[56] Yesdijird III., after his overthrow by the Arabs In 641, fled to Merv, and there appealed for aid to the Chinese Emperor. He does not appear to have fled for refuge to China, as has been sometimes asserted.
[57] The classical prototype is seen in a vase In the Fourth Vase Room (Case C) in the British Museum, on which we find two similar figures in relief surrounded by a grape vine scroll.
[58] Since writing the above note my attention has been drawn to a delightful article in the Neue Rundschau (Oct., 1913, p. 1427) by F. Perzynski, entitled Jagd auf Götter. Mr. Perzynski describes his hazardous journey to an almost inaccessible cave temple on a mountain top near Ichou in Chihli, and there is little doubt that this is the place from which our wonderful figure came. He speaks of the hill as the Acthlohanberg, implying a tradition of eight of these figures of Lohan, which had apparently been concealed in this and other caverns for safety during a period of iconoclasm, such as occurred in the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, when thousands of Buddhist shrines were wrecked. He found the shrine bare of the Lohan, except for a few fragments. The rest had been pillaged, and several of the figures had evidently been broken in the attempt to remove them through the narrow aperture of the caves, or to conceal them afterwards. Parts of them, and a sadly damaged Lohan, were actually shown to him in the neighbourhood; and he afterwards succeeded in obtaining a complete figure and a torso, which were exhibited by him in Berlin. On the altar of the shrine he found an incense burner of glazed ware, which he attributed to the Yüan dynasty, and there was a tablet recording the restoration of the altar in the reign of Chêng Tê (early sixteenth century). It is interesting to note that Mr. Perzynski assumed at once that these figures are of T´ang date. Incidentally, he mentions a visit to a hill which he calls the Kuanyinberg, where a cavern temple exists containing the remains of a colossal statue of Kuanyin. It is now broken, but Mr. Perzynski saw it standing in its enormous stature of three metres high, to which must be added a stand a metre high and two in width. This figure was originally in glazed pottery, possibly also of the T´ang period, but a great part of it had been restored in wood and plaster in the seventeenth century.
[59] See Japanese Temples and their Treasures, by Shiba–junrokuro, with translations by Mr. Langdon Warner, Tokyo, Shimbi Shoin, 1910, vol. ii., nos. 238, 268, and 300.
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