Shaping the Stein collection’s Dunhuang corpus (2): the items from Cave 17’s ‘miscellaneous’ bundles

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In a previous blog post , we looked at the instrumental role played by Wang Yuanlu during the selection of the items from the Cave 17. Wang, who directly chose from the small repository what to hand over to Stein for inspection, was very keen to divert his attention from the so-called ‘regular’ bundles, which were composed for the most part of Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Tibetan. During their first ever transaction, which took place between 21 May and 6 June 1907, Wang Yuanlu therefore began by handing over the ‘miscellaneous’ bundles, which he seemed to hold in low estimation. To Stein’s delight, these contained mixed and diverse materials, such as manuscripts in non-Chinese languages, illustrated scrolls, paintings, drawings, ex-votos, textiles, etc. Stein picked out any of the items that jumped at him as being particularly interesting and made sure to put them aside for ‘further examination’, the phrase that he used to refer to their removal in his transaction with Wang. This ...
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IDP Report: July–September 2011

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Download this report as a PDF (250KB).

CATALOGUING AND DIGITISATION

  • IDP photographer Rachel Roberts is currently digitising photographs from Aurel Stein’s fourth expedition to Dunhuang as well as continuing work on Dunhuang manuscripts.
  • Data on archaeological sites is currently being updated following an enhancement of the database. Miran, Endere and Kharakhoto are near completion.

COLLABORATIONS AND PARTNERSHIPS

  • 2–13 July: Susan Whitfield visited Afghanistan with John Falconer for meetings at the Ministry of Information and Culture, Kabul University, the National Archives and the National Museum, to discuss the development of an updated guide to resources on Afghanistan in the British Library. They continued to Delhi where they interviewed interns for the IDP/British Museum Stein artefacts project, and held continued discussions with the National Museum and the Ministry of Culture about collaboration on Central Asian material.
  • 2 September: A new scholarly resource for manuscript studies was launched on the IDP website, providing an introduction to the script types found in the Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang. This was achieved as part of as part of IDP’s Leverhulme palaeography project (2008 to 2011).
  • 26 September: Hu Wanglin arrived for a six-month internship as part of IDP’s collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology in Urumqi, Xinjiang, China. Funding has again been provided by the British Museum’s World Collections Programme.
  • The BL received a donation of 1940s photographs of Dunhuang taken by John B. Vincent, scheduled for cataloguing and digitisation.

VISITORS TO IDP

  • 14 July: Dr Sarah Kenderdine from the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualization and Embodiment (ALiVE) at the City University of Hong Kong visited to discuss immersive technologies.
  • 14 July: Three researchers from LIRIS (Informatics Laboratory for Imaging and Information Systems, based in Lyon, France) visited to discuss automated character recognition systems.
  • Rebbekah Abraham and Tony Morris from Historypin visited to discuss adding historical and modern photographs to the Historypin website.
  • 5–8 September: Dr Helman-Wazny from Hamburg’s Institute of Sinology made a follow-up visit relating to her earlier paper analysis work (IDP quarterly report for April to June 2011).
  • 7 September: The BL’s Head of Architecture and Development, Sean Martin, visited the IDP studio with members of his team to see digitisation work in progress.
  • 7 September: Benjamin Albritton of Stanford University Libraries and Dr Robert Sanderson of Los Alamos National Laboratory, both working on the Shared Canvas Project visited IDP to discuss user annotation of manuscripts, after their presentation to BL staff on Shared Canvas: Interoperable Medieval Manuscript Facsimiles.
  • 12 September: Professor Ishizuka Harumichi and Professor Ikeda Shoju, from Hokkaido University, Japan, visited IDP and consulted Dunhuang manuscripts in the Asian and African Studies reading room.
  • 11–19th September: Vic Swift accompanied the BL’s visual arts lead curator John Falconer to Sri Lanka, to assist in the installation of his exhibition A Return to Sri Lanka: Images of Sri Lanka from British Collections 1640–1900, for which she designed the exhibition graphics panels.

LECTURES

  • 9–10 September: Sam van Schaik gave a paper at a SOAS conference entitled Bon, Shangshung and Early Tibet.
  • 11 September: Abby Baker spoke about IDP to students attending BL Learning Department workshops.
  • 21 September: Susan Whitfield spoke about IDP to members of the Buddhist Society, London.
  • 15–16 October: Imre Galambos gave a talk entitled ‘Medieval Chinese Manuscripts with Multiple Dates’ at The Rise of Writing in Early China conference in Chicago.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

  • IDP News 36-37, Winter / Spring 2010–2011.
  • Imre Galambos, ‘The Tangut Translation of the General’s Garden by Zhuge Liang’, in Pis’mennyje Pamjatniki Vostoka, St. Petersburg, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, 2011.
  • Imre Galambos, ‘The Northern Neighbours of the Tangut’, in Cahiers de Linguistique – Asie Orientale 40 (2011): 69-104.
  • Imre Galambos, ‘Touched a Nation’s Heart: Sir E. Denison Ross and Alexander Csoma de Kőrös’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 21.3 (2011): 361-375.

FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS

  • Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Buddhist Pilgrim by Sam van Schaik and Imre Galambos is due for publication by de Gruyter in November.
  • Imre Galambos: ‘Punctuation marks in medieval Chinese manuscripts’, in Sobisch and Quenzer (eds.), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, Berlin and New York, de Gruyter.
  • Imre Galambos: ‘Correction marks in the Dunhuang manuscripts’, in Imre Galambos (ed.) Chinese manuscripts: Copies and Originals, Budapest, ELTE University.
  • Imre Galambos: ‘Popular character forms (suzi) and semantic compound (huiyi) characters in medieval Chinese manuscripts’, Journal of the American Oriental Society.
  • Imre Galambos: ‘Japanese exploration of Central Asia: The Ōtani expeditions and their British connections’, Bulletin of SOAS.
  • Sam van Schaik: ‘Towards a Tibetan Paleography: A Preliminary Typology of Writing Styles in Early Tibet.’ Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field, edited by Jörg Quenzer and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  • Sam van Schaik: ‘The Origin of the Headless Style (dbu med) in Tibet.’ Tibeto-Burman Linguistics, edited by Nathan Hill. Leiden: EJ Brill.
  • Sam van Schaik and André Alexander: ‘The Stone Maitreya of Leh: The Rediscovery and Recovery of an Early Tibetan Monument’. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. October 2011.
  • Susan Whitfield. Contribution on Buddhist sites on the Eastern Silk Road for The Cambridge World History of Religious Architect: Buddhist Volume.
  • Susan Whitfield, ‘Creating a Codicology for Chinese and Tibetan Manuscripts’ for the Proceedings of the Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies.

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