Imre Galambos Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture Studies in Manuscript Cultures
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Imre Galambos Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture Studies in Manuscript Cultures Edited by Michael Friedrich Harunaga Isaacson Jörg B. Quenzer Volume 6 Imre Galambos Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture Manuscripts and Printed Books from Khara-khoto ISBN 978-3-11-044406-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-045395-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045316-4 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at degruyter.com. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements Writing this book was in many ways a collaborative project in the course of which I received help from lots of colleagues and friends. I first became interested in Tangut texts and the Tangut script while working for the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) at the British Library, where I had a chance to view some original manuscripts while they were being digitised. Susan Whitfield, the head of the project, has been continuously encouraging of my interest in the languages and scripts of Central Asia and urged me to study them. Of my other co-workers at IDP, Sam van Schaik and his work on Tibetan manuscripts has been a steady source of inspiration. The staff at IDP in general have been helpful and went out of their way to help whenever I wanted to examine original manuscripts or needed reproductions of those. The final push to begin working with concrete texts came from Kirill Solonin who suggested to start reading the manuscript of The General’s Garden from the Stein collection at the British Library. Along the way, I received assistance and advice from Russian colleagues in St. Peters- burg, including Irina Popova, Vyacheslav Zaytsev and the late Evgeny Ky- chanov. In Taiwan, Lin Ying-chin of Academia Sinica has offered guidance when- ever I was in need of it, for which I am eternally grateful. The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at Hamburg University has all along been a second home and a great source of support. In 2011, they spon- sored my stay in Hamburg for the three months as a Petra Kappert Fellow and early drafts of a couple of chapters were started at that time. In 2013 the Centre financed a three-year project to study the Tangut collection at the British Library. I am most grateful to Michael Friedrich, Jörg B. Quenzer and Harunaga Isaacson for their continuous support. Michael Friedrich took time out of his busy schedule to read through my drafts and offer detailed suggestions on how to make them better. The staff at the Centre, including Irina Wandrey and Christina Kaminski, were always willing to sacrifice their time to provide solutions for obstacles along the way. I am most indebted to Cosima Schwarke who read through several ver- sions of the book and typeset the final one, meticulously incorporating several batches of changes and corrections. The idea of writing this book originally came from Nathan Hill who has re- mained a constant source of encouragement and who generously offered me a collection of books related to Tangut studies. While writing and working on draft chapters, many colleagues from the University of Cambridge offered their help, including Peter Kornicki, David McMullen, Roel Sterckx, Barak Kushner, John Moffett, Joseph McDermott and Yang Fu. Other scholars and researchers from VI | Acknowledgements around the world who gave advice at various points of this project include Guil- laume Jacques, Andrew West, Katia Chirkova, Matthias Richter, Gábor Kósa, Yingying Sun and Max J. Fölster. I am also extremely grateful to library staff at institutions where I carried out research on bits and pieces of this book, including the University of Cambridge, Hamburg University, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Princeton University, Ryukoku University, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I would particu- larly like to thank Charles Aylmer, Noboru Koyama, Francoise Simmons, Nathalie Monnet, Martin Heijdra, Emma Goodliffe, Ágnes Kelecsényi and Kinga Dévényi. While all these people in one way or another contributed to the completion of this book, I am of course solely responsible for any flaws that remain. Contents Introduction | 1 1 Ruins of a forgotten city | 17 1.1 Kozlov’s first visit to Khara-khoto (1908) | 19 1.2 Kozlov’s second visit to Khara-khoto | 23 1.3 Discovery before the “first” discovery | 29 1.4 Aurel Stein’s 1914 visit to Khara-khoto | 37 1.5 Subsequent exploration of Khara-khoto | 43 1.6 The Dunhuang and Khara-khoto materials: Analogies and connections | 47 2 Tangut studies: Emergence of a field | 53 2.1 Before the discovery of Khara-khoto | 54 2.2 The discovery of Khara-khoto and Tangut studies | 63 2.3 From the 1950s onward | 74 2.4 The late 1990s and after | 92 3 Historical and cultural background | 97 3.1 Tangut tribes before the Tangut state | 98 3.2 Birth of the Tangut empire | 104 3.3 The Tangut state after Yuanhao | 109 3.4 The Mongol invasion | 115 3.5 The invention of the Tangut script | 120 3.6 Characteristics of the script | 128 4 Primers in Tangut and Chinese | 135 4.1 *Taizong’s Questions | 138 4.2 Excerpts from the Classics and Histories | 156 4.3 The Mengqiu | 161 4.4 Chinese primers among the Tanguts | 174 5 Manuscript and print | 177 5.1 Tangut contribution to the spread of printing | 178 5.2 The Tangut Sunzi | 183 5.3 Draft or personal copy made from a printed edition? | 193 5.4 Co-existence of manuscript and print | 199 5.5 Editions and print runs | 204 VIII | Contents 6 Translation vs. adaptation | 209 6.1 The Chinese text | 212 6.2 The Tangut manuscript | 221 6.3 Translation discrepancies | 234 6.4 The four barbarians | 238 6.5 The northern neighbours | 244 6.6 Translation vs. adaptation | 253 7 Translation consistency | 257 7.1 Tangut translations of Chinese military texts | 258 7.2 Parallel phrases and passages | 263 7.3 Issues of intertextuality | 275 8 Conclusions | 279 References | 285 Index | 313 Introduction Since the beginning of the 20th century, northwest China has been the source of important archaeological finds of manuscripts and printed books. In 1900, a crack in the wall in one of the Buddhist cave temples led to the discovery of the Dunhuang library cave, which held tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan and a dozen and a half other languages. Around the same time excavations led by foreign expeditions brought to light wood and pa- per manuscripts at a series of desert sites in China’s westernmost province Xin- jiang 新疆 (now not a province but an autonomous region). Especially the mate- rial found at Khotan 和田, Turfan 吐魯番, Loulan 樓蘭 and Kucha 庫車 were significant, revealing a wealth of new information on ancient languages and peo- ples along the Silk Road. In addition, tens of thousands of woodslip documents from the early medieval period were found in the region of Etsin-gol in Inner Mon- golia. The abandoned city of Khara-khoto was located in the same region, and it is here that in 1908–1909 the Russian expedition of Pyotr K. Kozlov (1863–1935) discovered thousands of books and fragments written in Tangut and Chinese. After discovering the vast amount of textual material in a stupa outside the city walls of Khara-khoto, Kozlov shipped everything back to the Imperial Rus- sian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg. From there, the textual material was shortly transferred to the Asiatic Museum, which was the predecessor institution of the current Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (IOM), where the collection is kept to this day. Art objects and other items of pictorial nature went to the Ethno- graphic Department of the Russian Museum, and eventually ended up in the State Hermitage Museum.1 Even though Kozlov made every effort to remove from the site everything his caravan was able to transport, six years later the professional explorer and archaeologist M. Aurel Stein (1862–1943) was still able to gather a significant collection, even if the bulk of it was made up of fragments. These two expeditions collected gathered most the available textual material at the site and it was only towards the end of the 20th century that excavations conducted by Chinese archaeologists yielded a limited amount of additional fragments. Yet to this day, the Kozlov collection kept in St. Petersburg represents the largest and most important group of Tangut material, making subsequent discoveries pale in comparison. Nevertheless, even though no other site yielded as much material as Khara- khoto, when taken together, the other discoveries are just as important. Khara- || 1 Gromkovskaja and Kychanov 1978, 154. 2 | Introduction khoto was excavated by foreign expedition teams during the first decade and a half of the 20th century and, as a result, most of the material was taken out of China. From the late 1920s, however, China forbade the removal of antiquities from the country and thus subsequent discoveries remained on Chinese soil. Over the years, the Tangut manuscripts and printed texts accumulated and formed a sizeable body of material which is now kept in various institutions around China.