The Statuary of Dolonnuur, Inner Mongolia, and Its Impact across the Tibetan Buddhist World

Vajrapani, the “Vajra Holder,” is a martial bodhisattva deriving from Indra, the Indian god of thunder. While he is portrayed in a peaceful appearance in Mahayana Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhists usually depict him in his wrathful form. 

This statue, nearly six feet (two meters) high, presents mighty Vajrapani in the warrior posture (alidha) on a lotus seat. He crushes a snake under each foot, symbolizing obstacles he overcomes. His head has flamelike eyebrows, three bulging eyes, and a curled beard. His open mouth with lacquered red lips shows his fangs. His hair flows upward like flames, decorated with a half vajra (thunderbolt). In his stretched right hand, Vajrapani holds a vajra scepter to enforce religious and state laws, and to tame and forcefully convert demons and heretics; with his left hand, he makes a threatening gesture (karana mudra). 

Vajrapani wears some of the attributes of protective deities (dharmapala), such as the long snake necklace and the tiger-skin loincloth, but the macabre attributes of other dharmapalas are replaced by bodhisattva’s ornaments: the five-leaf crown representing the Five Buddha Families, earrings, armbands, bracelets, necklaces, and anklets. Long swirling scarves around his shoulders and ribbons from his crown create a sense of movement.

Vajrapani, Mongolia’s Tutelary Deity

Vajrapani is one of the main deities of the Mongols, who commonly believe that Mongolia is the land of Vajrapani, Tibet is the land of Avalokiteshvara, and China is the land of Manjushri; these three figures respectively represent power, compassion, and wisdom. 

When Mongols reconverted to Buddhism in the sixteenth century, the Third Dalai Lama proclaimed Vajrapani as their special protector. In 1586 or 1587, he recognized Abatai Khan (1554–1588) as an emanation of Vajrapani and offered him a statue of Vajrapani indestructible by fire. Several Mongol rulers—including Chinggis Khan—were subsequently recognized as the worldly emanation of this bodhisattva. 

Since the end of the eighteenth century, Mount Otgontenger, the highest peak of the Khangai Range, is said to be Vajrapani’s abode in Mongolia. The mountain itself is identified with Vajrapani’s body.1

After the fall of the Communist regime in 1990, Vajrapani was reinstated as the protector of the Mongolian state. In 2007 President Enkhbayar commissioned a giant appliqué depicting Vajrapani above Chinggis Khan and two of his successors, Ögedei and Qubilai (Kubilai), to be displayed on Otgontenger during ceremonial offerings to the mountain (fig. 2). 

Mongol herders pray to Vajrapani to protect their livestock from thieves and wolves, to retrieve stolen or lost animals, and to protect them from gossip, harm caused by snake spirits (nagas), and sickness. 

The Bronze Workshops of Dolonnuur in Inner Mongolia

Every region of Mongolia preserved names of famous Mongol smiths, and a few lamas were eminent sculptors, the most famous being Zanabazar, the First Jibzundamba Khutugtu (1635–1723).2 Itinerant Chinese smiths also crisscrossed Mongolia to offer their services. In the eighteenth century, the growing demand for large-scale statues that required a high degree of specialization and a large workforce caused the progressive sedentarization of metalwork, as smiths established workshops in settlements. The main center of production in the early Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was Hohhot in Inner Mongolia. After 1850, the quality and quantity of metalwork produced in Hohhot declined because commissions moved to the famous workshops of Dolonnuur. 

The Vajrapani statue belongs to a set of six sculptures brought from an abandoned monastery near Dolonnuur, Inner Mongolia, by the geographer and explorer Sven Hedin in 1930. Dolonnuur (formerly in Chakhar Province, now in Shiliin Gol League), on the southeast edge of the Mongol steppe, developed as a satellite of two large imperial monasteries, the Blue Monastery (Khökhe süme, Chinese: Huizongsi, founded in 1691 at the place where the Khalkha Mongol leaders swore allegiance to Qing emperor Kangxi [r. 1661–1722] in 1691), and the Yellow Monastery (Shira süme, Chinese: Shanyinsi, founded by Emperor Yongzheng [r. 1722­–1735] in 1727)3 (fig. 3). After 1732, when the Qing established an office to rule Inner Mongol Buddhist affairs there, Dolonnuur became a commercial and religious hub. Located on the roads from China and Tibet to Urga/Yekhe Khüriye and Central Asia, it attracted a great number of monks and pilgrims, traders, and artisans. Although the imperial monasteries encountered economic difficulties in the late Qing period, trade and metalwork continued to prosper up to the early twentieth century.

Dolonnuur’s trade and workshop center, known as Maimaicheng (a generic name for trade cities settled near large monasteries), spontaneously developed in the eighteenth century a little less than one mile (one and a half kilometers) south of the monasteries.4 In the late nineteenth century, it counted four thousand shops and workshops, including workshops of thangkas, carpets, and metal artifacts of daily life, and was the biggest production center for Mongol Tibetan Buddhist metal statues.5 The two main foundries were Ayushi Tunjan (tunjan, Chinese: tongjiang, metallurgists) and Khaisandai; the four others were Öntsög Tunjan, Öntsögön Nomtu, Bayantai Tunjan, and Khuuchin Nomtu. They employed from a hundred up to several hundred craftsmen.6 They were initially run by both Chinese and Mongols, and fell entirely into the hands of Chinese in the late nineteenth century. 

Assimilated Chinese smiths from Dolonnuur also established bronze workshops in the Chinese settlement (Maimaicheng) east of Urga monastic city. They probably first opened branch shops to receive and assemble statues created in parts at a Dolonnuur workshop, to be assembled after delivery, and later established their own workshops. In the late nineteenth century, with twenty workshops of blacksmiths, bronze smiths, and silversmiths, Urga became the third main fabrication center for metal statues, after Dolonnuur and Beijing (fig. 4).

The purchase of large statues represented, with Buddhist scriptures, a major part of a monastery’s budget. In the nineteenth century, large-scale statues from Dolonnuur were sold for between 700 and 6,000 taels of silver, and up to 20,000 taels, at a time when the construction of an average-size monastery cost about 10,000 taels.7 The prices of statues made in Urga were higher than those made in Dolonnuur and Beijing.8 

Dolonnuur exported its production by camel caravans all over the Tibetan Buddhist world. In the nineteenth century most of the metal statues of Mongolia and the northeastern province of Tibet (Amdo) came from Dolonnuur. In 1844 Fathers Huc and Gabet encountered a caravan of eighty-four camels carrying different parts of a statue to be offered to the Dalai Lama. The statue of Maitreya of Urga, almost fifty feet (fifteen meters) in height and made in seven parts in Dolonnuur by twelve Chinese artists of the Ayushi Tunjan foundry, was shipped to Urga in 1833 (it was destroyed in 1939). The Buddhist temple founded in Saint Petersburg in 1913–1915 commissioned its statues from Dolonnuur foundries.

The Techniques of the Dolonnuur Foundries

As with other Dolonnuur statues, the Vajrapani statue combined the repoussé method (hammered metal) for the body and the base, and the lost-wax technique for the arms and legs, and perhaps for the head. The decorative parts, such as the crown, attributes, and scarves, were made separately from a thinner sheet by hammering and were inlaid with turquoise, coral, and lapis lazuli. The repoussé technique is less complex and uses less metal and fuel than the lost-wax technique; it permits a mass, standardized, and cheaper production, since a single mold could be used for making several sculptures. Different metal alloys were used for different parts of the body and ornaments of a single sculpture. The Dolonnuur workshops also produced a few silver statues9 (fig. 5).

The different parts of large statues were delivered separately; once they arrived at a temple, they were fitted together with rivets, dovetail joints, and clasps, and were gilded (using the amalgam gilding process) and painted (they could be lacquered before the gilding). 

The Style of Dolonnuur

The Chinese artisans strictly executed the will of their patrons and followed prescribed iconometry. Mongol lamas told the Russian explorer Aleksei M. Pozdneev that they preferred Dolonnuur statues to Beijing statues, because Dolonnuur craftsmen were more respectful of iconographic canons and their gilding lasted longer.10

Statues at the Stockholm Ethnographical Museum and the Hermitage Museum are the rare images whose provenance is firmly attested (figs. 6 and 7). Together with photographs taken by a Japanese scholar inside the Shira süme in the 1930s (fig. 8), they allow us to distinguish a few characteristics of the Dolonnuur style: big crowns with large, flat leaves, scarves billowing behind the ears and at the elbows, long, flat ear pendants, arching eyebrows meeting above the nose, inlaid semiprecious stones, and a base plate held in place by small clamps—as seen in the Vajrapani sculpture under discussion.

Stylistic study combined with X-ray spectral analysis helps scholars define this style in spite of its many variations. It has so far been impossible to distinguish statues produced in Dolonnuur from statues made by craftsmen from Dolonnuur established in Urga (figs. 9 and 10). Besides the Urga production, hundreds of statues from China, Russia (especially Buryatia), and even Europe also imitated the Dolonnuur style.11