DOCSLIB.ORG

Introduction

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Introduction 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. © 2015 Imre Galambos. Published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. 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. Although they are not kept together in one institution and thus cannot be consid- ered a single collection, facsimile images have been recently published in 20 large volumes, presenting a treasure trove of written sources for Tangut studies.2 This body of material is especially important because it complements the Khara- khoto finds with sources of wider provenance, which in turn can validate or dis- prove some of the assumptions made earlier. The large volume of books from Khara-khoto inevitably raises the question how representative this corpus is for other regions of the Tangut state and Tangut culture in general. The publication of the Tangut collections kept in China, almost none of which come from Khara- khoto, provides a control group that is essential for assessing the reliability of the Kozlov collection. In light of these publications, we can now confirm the initial impression that most of the Tangut written sources are Buddhist in nature. In fact, the newly published material contains almost no secular texts, highlighting the uniqueness of the Khara-khoto corpus in this respect. The discovery of texts written in Tangut opened up an entirely new field of research. Tangut was a dead language completely forgotten and initially even the identification of the script presented a serious problem. The discovery of a treas- ure trove of books written in this language made it possible to ascertain the iden- tity of the script and to begin the work of decipherment. Fortunately, the collec- tion had everything a decipherer could dream of, including bilingual and monolingual dictionaries, as well as numerous translations of known Chinese texts. This enabled scholars to align the Tangut and Chinese (and in some cases the Tibetan) versions of the same text, producing Rosetta Stone-type parallel ver- sions. Such work in turn made it possible to determine which Tangut word trans- lators usually used for which Chinese word. While such correspondences pro- vided the basis for reading Tangut texts, in practice they were dependent on character-to-character matches with the Chinese version and essentially entailed reading Tangut texts in a Chinese transcription. Ironically, the richness of the parallel Chinese material presented an obstacle to understanding the Tangut lan- guage, which remained elusive behind the logographic disguise of Sinoform || 2 Ningxia daxue Xixiaxue yanjiu zhongxin et al. 2005–2007. Introduction | 3 characters. To this day, this remains a problem in the field, even though signifi- cant progress has been made in trying to understand the Tangut language inde- pendent of Chinese. This book is concerned with Tangut translations of secular Chinese texts. More specifically, I am interested in how Chinese texts were used and understood beyond China’s borders, in a setting that is linguistically and socially different from where they had been composed and initially circulated. Essentially, this is a study of Chinese texts that had been translated into a different language and used in a non-Chinese environment. Chinese texts began to be translated into Tangut immediately after the invention of the Tangut script and, as far as we can tell, this process lasted as long as the script was in use. Indeed, judging from the sources available to us today, Chinese culture and Chinese texts were a major source material for Tangut literacy, as the larger part of the extant Tangut mate- rial is of Chinese origin and, at one point or other, was translated from Chinese. Particularly important in this respect are the Buddhist texts which are by far the most numerous in the available body of material. In most cases these texts, espe- cially canonical sutras, were of Indian origin and had been translated into Chi- nese by Chinese and Central Asian monks. Nevertheless, Tangut translations used the Chinese translations and were less interested in tracing those back to their Indic versions. Accordingly, Tangut Buddhist sutras normally included the name of the translator (e.g. Kumārajīva) who had produced the Chinese version, even though the text itself was presented in Tangut. The predominance of Buddhist texts among the Tangut books and manu- scripts discovered at Khara-khoto and other sites demonstrates the significance of Buddhism in the Tangut state.3 At the same time, it also attests to the princi- pally religious motivation behind the invention of a native script. Nevertheless, the surviving material also contains many secular works, including Confucian classics, popular or semi-popular literary works and primers used for educational purposes. The present book focuses on such secular works, all of which were translated into Tangut from Chinese. Not trying to downplay the importance of the Buddhist material, my primary interest in this place is how and why texts of the native Chinese tradition acquired additional roles and functions in a non-Chi- nese environment. Another group of material not covered in this book is the rich collection of manuscripts and printed texts written in Chinese. Once again, Buddhist texts || 3 For Tangut Buddhism, see the works of Kirill J. Solonin, especially Solonin 2003, 2008 and 2014. 4 | Introduction constitute an important part of this material, although there is also a considera- ble number of secular works. Some of these are fragmentary and relatively small but there are also printed editions that run into dozens or hundreds of pages. In terms of their content, the texts range from Confucian classics and Daoist works to primers and collections of medical prescriptions. Among the most important Chinese finds is the printed edition of the Zhuangzi 莊子 with Lü Huiqing’s 呂惠 卿 (1032–1111) commentary, which had been printed in the Song 宋 and subse- quently brought to Khara-khoto.4 There are also quite a few Chinese dictionaries, such as the Guangyun 廣韻 and the Pingshui yun 平水韵, as well as primers such as the Qianziwen 千字文 and the Mengqiu 蒙求.5 In addition, there are also frag- ments of the Han shu 漢書, Xin Tang shu 新唐書, Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑒 綱目, Chuxue ji 初學記, Lunyu 論語 and other texts known from the Chinese liter- ary tradition.6 Some of these editions were produced in the Song or Jin 金 states, others within the Tangut domain. In either case, these materials are of crucial importance for the study of the history of printing, education and scholarship. Even though the overall majority of Tangut textual material comprises trans- lations from Chinese and Tibetan, this does not mean that the ruins yielded no native Tangut texts.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia Pestis Polytomy
    Epilogue: A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy Robert Hymes The Medieval Globe, Volume 1, Inaugural Double Issue 2015, pp. 285-308 (Article) Published by Arc Humanities Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/758494 [ Access provided at 24 Sep 2021 02:41 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] EPILOGUE: A HYPOTHESIS ON THE EAST ASIAN BEGINNINGS OF THE YERSINIA PESTIS POLYTOMY ROBERT HYMES Yersinia pestis For tHe HiStorian of premodern Eurasia, the 2013 study of histori- cal variations in mutation rates by Yujun Cui and others signals a new departure in the cumulative study of the genetics of the Y. pestis bacillus over the preceding fifteen years. Whereas previous studies had been moving to define ’s place of origin and dissemination only in a broad chronological framework of up to 20,000 years (Achtman et Y. pestis al. 2004; Morelli et al. 2010), Cui and colleagues’ work makes a histori- cal claim of much greater precision: that the evolution of since its divergence from its most recent common ancestor may have occurred within the past three to four thousand years, and more importantly that a polytomy (simultaneous or nearly simultaneous genetic divergence of Y. pestis multiple lineage branches) or “Big Bang” that yielded most of the cur- rent strains of , as well as the 1348 Black Death strain, took place between 1142 and 1339 (Cui et al. 2013: 580, table 1; their time interval has a confidence level of 95%). Their further finding, that the bacillus originated in or near the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, offers historians both a period and place to look for human events that could produce a punctu- ated genetic divergence.
    [Show full text]
  • 3) Indiana Jones Proof
    CHAPTER EIGHT Hollywood vs. History In my frst semester of graduate school, every student in my program was required to choose a research topic. It had to be related in some way to modern Chinese history, our chosen course of study. I didn’t know much about China back then, but I did know this: if I chose a boring topic, my life would be miserable. So I came up with a plan. I would try to think of the most exciting thing in the world, then look for its historical counterpart in China. My little brainstorm lasted less than thirty seconds, for the answer was obvious: Indiana Jones. To a white, twenty-something-year-old male from American sub- urbia, few things were more exciting in life than the thought of the man with the bullwhip. To watch the flms was to expe- rience a rush of boyish adrenaline every time. Somehow, I was determined to carry that adrenaline over into my research. On the assumption that there were no Chinese counterparts to Indiana Jones, I posed the only question that seemed likely to yield an answer: How did the Chinese react to the foreign archaeologists who took antiquities from their lands? Te answer to that question proved far more complex than I ever could have imagined. I was so stunned by what I discov- ered in China that I decided to read everything I could about Western expeditions in the rest of the world, in order to see how they compared to the situation in China. Tis book is the result.
    [Show full text]
  • Iso/Iec Jtc1/Sc2/Wg2 N5064
    JTC1/SC2/WG2 N5064 2019-05-27 Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set International Organization for Standardization Organisation Internationale de Normalisation Международная организация по стандартизации Doc Type: Working Group Document Title: Proposal to encode nine Tangut ideographs and six Tangut components Source: Andrew West, Viacheslav Zaytsev (Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences), Jia Changye (Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences), Jing Yongshi (Beifang University of Nationalities), Sun Bojun (Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) Status: Individual Contribution Action: For consideration by JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC Date: 2019-05-27 1. Introduction At the Ad hoc meeting on Tangut held at Yinchuan, China in August 2016, under the auspices of the Script Encoding Initiative, Professors Jia Changye and Jing Yongshi reported that they had identified a number of misunified Tangut ideographs (see WG2 N4736; L2/16-243). The ideographs in question each have two unrelated meanings with separate entries in Li Fanwen’s 2008 Tangut-Chinese Dictionary (Xià-Hàn zìdiǎn 夏漢字典), but because they have identical glyphs in Li Fanwen’s dictionary and all other modern sources each of the two meanings were unified as a single encoded character. The recent research by Jia and Jing indicates that there are subtle but systematic glyph differences that distinguish the two readings and meanings of each of these encoded characters, as listed in their Xīxià zìfú jí shǔxìng biāozhù biǎo (cǎogǎo) 西夏字符及属性标注表(草稿) [Table of Xixia Characters with Annotated Properties (Draft)] (August 2016). Their document also identifies five components which should each be disunified into two encoded characters.
    [Show full text]
  • The Etymology of Chinggis Khan's Name in Tangut'
    THE ETYMOLOGY OF CHINGGIS KHAN'S NAME IN TANGUT' Ksenia B. Keppíng Chinggis Khan's fate is closely associated with the Tangut State: it is generally accepted that he met his death in the Great State of the \¡Vhite and hfty (= The Great state of Yab-Yum\z (982-1227), in the course of his Tangut campaign n 1226'27, when the once flourishing Tangut State had been completeþ subdued; shortly after it fell into oblivion. But in spite of this, the list of sources written in a variety of languages describ- ing Chinggis Khan's life and his military successes, lacks Tangut material, and this was and still is taken for granted, since it is widely held that Tangut historical records which, no doubt, had been compiled at the Tangut court, perished in the flames of the Mongolian invasion. However it may be' so far therc are no traces of any historical records written in Tangut script. The idea that some Tangut historical figures or figures connected with the Tanguts might appear in non-historical Tangut texts had nevef crossed my mind' That is why the mention of Chinggis Khan (as well as of two mof€ persons - the Tangut heir, the son of the last but one Tangut empefor De-wang, and 'Phags-pa lama3) in one of the Tangut poetic works (a ritual song) at first seemed to np unbelievable. As it proved to be, among Tangut ritual songs ltl4 tçiqs,which came to us in a cursive handwriting on the revefse sides of wood-block print pages, was one' I I would like to rhank my colleague Professor S.
    [Show full text]
  • Official Colours of Chinese Regimes: a Panchronic Philological Study with Historical Accounts of China
    TRAMES, 2012, 16(66/61), 3, 237–285 OFFICIAL COLOURS OF CHINESE REGIMES: A PANCHRONIC PHILOLOGICAL STUDY WITH HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS OF CHINA Jingyi Gao Institute of the Estonian Language, University of Tartu, and Tallinn University Abstract. The paper reports a panchronic philological study on the official colours of Chinese regimes. The historical accounts of the Chinese regimes are introduced. The official colours are summarised with philological references of archaic texts. Remarkably, it has been suggested that the official colours of the most ancient regimes should be the three primitive colours: (1) white-yellow, (2) black-grue yellow, and (3) red-yellow, instead of the simple colours. There were inconsistent historical records on the official colours of the most ancient regimes because the composite colour categories had been split. It has solved the historical problem with the linguistic theory of composite colour categories. Besides, it is concluded how the official colours were determined: At first, the official colour might be naturally determined according to the substance of the ruling population. There might be three groups of people in the Far East. (1) The developed hunter gatherers with livestock preferred the white-yellow colour of milk. (2) The farmers preferred the red-yellow colour of sun and fire. (3) The herders preferred the black-grue-yellow colour of water bodies. Later, after the Han-Chinese consolidation, the official colour could be politically determined according to the main property of the five elements in Sino-metaphysics. The red colour has been predominate in China for many reasons. Keywords: colour symbolism, official colours, national colours, five elements, philology, Chinese history, Chinese language, etymology, basic colour terms DOI: 10.3176/tr.2012.3.03 1.
    [Show full text]
  • "Brightening" and the Place of Xixia (Tangut)
    1 "Briiighttteniiing" and ttthe plllace of Xiiixiiia (Tanguttt) iiin ttthe Qiiiangiiic branch of Tiiibettto-Burman* James A. Matisoff University of California, Berkeley 1.0 Introduction Xixia (Tangut) is an extinct Tibeto-Burman language, once spoken in the Qinghai/Gansu/Tibetan border region in far western China. Its complex logographic script, invented around A.D. 1036, was the vehicle for a considerable body of literature until it gradually fell out of use after the Mongol conquest in 1223 and the destruction of the Xixia kingdom.1 A very large percentage of the 6000+ characters have been semantically deciphered and phonologically reconstructed, thanks to a Xixia/Chinese glossary, Tibetan transcriptions, and monolingual Xixia dictionaries and rhyme-books. The f«anqi\e method of indicating the pronunciation of Xixia characters was used both via other Xixia characters (in the monolingual dictionaries) and via Chinese characters (in the bilingual glossary Pearl in the Palm, where Chinese characters are also glossed by one or more Xixia ones). Various reconstruction systems have been proposed by scholars, including M.V. Sofronov/K.B. Keping, T. Nishida, Li Fanwen, and Gong Hwang-cherng. This paper relies entirely on the reconstructions of Gong.2 After some initial speculations that Xixia might have belonged to the Loloish group of Tibeto-Burman languages, scholarly opinion has now coalesced behind the geographically plausible opinion that it was a member of the "Qiangic" subgroup of TB. The dozen or so Qiangic languages, spoken in Sichuan Province and adjacent parts of Yunnan, were once among the most obscure in the TB family, loosely lumped together as the languages of the Western Barbarians (Xifan = Hsifan).
    [Show full text]
  • Sir Gerard Clauson and His Skeleton Tangut Dictionary Imre Galambos
    Sir Gerard Clauson and his Skeleton Tangut Dictionary Imre Galambos Sir Gerard Leslie Makins Clauson (1891–1974) worked most of his life as a civil servant and conducted academic research in his spare time.1 Only after retiring in 1951 at the age of 60 was he able to devote his full attention to scholarly endeavours, which were primarily focussed on Turkish languages. Thus as a scholar, today he is primarily remembered for his contribution to Turkish studies, and his Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish is still an essential reference tool in the field.2 Yet in addition to his study of Turkish and Mongolian linguistics, he also worked on a number of other Asian languages, including Tangut. Even though his extensive list of publications includes a small number of items related to Tangut studies,3 he devoted an incredible amount of time and effort to studying the language and to compiling a dictionary. He never finished the dictionary but deposited a draft version along with his notes in seven large volumes at the Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), so that they would be available to anyone who wished to study Tangut and perhaps continue his research. Eric Grinstead, who used the dictionary when working on the Tangut manuscripts at the British Museum, called it “a paragon of excellence” in comparison with high level of errors in dictionaries available at the time.4 Indeed, the erudition of Clauson’s dictionary is obvious even upon a cursory look at the manuscript version and had it ever been published, it would have undoubtedly made a major impact on scholarship.
    [Show full text]
  • Langdon Warner at Dunhuang: What Really Happened? by Justin M
    ISSN 2152-7237 (print) ISSN 2153-2060 (online) The Silk Road Volume 11 2013 Contents In Memoriam ........................................................................................................................................................... [iii] Langdon Warner at Dunhuang: What Really Happened? by Justin M. Jacobs ............................................................................................................................ 1 Metallurgy and Technology of the Hunnic Gold Hoard from Nagyszéksós, by Alessandra Giumlia-Mair ......................................................................................................... 12 New Discoveries of Rock Art in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor and Pamir: A Preliminary Study, by John Mock .................................................................................................................................. 36 On the Interpretation of Certain Images on Deer Stones, by Sergei S. Miniaev ....................................................................................................................... 54 Tamgas, a Code of the Steppes. Identity Marks and Writing among the Ancient Iranians, by Niccolò Manassero .................................................................................................................... 60 Some Observations on Depictions of Early Turkic Costume, by Sergey A. Yatsenko .................................................................................................................... 70 The Relations between China and India
    [Show full text]
  • Written Monuments of the Orient
    RUSSIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Institute of Oriental Manuscripts (Asiatic Museum) WRITTEN MONUMENTS OF THE ORIENT VOLUME 6 No. 1 (11) Founded in 2014 Issued biannually 2020 Editors Irina Popova, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg (Editor-in-Chief) Svetlana Anikeeva, Vostochnaya Literatura Publisher, Moscow Tatiana Pang, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Elena Tanonova, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Editorial Board Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst, Turfanforschung, BBAW, Berlin Michael Friedrich, Universität Hamburg Yuly Ioannesyan, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Karashima Seishi, Soka University, Tokyo Aliy Kolesnikov, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Alexander Kudelin, Institute of World Literature, RAS, Moscow Karine Marandzhyan, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Nie Hongyin, Beijing Normal University, Sichuan Normal University, Beijing Georges-Jean Pinault, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Stanislav Prozorov, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, RAS, St. Petersburg Rong Xinjiang, Peking University Nicholas Sims-Williams, University of London Takata Tokio, Kyoto University Stephen F. Teiser, Princeton University Hartmut Walravens, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Nataliya Yakhontova, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Institute of Oriental RAS, St. Petersburg Manuscripts Peter Zieme, Freie Universität Berlin RAS 2020 WRITTEN MONUMENTS OF THE ORIENT. Vol. 6, No. 1 (11), 2020, p. 2 IN THIS ISSUE Nie Hongyin A Unique
    [Show full text]
  • Areal Script Form Patterns with Chinese Characteristics James Myers
    Areal script form patterns with Chinese characteristics James Myers National Chung Cheng University http://personal.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/ To appear in Written Language & Literacy This study was made possible through a grant from Taiwan’s Ministry of Science and Technology (103-2410-H-194-119-MY3). Iwano Mariko helped with katakana and Minju Kim with hangul, while Tsung-Ying Chen, Daniel Harbour, Sven Osterkamp, two anonymous reviewers and the special issue editors provided all sorts of useful suggestions as well. Abstract It has often been claimed that writing systems have formal grammars structurally analogous to those of spoken and signed phonology. This paper demonstrates one consequence of this analogy for Chinese script and the writing systems that it has influenced: as with phonology, areal script patterns include the borrowing of formal regularities, not just of formal elements or interpretive functions. Whether particular formal Chinese script regularities were borrowed, modified, or ignored also turns out not to depend on functional typology (in morphemic/syllabic Tangut script, moraic Japanese katakana, and featural/phonemic/syllabic Korean hangul) but on the benefits of making the borrowing system visually distinct from Chinese, the relative productivity of the regularities within Chinese character grammar, and the level at which the borrowing takes place. Keywords: Chinese characters, Tangut script, Japanese katakana, Korean hangul, writing system grammar, script outer form, areal patterns 1. Areal phonological patterns and areal script patterns Sinoform writing systems look Chinese, even when they are functionally quite different. The visual traits of non-logographic Japanese katakana and Korean hangul are nontrivially like those of logographic Chinese script, as are those of the logographic but structurally unique script of Tangut, an extinct Tibeto-Burman language of what is now north-central China.
    [Show full text]
  • RESEARCH on CLOTHING of ANCIENT CHARACTERS in MURALS of DUNHUANG MOGAO GROTTOES and ARTWORKS of SUTRA CAVE LOST OVERSEAS Xia
    Global Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Vol.8, No. 1, pp.41-53, January 2020 Published by ECRTD-UK ISSN: 2052-6350(Print), ISSN: 2052-6369(Online) RESEARCH ON CLOTHING OF ANCIENT CHARACTERS IN MURALS OF DUNHUANG MOGAO GROTTOES AND ARTWORKS OF SUTRA CAVE LOST OVERSEAS Xia Sheng Ping Tunhuangology Information Center of Dunhuang Research Academy, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China E-mail: [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT: At the beginning of the twentieth century (1900), the Sutra Cave of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang (presently numbered Cave 17) was discovered by accident. This cave contained tens of thousands of scriptures, artworks, and silk paintings, and became one of the four major archeological discoveries of modern China. The discovery of these texts, artworks, and silk paintings in Dunhuang shook across China and around the world. After the discovery of Dunhuang’s Sutra Cave, expeditions from all over the world flocked to Dunhuang to acquire tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts, silk paintings, embroidery, and other artworks that had been preserved in the Sutra Cave, as well as artifacts from other caves such as murals, clay sculptures, and woodcarvings, causing a significant volume of Dunhuang’s cultural relics to become lost overseas. The emergent field of Tunhuangology, the study of Dunhuang artifacts, has been entirely based on the century-old discovery of the Sutra Cave in Dunhuang’s Mogao Grottoes and the texts and murals unearthed there. However, the dress and clothing of the figures in these lost artworks and cultural relics has not attracted sufficient attention from academic experts.
    [Show full text]
  • Chinax Course Notes
    Part 4: A New National Culture 16: From Early to Later Imperial China Introduction This is one of those great discussions between Profs. Bol & Kirby. Prof. Bol has written extensively about this period of Chinese history, whereas Prof. Kirby's expertise is in modern history. When does modern China begin? The Song Dynasty, running from the 10th to the 13th centuries, influenced economic, commercial, and political life in China well into the 19th and 20th centuries. The Southern Song was more cosmopolitan than the Tang and its economy rested more on private enterprise. Farmers owned their land and prospered in ways not possible under the Tang. The Song created the foundation for a millennium of civil service exams that ended only in 1905: an exemplar of civil meritocracy - what the Japanese scholar Miyazaki called 'China's examination hell.'76 The Song was also a time of division, of foreign invasion. With the increasingly private economy and a new Confucianism, the Song relocated moral authority from the state to the individual, in contrast with the perception of China as an unbroken lineage of centralized authoritarian regimes.77 It was also a time of great invention: gunpowder, the mariner's compass, paper currency. Commercial printing meant knowledge could be spread less expensively than ever. The compass permitted blue water navigation. 76 See page 148 for an overview of the Civil Service Exam. 77 See page 169 for a look at the State vs. the Individual through Chinese history. ChinaX Part 4 A New National Culture Page 132 of 257 Historical Overview Tang (618-907) Year Event 755-763 An Lushan Rebellion The rebellion changed the course of the Tang Dynasty, forcing retreat from and the North and from Central Asia and shifting the economic base to the beyond Southeast.
    [Show full text]