This rim sherd came from a straight-sided stoneware bowl, dating to the Tang dynasty (618-906) covered with a mottled dark brown glaze on the inside and outside. This sherd along with many other pottery sherds was found at a watchtower near the town of Dunhuang. Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943) coined the term “limes” for the line of watchtowers north of Dunhuang, Gansu Province, which constitute the westernmost extension of the Great Wall. The military facilities were manned during the course of the Han Dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) and excavated during Stein’s second expedition. He recovered objects illustrating the everyday life, tools and other artefacts in these peripheral garrisons of the Chinese empire, among them inscribed wooden slips which count to the oldest written record then known from China.

The Victoria and Albert Museum has more than 70 ceramic fragments and fragments of Buddhist sculptures, as well as around 600 ancient and medieval textiles recovered by Stein during his second expedition (1906-8) into Chinese Central Asia, where he once again visited and excavated sites on the southern Silk Road, before moving eastwards to Dunhuang. At Dunhuang, he studied and excavated the Han-dynasty watchtowers to the north of the town, as well as the Mogao cave temples to the southeast, where he acquired material from the Library Cave. From there he moved on to the northern Silk Road, stopping briefly at Turfan sites but not carrying out any excavations. He made a perilous north-south crossing of the Taklamakan desert in order to hasten to Khotan where he excavated more ancient sites, before finishing off his expedition with surveying in the Kunlun Mountains.