A bodhisattva in Mogao Cave 290. Photo: DUNHUANG INSTITUTE

---

Of the 60,000 items of ancient documents discovered in Mogao Caves, China stores only about 10,000 items while Britain has roughly 15,000. Other major collections are found in France, Russia, Japan and Denmark. Over 100 years ago, Luo Zhenyu and his fellow scholars could only compile records based on the documents and photographed copies they transcribed or obtained from Paul Pelliot of France. After the 1920s, scholars like Liu Fu and Wang Chongmin went to Paris and London to investigate, compile and study Dunhuang documents. Under arduous conditions, they achieved admirable research results. However, Chinese scholars failed to profoundly understand or utilize the Dunhuang materials, because they were unable to access the original documents. In the 1950s, foreign scholars compared their original documents to the Chinese scholars’ transcriptions, identifying more than 300 mistakes.

Things began to change since then. In 1957, the Capital Library of China, through exchange, obtained microfilms of the British Museum’s collection of Dunhuang documents with document numbers before S.6980. In the 1970s, the library purchased microfilms of all Dunhuang documents in the collection of the National Library of France. By then, Chinese scholars could use a microfilm reader to look at most Dunhuang materials written in Chinese. However, the materials have not been widely applied in academia due to their limited circulation and illegible characters.

With the development of Dunhuang studies, microfilms can no longer satisfy research, so some scholars set out to rephotograph and reprint the Dunhuang documents. Such work was jointly done by the Institute of History at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), The British Library and London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies in 1989. Professor Hao was excited about participating in the mission. “I still remember the moment when I saw the rephotographed Dunhuang documents. The past illegible text on the microfilms became easy to identify in the new pictures,” Hao said.

A grand vision started to grow in Hao’s mind. He wanted to use these pictures to revise and compile a complete set of annotated Dunhuang texts. High-resolution pictures of the materials in the British collection were available, so he started with these materials.

“Although found for more than 100 years, Dunhuang documents remain mysterious and unfamiliar to the scholarly field. The past problem lay in the difficult access to the original texts. In recent years, the compilation work has been blocked by the large number of manuscripts transcribed in irregular or variant characters used in the Tang and Song dynasties. These manuscripts are hard to identify. Also, scholars have concerns about citing the unannotated transcripts,” Hao said.

More than 60,000 items of ancient documents and 30,000 items of Dunhuang manuscripts contain abundant information covering politics, economics, military, religion, literature and folk customs. They also touch upon music, dance, technology and transportation, providing a treasure trove of first-hand materials to examine overall Chinese society during the Middle Ages. Most remaining classic documents were engraved after the Song Dynasty, but these manuscripts were written in the Tang Dynasty or earlier, which is of great value. “It is a pity that these abundant ancient records haven’t drawn enough attention from academia,” Hao said when talking about the initial intent of his compilation work.

Beyond his expectations, it has taken him nearly 30 years to get this far in the work. “I prepared the work in the 1990s. The first volume of Compiled Dunhuang Social and Historical Documents in British Collection was published in 2000. Now, we have finished the fifteenth volume. There will be another fifteen volumes. We will continue to spend at least ten years compiling Dunhuang documents,” Hao said.

Dunhuang documents refer to Mogao Caves’ ancient manuscripts and a few engraved copies that can be dated back to the Eastern Jin Dynasty or to the Northern Song Dynasty. More than 50,000 manuscripts are written in Chinese, of which about 90 percent are Buddhist documents and 10 percent are non-Buddhist, including Confucian classics, historical records, philosophical writings and miscellaneous works as well as reams of official and private documents.

It is demanding work to annotate and compile the various kinds of documents in a complete and accurate way. The first fifteen volumes of Compiled Dunhuang Social and Historical Documents in British Collection focused on the non-Buddhist items numbered between S.10 and S.3330 with a total of 5.4 million characters.

“Scholars have compiled and studied Dunhuang documents in the past. For example, China began to publish Compiled Dunhuang Documents by Field in the 1990s. This time, Compiled Dunhuang Social and Historical Documents in British Collection is arranged in the order of the document number, which gives a full picture of the Dunhuang relics,” said Meng Yanhong, a research fellow from the Institute of History at CASS.

Wang Su, a research fellow at the Palace Museum, has been studying oracle bone scripts, bamboo slips, documents, epitaphs and other unearthed documents for years. He understands the difficulty in sorting out the Dunhuang documents. “Scholars have choices in academic studies so that they can avoid the areas they are not good at. Document compilation is different. It requires a good knowledge of history, related disciplines as well as ancient Chinese. And we must look up all materials to understand everything we compile,” Wang said.

“We devoted ourselves to the compilation of Dunhuang documents when the cause started. Our commitment will not be shaken,” Hao said.

 

This article was translated from  Guangming Daily.

(edited by MA YUHONG)