Galambos Imre (ed.) Translating Chinese tradition and teaching Tangut culture

Berlin / Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2015. — viii, 318 p. (Studies in manuscript cultures, Vol. 6) — e-ISBN: 9783110453959 (PDF).Manuscripts and printed books from Khara-khoto.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 paper manuscripts at a series of desert sites in China’s westernmost province Xinjiang 新疆 (now not a province but an autonomous region). Especially the material 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 peoples 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 Mongolia. 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 Russian 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 Ethnographic Department of the Russian Museum, and eventually ended up in the State Hermitage Museum.