It is not till 938 that we hear of renewed diplomatic relations with China. The Imperial Court received an embassy from Khotan and deemed it of sufficient importance to despatch a special mission in return. Eight other embassies were sent to China in the tenth century and at least three of them were accompanied by Buddhist priests. Their object was probably to solicit help against the attacks of Mohammedans. No details are known as to the Mohammedan conquest but it apparently took place between 970 and 1009 after a long struggle.
Another cultural centre of the Tarim basin must have existed in the oases near Lob-nor where Miran and a nameless site to the north of the lake have been investigated by Stein. They have yielded numerous Tibetan documents, but also fine remains of Gandharan art and Prakrit documents written in the Kharoshthî character. Probably the use of this language and alphabet was not common further east, for though a Kharoshthî fragment was found by Stein in an old Chinese frontier post[517] the library of Tun-huang yielded no specimens of them. That library, however, dating apparently from the epoch of the T'ang, contained some Sanskrit Buddhist literature and was rich in Sogdian, Turkish, and Tibetan manuscripts.
Ample as are the materials for the study of Buddhism in Central Asia those hitherto published throw little light on the time and manner of its introduction. At present much is hypothetical for we have few historical data--such as the career of Kumârajîva and the inscription on the Temple of Maitreya at Turfan--but a great mass of literary and artistic evidence from which various deductions can be drawn.
It is clear that there was constant intercourse with India and the Oxus region. The use of Prakrit and of various Iranian idioms points to actual colonization from these two quarters and it is probable that there were two streams of Buddhism, for the Chinese pilgrims agree that Shan-shan (near Lob-nor), Turfan, Kucha and Kashgar were Hînayânist, whereas Yarkand and Khotan were Mahâyânist. Further, much of the architecture, sculpture and painting is simply Gandharan and the older specimens can hardly be separated from the Gandharan art of India by any considerable interval. This art was in part coeval with Kanishka, and if his reign began in 78 A.D. or later the first specimens of it cannot be much anterior to the Christian era. The earliest Chinese notices of the existence of Buddhism in Kashgar and Kucha date from 400 (Fa-Hsien) and the third century (Annals of the Tsin, 265-317) respectively, but they speak of it as the national religion and munificently endowed, so that it may well have been established for some centuries. In Turfan the first definite record is the dedication of a temple to Maitreya in 469 but probably the history of religion there was much the same as in Kucha.