# The Diamond Sutra > Wang Jie, donor; an unnamed block-cutter and printer - 11 May 868 (the ninth year of the Xiantong reign, Tang dynasty) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/wang-jie-diamond-sutra/dunhuang-diamond-sutra-british-library/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-08-21 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Wang Jie, donor; an unnamed block-cutter and printer - **Date:** 11 May 868 (the ninth year of the Xiantong reign, Tang dynasty) - **Medium:** Woodblock-printed ink on seven sheets of yellow-stained paper, pasted end to end into a scroll - **Dimensions:** Approximately 5 m long (given as over 16 ft by the British Library); seven printed panels including the frontispiece - **Object type:** Manuscript - **Period:** Chinese, Tang dynasty - **Current location:** The British Library, London - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A woodblock-printed scroll about five metres long, made of seven sheets of yellow-stained paper pasted end to end, carrying the Chinese text of the Diamond Sutra behind a printed frontispiece of the Buddha preaching. Its colophon dates it to 11 May 868 and names the man who paid for it, Wang Jie, who commissioned it for free distribution on behalf of his parents. It is the earliest complete survival of a dated printed book.It was sealed into a side chamber of the Mogao caves near Dunhuang around the beginning of the eleventh century and found by a Daoist caretaker named Wang Yuanlu in 1900. In 1907 it passed to Aurel Stein in a bulk transaction covering roughly ten thousand items, for which about 130 pounds changed hands as a donation towards restoring the temple. No price was ever struck for this scroll on its own. It has been in London ever since, and it has never been offered for sale.The chain of custody is not in doubt. What is contested is whether that transaction was a sale at all, whether the man who took the money had authority to convey title, and what a digital surrogate is worth as an answer to a claim - a question sharpened when the cyber-attack of October 2023 took the British Library's own online collections, including its Dunhuang portal, out of service. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **868-ca. 1000** Wang Jie, donor; then in circulation and at Dunhuang `[documented]` (commission and distribution) Commissioned by Wang Jie for universal free distribution on behalf of his two parents and dated 11 May 868 in its own colophon. Possibly printed in Sichuan. How and when it reached Dunhuang is not recorded. - **ca. 1000-1900** Sealed in Cave 17, Mogao caves, Dunhuang `[documented]` (deposit) Walled into a side chamber off the corridor of Cave 16 with tens of thousands of other manuscripts, paintings and textiles, and plastered over. The reason for the sealing is disputed. No owner is recorded for roughly nine hundred years. - **1900-1907** Wang Yuanlu, self-appointed caretaker of the Mogao caves `[documented]` (discovery and custody) Opened the chamber on 25 June 1900. Took specimens to the Gansu provincial authorities hoping to raise funds; the response was an order to lock the material back in the cave, with no money and no staff. He held the cave and its contents in fact, without title in law. - **1907** Aurel Stein, acquiring at Dunhuang for the British Museum and the Government of India `[disputed]` (acquisition) Obtained in a bulk transaction between 21 May and 6 June 1907, roughly ten thousand items for about 130 pounds framed as a donation towards temple restoration. Graded disputed: the transfer itself is fully documented, but whether it was a valid sale is contested. Chinese scholarship treats it as theft in the form of a purchase, on the ground that Wang Yuanlu had no authority to convey title; a revisionist reading treats Wang as a rational actor whose approaches to the state had been ignored. This scroll was not itemised or separately priced. - **1907-1973** The British Museum, London `[documented]` (institutional ownership) Held by the British Museum from the arrival of the Stein Dunhuang collection until the library departments were separated in 1973. Backed and mounted under early twentieth-century museum practice, a treatment the modern conservation campaign partly reversed. Nothing about this sixty-six-year period is contested; the dispute attaches to the 1907 acquisition, not to the museum's custody. - **1973-present** The British Library, London `[documented]` (transfer) Passed with the British Museum library departments to the newly constituted British Library in 1973. Shelfmark Or.8210/P.2. Conserved in a modern campaign led by Mark Barnard. Digitised and published free; that access has been degraded since the cyber-attack of October 2023. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **1907-05** Payment to Wang Yuanlu, Taoist priest-custodian of the Mogao Caves library cave (Cave 17), Dunhuang, - Estimate: Stein records that he was privately prepared to offer up to 40 silver horse-shoes, about Rs 5,000, and was resolved to double even that if needed, to secure the whole hidden library. Wang would not part with the whole collection, so the sum actually paid for this consignment was one-tenth of that ceiling. - Hammer: Four horse-shoe-shaped silver ingots - With premium: None; a private exchange with the cave's custodian, not an auction, so no buyer's premium applies - This is a payment for a large body of material, not a price for the Diamond Sutra scroll (Or.8210/P.2) by itself. In his own account of the 1907 expedition, Stein records that four horse-shoe-shaped silver ingots, which he valued at about Rs 500, secured fifty bundles of Chinese text rolls, five bundles of Tibetan texts, and everything he had already set aside from the 'miscellaneous' bundles examined earlier in the same visit: several thousand items in total, among which the Diamond Sutra was one selection. No source consulted prices the Diamond Sutra individually. A rounder figure of about GBP 130 for some 10,000 scrolls from this 1907 visit is widely repeated in secondary literature; that figure does not appear in Stein's own contemporaneous narrative, which states the sum in Indian rupees rather than sterling, and it is not established here whether it also folds in the roughly 230 further bundles that Stein's secretary, Jiang Xiaowan, purchased from Wang Yuanlu in a separate visit that September. ## Open questions - Why was Cave 17 sealed around the beginning of the eleventh century? The two standing explanations - a response to an external threat, and the orderly disposal of a monastery's superseded copies - are still unresolved. - Where was the scroll actually printed? Sichuan has been proposed; Dunhuang is only where it was deposited. - Who was Wang Jie? No office, place, family or other commission is attached to the only named person on the world's earliest dated printed book. - Does the colophon read the 13th or the 15th day of the fourth moon? Published translations differ; both convert to 11 May 868. - What did Wang Yuanlu actually receive, and in what form? The figure of about 130 pounds is an equivalence; the currency, the instalments and the accounting are not established in the sources consulted here. - Has any Chinese authority made a formal restitution demand for the Stein Dunhuang collection, and on what legal basis, given that both the 1970 UNESCO and 1995 UNIDROIT instruments postdate the removal by decades? - When will the British Library's own bl.uk item page for the Diamond Sutra be restored after the October 2023 cyber-attack? (As of 21 Aug 2026 the Dunhuang portal itself - the International Dunhuang Programme at idp.bl.uk - is substantially restored, with full catalogue and image access to Or.8210/P.2 verified live; it is specifically the bl.uk collection-items page that remains degraded.) The digital-access argument for retention depends on which of the two systems a claimant or reader means. ## Sources - [1] Wikimedia Commons file record for the British Library's reproduction of Or.8210/P.2, carrying the Library's own caption, its translation of the colophon, the shelfmark, the date 11 May 868, the proposed Sichuan printing, and the standing notice that British Library links may be broken following the October 2023 cyber-attack. Licence read per file from extmetadata LicenseShortName on 4 August 2026. - [2] Frances Wood and Mark Barnard, The Diamond Sutra: The Story of the World's Earliest Dated Printed Book (London: The British Library, 2010), ISBN 9780712350907. The curator's and the conservator's own account of the object and its treatment. NOTE: some library catalogues record this ISBN under Frances Wood alone, with Barnard credited on the later Chinese edition; the co-authorship should be checked against the book itself before the record is cited for it. - [3] World Archaeology, review notice of Wood and Barnard, The Diamond Sutra, describing the scroll as seven strips of yellow-stained paper printed from carved wooden blocks and pasted together. - [4] The China Project, 'Abbot Wang Yuanlu of Dunhuang: Villain or...?', 23 June 2021. The discovery of 25 June 1900, Wang's approach to the Gansu authorities and the order to lock the material back in the cave, Stein's purchase of about ten thousand scrolls for the equivalent of 130 pounds, and Justin Jacobs's revisionist reading of the Chinese participants. - [5] Wikipedia, 'Diamond Sutra', consolidating the date, the colophon in the fifteenth-day rendering, the scroll's length and woodblock printing, Wang Yuanlu's discovery, Stein's 1907 acquisition and the modern conservation. TERTIARY: to be replaced with Wood and Barnard 2010 and the British Library catalogue entry once the Library's online services are restored. - [6] The British Library, public notice on its website that it is recovering from a cyber-attack and that only a limited amount of digital content is currently available; item pages for named collection objects do not resolve. Read 4 August 2026. - [7] 'An Unforgettable Distressing History: The Stolen Course of the Dunhuang Documents', chapter in a Chinese scholarly volume on the dispersal (Springer), cited for the framing of the removals in Chinese scholarship. Consulted at abstract level; the full chapter sits behind an institutional login. - [8] M. Aurel Stein, Ruins of Desert Cathay: Personal Narrative of Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1912), chapter LXVI, 'A Walled-Up Temple Library' / 'Wang Brought to Business', pp. 190-193. Stein's own contemporaneous account of the May 1907 payment: 'For all these acquisitions four horse-shoes of silver, equal to about Rs.500, passed into the priest's hands.' Read as the raw OCR transcription on archive.org, grepped for 'horse-shoe' and 'silver' and the surrounding pages read in full to confirm context. - [9] Melodie Doumy, 'Shaping the Stein collection's Dunhuang corpus (1): Wang Yuanlu, the first curator', International Dunhuang Programme blog, British Library, 22 June 2023. The Library's own account of Wang Yuanlu's role, Stein's May 1907 visit, and the September 1907 follow-up purchase of about 230 further bundles by Stein's secretary Jiang Xiaowan. Carries no payment figure of its own. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.