by
their agriculture. They have a great many abbeys and minsters full of
idols of sundry fashions, to which they pay great honour and reverence,
worshipping them and sacrificing to them with much ado."
Sachiu, or rather Tun Hwang, is celebrated for its "Caves of Thousand
Buddhas"; Sir Aurel Stein wrote the following remarks in his Ruins of
Desert Cathay, II., p. 27: "Surely it was the sight of these colossal
images, some reaching nearly a hundred feet in height, and the vivid first
impressions retained of the cult paid to them, which had made Marco Polo
put into his chapter on 'Sachiu,' i.e. Tun-huang, a long account of the
strange idolatrous customs of the people of Tangut.... Tun-huang manifestly
had managed to retain its traditions of Buddhist piety down to Marco's
days. Yet there was plentiful antiquarian evidence showing that most of the
shrines and art remains at the Halls of the Thousand Buddhas dated back to
the period of the T'ang Dynasty, when Buddhism flourished greatly in China.
Tun-huang, as the westernmost outpost of China proper, had then for nearly
two centuries enjoyed imperial protection both against the Turks in the
north and the Tibetans southward. But during the succeeding period, until
the advent of paramount Mongol power, some two generations before Marco
Polo's visit, these marches had been exposed to barbarian inroads of all
sorts.
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