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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Manuscripts under the microscope

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A few years ago Sam van Schaik (IDP) and Agnieszka Helman-Wazny (Hamburg University) started a small project on the Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang. They developed a plan to combine the results of Agnieszka's scientific analysis of the paper used in the Tibetan manuscripts with Sam's work on the textual and palaeographical aspects of the manuscripts. Selecting a group of fifty manuscripts, put everything they could find out about them into a table, and studied at the patterns that emerged. One of the most interesting results was the suggestion that manuscripts that had been brought to Dunhuang from Tibet itself were made in a different way to those made locally at Dunhuang. Though more work needs to be done, this opens up the possibility of ‘fingerprinting’ a manuscript to find out where it was made.

Read more about the project here.

The image above shows a microscopic image of Paper Mulberry fibres, more examples of Agnieszka Helman-Wazny's images of paper fibres from a Dunhuang manuscript can be found on the IDP website.

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