Silk was central to Buddhism as the faith spread across Central and into East Asia during the first millennium.1 It was used in clothing, for furnishings, books and, most notably, for producing the banners and silks used in ceremonies and to clothe statues and stupas. These were ephemeral silks, long lost, with very few exceptions. Contemporary texts give vital clues to the quantity of silks used for these purposes as, for example, Faxian’s 法顯 (337–422) account of a Buddhist ceremony in Skardo (Kashmir):
‘Having gathered together, the place where the monks are to sit is splendidly adorned beforehand with silk banners and canopies. Golden and silver lotus flowers adorn the rear. When all is in order, the kings and ministers make their offerings according to the rite. The assembly may last for one, two or three months, and is generally held in the spring. The king, when the assembly is over, further bids his ministers to arrange their offerings for presentation, which ceremony may last for one, two, three, five or even seven days. When all the offerings have been made, the king takes his own horse and saddles and bridles it himself, and causes a distinguished official to ride it. Then with white felt and all kinds of treasures required by the Sramana, he joins with the officials in a vow to present these as alms.’2 The adorning of stupas with silk is noted in a brief note by the pilgrim monk, Song Yun 宋雲 (d. c. 528), travelling across the Taklamakan and, writing around 520, from a town in the kingdom of Khotan:

‘Men of later times built several thousand Buddhist statues and stupas in the neighbourhood. Coloured canopies and banners hung over them in the tens of thousands—of these more than a half originated from the Wei.’3 One of these, he notes, dates from the time of Faxian, over a century earlier. But none could have been expected to survive to the present day given their exposure to the ravages of the weather and the decline of Buddhism in this region during the
first half of the second millennium. The same goes for the silks used in clothing and monastic furnishings. Fortunately, thanks to the serendipitous discovery of the Library Cave at the Buddhist rock-cut temples near Dunhuang and the dry climate of the Gobi desert, some books with silk, canopies and hundreds of banners have survived. But these must represent a tiny part of the silks in use over the thousand years of Buddhism here.
Another piece of silk discovered at Miran, part of the oasis kingdom of Kroraina, might be an offering to a stupa as described by Songyun.4 Trapped between the stupa and its retaining wall it was preserved for almost two thousand years.5 The silk is reliably datable not only because of the find site — Miran dates from 1st/2nd to 4th centuries—but also because it contains prayers written in Gāndhārī in the Kharo hī script, a script only used during this same period.6 There is thus every reason to believe that it was a votive silk, laid against the stupa by passing pilgrims, and preserved by serendipity.
This piece of silk raises many questions. Its source is not yet determined but its decoration — with bands of colour running lengthways across the top and bottom and in the centre of the silk — that is, as far as I have been able to tell, not known elsewhere. Is it possible that it was a design especially made for such offerings, the central band of colour used, as on this piece, for the votive messages? Is it possible, as has been hypothesized, that it was made in India? Or is it Chinese or even local? Was there a recognized and widespread design and colouring for votive silks across India/
central Asia/China, or did each region develop its own? If there was custom made silk for stupa offerings, then who produced it? Can we start to estimate how much would have been produced and, from this, start to get an idea of the scale of the economics behind these offerings?
These are all questions I will be addressing over the course of this research in order to bring to light the lost silks of Buddhism.

1. This is a continuation of a research project outlined at the 2015 IASSRT conference and published in Zhao 2015.
2. Giles 1877:.

3. Jenner 1981: 219–20. Songyun reports that he reads the Chinese inscriptions on the banners and finds most of
them date from 495, 501, and 513, with only one that he finds from the time of Faxian (c. 400). See also Bhattacharya-Haesner 2003: 42.
4. The British Library, Or.8212/190 (M.III.015), 33 x 140 cm. Zhao Feng spoke about this piece at a former IASSRT
conference.
5. It was discovered by Aurel Stein in 1906. He writes of the excavation: ‘As soon as the debris of broken brickwork had been removed from the outside, I quickly realised that the solid masonry then laid bare was not a base at all, but belonged to the walls of a shrine, square outside but circular within, which had once been surmounted by a dome and enclosed a small Stupa in its centre. … Heavy masses of debris, fallen from the vaulting and the higher portions of the walls, has completely blocked up the circular passage …. The Debris, still lying in places to a height of eight feet and more from the original floor, had afforded protection to the Stupa and allowed its plastered surface and the elaborate mouldings of its base to survive to a considerable extent. … From the rubble of broken mud-bricks and decomposed plaster filling the south-western segment of the circular passage there were recovered in succession three large pieces of finely woven buff silk … which proved to have formed part of a votive banner or streamer, about four feet long in its present torn condition and originally over one foot wide. It was decorated with two inwoven bands of narrow lines, in harmonizing tints of red and green, running its whole length. Written along and over a red line which divides the intervening space were nine short inscriptions in Kharo hī, five of them complete.’ Stein 1907: 493–5. See also fig 125 and plate XXXIX.
6. Translated by Boyer 1911.

Bibliography
- Bhattacharya-Haesner, C. 2003. Central Asian Temple Banners in the Turfan Collection of the Museum für Indische Kunst, Berlin. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.
- Boyer, Augustine-M. 1911. ‘Inscriptions de Miran.’ Journal Asiatiques 10:17: 413-430.
- Zhao Feng. 2015. The Silk Road: A Road of Silk. Shanghai: Dongyang University.
- Giles, Herbert A. (trans). 1877. Record of the Buddhistic Kingdom. London: Trübner & Co,
- Jenner, W. F. 1981. Memories of Luoyang: Yang Hsuanchih and the Lost Capital, 493–534. Oxford: Oxford University Press.