While we were in Byron there was an online spat about a documentary that apparently suggested that Greek craftsmen may have worked on the terracotta army in Xian.

I’ll say apparently as I havn’t seen the documentary, but something that the discussions seemed to miss was the influence on Bhuddist art in Afghanistan of the Greeks who came in the wake of Alexander the Great’s expedition to Afghanistan and India.

There are some quite nice and distinctly Greek looking statues of the Bhudda dating from around the time of the terracotta army, and given that many Bhuddist missionaries and monks travelled north from what is now Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, and they may have taken their Greek influenced sculptural traditions with them, which may have also influenced Chinese sculpture in general…