Historian Haneda Toru collected a lot of photos of Dunhuang documents when he sojourned in Europe in 1919. Beginning in 1935, he bought through druggist Takeda 432 manuscripts originally collected by Li Shengduo and he thereafter spent eight years purchasing manuscripts from every possible source, creating a collection of 735 Dunhuang documents, amounting to the largest Japanese collection of Dunhuang documents.Meanwhile, he also searched for photos of Dunhuang documents collected in bookstores of classics, museums, or by private collectors like Nakamura Fuestsu.
