Dunhuang Manuscript Culture by Imre Galambos

Dunhuang Manuscript Culture by Imre Galambos

“Dunhuang Manuscript Culture” explores the world of Chinese manuscripts from ninth-tenth century Dunhuang, an oasis city along the network of pre-modern routes known today collectively as the Silk Roads. The manuscripts have been discovered in 1900 in a sealed-off side-chamber of a Buddhist cave temple, where they had lain undisturbed for for almost nine hundred years. The discovery comprised tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages and scripts, including Chinese, Tibetan, Old Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian and Sanskrit. This study centres around four groups of manuscripts from the mid-ninth to the late tenth centuries, a period when the region was an independent kingdom ruled by local families. The central argument is that the manuscripts attest to the unique cultural diversity of the region during this period, exhibiting—alongside obvious Chinese elements—the heavy influence of Central Asian cultures. As a result, it was much less ‘Chinese’ than commonly portrayed in modern scholarship. The book makes a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.

Imre Galambos, University of Cambridge, UK.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783110723496
ISBN 10	3110723492
Title	Dunhuang Manuscript Culture
Author	Imre Galambos
Series	Studies In Manuscript Cultures
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	De Gruyter
Year published	2020-12-07
Number of pages	298
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.