Aided by his wealth, von Le Coq became a famous
archaeologist and
explorer of
Central Asia. Von Le Coq was convinced that the influence of
Ancient Greece could be found as far in the east as
China. However, organising expeditions to
Central Asia and China was beyond his means. The German archaeologist
Hermann Parzinger has found a letter in the
Prussian State Archive which reveals that the financial backing to von Le Coq's expedition came from no one else than the last German emperor
Wilhelm II. Wilhelm was obsessed with Greek culture and supported one of the expeditions with 32,000
German gold marks. With the help of
Theodor Bartus and his other assistants, Le Coq carved and sawed away over 360 kilograms (or 305 cases) of artifacts, wall-carvings, and precious icons, which were subsequently shipped to the museum. In
Buried Treasures ..., Le Coq defends these "borrowings" as a matter of necessity, citing the turbulent nature of Chinese Turkestan at the time of the expeditions. Chinese consider this seizure a "colonial rapacity" comparable to the taking of the
Elgin Marbles or the
Koh-i-Noor diamond. The collections from the German expeditions were initially kept at the Indian Department of the
Ethnological Museum of Berlin (
Ethnologisches Museum Berlin). The artifacts were put on display at the museum and were open to the public until 1944 when the relics were destroyed in British bombing raids during
World War II. the
Museum of Indian Art (
Museum für Indische Kunst) from 1963 and finally combined into a single location at the
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, BBAW), since 1992. Most of the manuscripts collection survived stored in salt mines. After the war the major part of the collection was given in 1946 to the newly founded
Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften. A smaller portion found its way to the
Mainzer Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur. ==Notes==