Dunhuang Manuscript Culture: End of the First Millennium (Studies in Manuscript Cultures, 22)

Open Access “Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads. The book explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the Silk Roads. It centres around four groups of manuscripts and argues for the existence of a unique local culture combining Chinese and Central Asian elements. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads at the end of the first millennium CE Contents 5 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 1 Multiple-text Manuscripts 31 2 Manuscripts Written by Students 93 3 Writing from Left to Right 147 4 Circulars and Names 203 Concluding Remarks 256 References 263 Index 293 About the Author 298