Khotan
Khotan, an oasis kingdom on the southern edge of the Tarim basin, was one of the great Buddhist centres of Central Asia for a thousand years. Its people spoke Khotanese, an Iranian language of the Saka family, and its kings had a tradition, recorded in Tibetan and Chinese texts, of descent from an Indian prince, a son of Ashoka. Khotan was famous for its jade and later for its silk, and its monasteries were visited by Chinese pilgrims. Faxian, around 400, described the great image procession held there each year and a city with many thousands of monks, mostly of the Mahayana.
The stupa
The Rawak stupa stands in the desert north-east of the oasis, in an area once watered by a river that has since shifted. Its base is cruciform, with flights of steps on each side, and it carried a domed drum, now badly eroded. Around it was a rectangular courtyard enclosed by a wall. Along the inner and outer faces of this wall stood large stucco figures of buddhas and bodhisattvas, some larger than life, with smaller figures between them, all once painted.
Stein's excavation
Aurel Stein excavated the site in April 1901, during his first expedition, clearing the sand from the walls of the courtyard and photographing the sculptures. He found more than ninety large figures, as well as coins of the Chinese Han and later dynasties, which suggested a date. The stucco was too fragile to move, and Stein had the sculptures covered with sand again. When he returned in 1906 he found that treasure hunters had damaged some of them. Later visitors have reported that much has since been lost to erosion.
The style of the sculptures, with their heavy, clinging drapery, shows the influence of the art of Gandhara and of the Gupta art of India, transformed by local workshops. Scholars have dated the stupa from the third to the sixth century; most place the sculptures around the fourth to sixth.
Significance
Rawak is one of the largest Buddhist monuments known in the Tarim basin and an important example of Khotanese Buddhist art, which was in turn influential in the art of Dunhuang and of Tibet. Khotan converted to Islam after its conquest by the Qarakhanids around the beginning of the eleventh century, and its Buddhist monuments were abandoned to the desert.
Further reading
- Neelis, Jason. Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Brill, 2011
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
- Behrendt, Kurt A. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007
See also
- Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.
- Gandhara — Gandhara was an ancient region centred on the Peshawar Valley, Swat Valley, and Taxila in present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan that served for over a millennium as a crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the Persian and Hellenistic worlds, and as a major centre of Buddhist art and learning.
- Dunhuang — Dunhuang is an oasis city at the western end of the Gansu corridor in China, a meeting point of the Silk Road routes, whose Mogao caves preserve a thousand years of Buddhist painting and whose sealed library cave yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.