Dunhuang manuscripts full#

Practical documents from daily life also show how the barely literate engaged in technical, legal, and religious activities. Primers used in local schools, including many whole texts unknown before the Dunhuang discoveries, together with sheets of practice characters and handwriting exercises, provide insight into how students learned to read and write during the medieval period. There are also more than twenty manuscript copies, some with annotations and notes on pronunciation, of the erudite anthology Selections of Refined Literature ( Wenxuan 文選) by Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501-531), copied at Dunhuang between the sixth and ninth centuries.Middle-brow culture is also abundant. Elite culture is represented in the dozens of Lotus and Diamond Sūtras produced by scribes in the imperial court as part of the official copying and empire-wide promulgation of canonical Buddhist texts in the seventh and early eighth centuries. Diversity and the chance survival of otherwise unknown texts are true for all the categories of traditional Chinese writing found at Dunhuang.Īnother way to think about the remarkable diversity of sources discovered at Dunhuang is to consider social class and levels of literacy. But they also contain non-standard versions of many of the histories as well as otherwise unknown works, including biographies, military histories, and textbooks for teaching history in local schools. By contrast, the Dunhuang corpus came together accidentally.The Dunhuang materials include, to be sure, medieval versions of the standard histories studied at the time, including Records of the Grand Historian, History of the Han Dynasty, Records of the Three Kingdoms, and History of the Jin Dynasty. Most of the Chinese historical record was produced over the millennia by professionals tasked with writing about the past to teach a lesson to those in power.

Regardless of how the mystery of their burial is solved, however, this book accentuates the astounding diversity of the Dunhuang manuscripts and the amazing new light they shed on the past. Responsible scholars have suggested different motives: a genizah for sacred waste, fear of impending invasion, interment to survive religious decay, memorializing a local holy man, relocation of a single monastic library. We may never know why all these materials were gathered up early in the eleventh century and then entombed until a local caretaker of the Mogao cave-temples in the desert outside of Dunhuang happened to discover them in the year 1900.Debate about the reasons for the sealing of the so-called library cave still rages. But in addition to sūtras from the shelves of well-ordered temple libraries, there are also writings used in local schools, private libraries, government offices, and by merchants passing through this key oasis intersection. It is true that more than 90% of the texts are sacred scriptures that belonged to Buddhist monasteries. The Dunhuang corpus constitutes not so much a library but rather a haphazard gathering together of written material circulating in a medieval city over a span of more than 600 years. This preface provides an overview of the Dunhuang manuscripts and their significance, the virtues of Hao’s book and the choices made when translating it into English, and the roles played by author and translator. Written for the educated general reader, this book offers an unrivaled understanding of the diversity of medieval Chinese social life and the richness of cultural interaction along the silk road.

Dunhuang manuscripts full#

Hao Chunwen’s 2007 introductory book, here revised and translated into English, opens up the full range of those documents. Teiser ( 太史文), published by Portico Publishing Company, 2020.ĭunhuang Manuscripts: An Introduction to Texts from the Silk Roadĭunhuang Manuscripts-an accidental assembly of more than 60,000 pieces of writing, ranging from long books in scroll format to short jottings on single sheets or fragments of paper-are a historian’s dream.

We are excited to announce the publication of a new book: Dunhuang Manuscripts: An Introduction to Texts from the Silk Road by Hao Chunwen ( 郝春文), translated by Stephen F.