184 Imre Galambos the Tangut Empire

184 Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 45 (2016) 184-190 review articles Imre Galambos Translating Chinese tradition and teaching Tangut culture: Manuscripts and printed books from Khara-Khoto (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 6). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 2015. ISBN 978-3-11-044406-3. The Tangut Empire (a.k.a. Western Xià, 1038–1227 CE) was one of the major powers of northeastern Asia. But today it is largely forgotten, and Tangutology remains an obscure and isolated field within Asian studies despite tremendous advances over the last century. Imre Galambos’ book is a much-needed bridge between the worlds of Tang- utology and Sinology. Galambos is uniquely qualified to write it; he is equally at home in both fields and has a command of the various languages needed to work in them. The title of his book might discourage readers who are not specifically inter- ested in Tangut or Chinese manuscripts. That would be a shame because the first half of Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture is acces- sible to a far broader audience. The first chapter recounts the story of the discovery of Khara-khoto, the city whose hidden texts became the core of Tangutology. Although the outline of this tale should be familiar to Tangutologists, Galambos draws upon a variety of sources to include details that may make it fresh to specialists and interesting even to nonacademics. Most notable is the section “Discovery before the ‘first’ discovery” revealing that Pyotr K. Kozlov was not the first to discover Khara-khoto and to write a report about it. Those honors in fact belong to a Buryat named Tsokto Badmazhapov. Galambos delicately handles the ques- tion of why Badmazhapov did not receive the recognition he deserved by de- scribing a terrible confluence of factors: (1) the fear that non-Russians might beat the Russians to Khara-khoto if Badmazhapov’s discovery had been an- nounced, (2) “Kozlov’s personal yearning for fame,” and (3) an inability to view a non-Russian without a university degree as an equal. Galambos does not condemn anyone; he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about this heartbreaking theft of credit. The second chapter goes back further in time to the identification of the Tangut language on the Liángzhōu 涼州 bilingual stele by Zhāng Shù 張澍 cir- ca 1804. Sinologists intimidated by Tangut may empathize with Zhāng and other Qīng dynasty Chinese pioneers such as Liú Shīlù 劉師陸 who indepen- dently identified the Tangut script on Tangut coins around 1805. The narrative eventually picks up where the previous chapter left off with an account of the development of Tangut studies following the discovery of Khara-khoto. The hero of Tangutology during the first half of the 20th century ISSN 0153-3320 (print version) ISSN 1960-6028 (online version) CLAO 2 © koninklijke brill nv, leiden,Cahiers 2016 | doi de Linguistique 10.1163/19606028-00452p05 Asie Orientale 45 (2016) 184-190 East Asian Languages and Linguistics review articles 185 is of course none other than Nikolai A. Nevsky, whom Galambos regarded as “the person who made the greatest contribution to the decipherment of Tang- ut.” Galambos has surprisingly little to say about Nevsky’s murder at the young age of 45 by the NKVD. A discussion of the political situation in the USSR in the 1930s would clarify why Tangutology ground to a complete halt there until after Stalin’s death. Did Galambos consider the Great Purge to be common knowl- edge? Galambos does shed light on the intellectual atmosphere in two other coun- tries where Tangutology took root: China and Japan. By placing scholars such as the Luó 羅 family and Nevsky’s collaborator Ishihama Juntarō 石濱純太郎 into context, he makes what could have been a dry list of names, dates, and works both insightful and colorful. The remainder of the second chapter surveys the major contributors and contributions to Tangutology around the world. Here and throughout the book, Galambos’ acquaintance with the multiple branches and schools of Tangutology shines. Perhaps more could be said about Tangut archaeology (e.g., Castell’s identification of the Tangut royal tombs in 1938), though that might stray too far from the textual focus of the book. This reviewer suggests two further small additions. First, Galambos states on p. 82 that “none of these books [by Nishida Tatsuo 西田龍雄] were translated into European languages,” but Nishida’s 1967 book Seika moji 西夏文字 (The Tangut script) was translated into English in 1979 by James A. Matisoff. Neither version of Seika moji is in Galambos’ bibliography. Second, although Galambos mentions George van Driem and Ksenia Kepping’s proposed book on Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut, he did not mention the Hong Kong Tang- utologist Tai Chung-pui (Dài Zhōngpèi) 戴忠沛’s 2008 PhD dissertation that is the definitive work on the subject. Those transcriptions are only briefly men- tioned four times in Galambos’ book (pp. 66, 67, 91, 169); they might have been worthy of more attention not only because they are crucial alphabetic evi- dence for the pronunciation of Tangut but also because those transcriptions were on manuscripts. It is disappointing that “Tibet” and “Tibetan” do not even appear in the index even though there are several brief references to Tangut translations from Tibetan. One surprise in the second chapter is Galambos’ favorable treatment of the rarely cited Luc Kwanten whose ideas were criticized and who dropped out of Tangutology nearly thirty years ago. This reviewer agrees with Galambos’ as- sessment of Kwanten as someone who “pointed out a number of problems in the conventional understanding of the language and the script, and at the same time raised interesting issues that had been largely ignored by the lin- guistic community.” Alas, those issues still remain more or less unexplored, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale 45 (2016) 184-190.

Load more