PARIS, Nov 13 (Reuter) - Sifting earth around oases along Central Asia's legendary Silk Road, archaeologists earlier this century stumbled on a lost civilisation that bears witness to Buddhism's flowering as one of the world's main religions.

Neglected since merchants' caravans, missionaries and monks criss-crossed the vast desert region, 10 centuries of art born of a melting-pot of cultures takes centre-stage at Paris's Grand Palais in an exhibition that opens on February 19.

"Serindia, Land of Buddha," which will later go to Tokyo's Metropolitan Museum, traces the spread of Buddhism from India to East Asia along perilous trade routes which linked China and the Mediterranean from as early as the third century BC.

A mainly desert area of no geographic or political unity sprawled between China and India, "Serindia" was from the second to 11th centuries AD an unlikely setting for artistic ferment.

To the north of Tibet, it stretches from Pamir in the west to the Chinese province of Gansu in the east and bites in to several former Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

"Over 1,000 years, influences from India and China met in this land. It was not just a place of transit, it became the base for a specific artform," said Jacques Gies, one of the curators of the exhibition and chief curator at Paris's Guimet Museum of Asian Art.

Buddhism born in northern India in the sixth century BC spread from oasis to oasis, each at the time a separate kingdom or principality, to win followers first in China and later in Korea and Japan among others.

Heading in the opposite direction, Chinese influences enriched the art of Serindia - a name based in part on the ancient Greek "land of the Seres," or land of silks.

The first archaeologists to explore the inhospitable terrain, in the late 19th century, followed the two ancient trade routes that sidestep the Taklamakan desert.

A Frenchman's discovery in 1892 of a second century text transcribed on birch-bark - one of the oldest documents in an Indian language - prompted the searches.

The explorers discovered 40,000 manuscripts and hundreds of religious paintings and artworks in a walled-off grotto near the former garrison town of Dunhuang, built around an oasis as an extension to the Great Wall of China. The Silk Road's gateway into China, it became a key site for the Buddhist faithful, prickly with pagodas and temples.

The finds were mainly translations of Indian Buddhist texts, although some relate to other religions including Judaism. The find unearthed several previously-unknown languages and yielded insights into the daily life of the time.

In one letter dating from the first century AD, an officer at a Chinese garrison in Loulan, south of the Taklamakan desert, complains to a friend about the tough climate and loneliness. Gies said: "The desert was a destructive environment but it also acted miraculously as a kind of casket which preserved very fragile statues made of wood or of dried earth which are nine to 10 centuries old."

Monastic paintings from sacred grottoes survived earthquakes, attacks from intruders who wiped out the faces on portraits for religious reasons and damage from fires lit by shepherds who used the caves as refuges early this century.

Displaying artworks by theme rather than origin, the exhibition shows the parallels between statues or paintings that were crafted several thousand kilometres (miles) apart.

Dried earth sculptures, silk paintings from the eighth century, multi-coloured stone and wooden Buddhas and sacred manuscripts chiefly illustrate Buddhist creed, with variations corresponding to the teachings of the period's different sects.

They bear marks of a myriad of artistic influences, from as far apart as India, China and Iran.

All but a few of the 300 or so works to be displayed were discovered by archaeologists from rival empires -- Russian, Japanese, British and French. But the outbreak of World War One forced them to call off their searches.

Chinese explorations since have yielded few finds.