Just over 100 years have passed since the end of the archaeological work of the Russian expeditions to East Turkestan in 1915. This gives us a good opportunity to summarize what has been done and what remains to be done to shed light on the history. The collections in the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences and scientific societies contain a wealth of material that sheds light on the history of the study of Central Asia in general and East Turkestan in particular.
Paradoxically, very little information on Oldenburg's expeditions can be found in scientific literature. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of the material brought back is still unpublished, as well as to the fact that, unlike his European and Japanese colleagues, Oldenburg did not seek to export artistic antiquities from the study area en masse to the "civilized" world, and relied instead on the principle of cultural protection in oriental archaeology. The first expedition mainly brought to Petersburg what required salvage and restoration - fragments of the manuscripts found on the cave floor, fragments of wall paintings and statues - the rest being cleaned then recorded and, on occasion, preserved on site. The main aim of the second expedition was to find material for chronological definitions of historical monuments of Buddhist art and to collect data to characterize individual styles in the territory of East Turkestan. The complete edition of the data from two Russian expeditions to Chinese Turkestan led by Serguei Oldenburg in their original version, one of the main objectives of 20th and early 21st century ruse orientalism, has not been achieved to date. A small research team made up of specialists in the history of the Academy of Sciences, and in the history and philology of China, India and Central Asia, has resumed work on Oldenburg's archival heritage in order to publish the materials of the first and second expeditions. In recent years, significant progress has been made in publishing preparatory documents from the collections of the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, the Archive of the Academy of Sciences and the Berlin "Turfan Collection".
