The Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in China

Early in the twentieth century a hidden cache of manuscripts was discovered in the monastic cave complex of Dunhuang in Central Asia. The majority of the manuscripts, dating from the first millennium C.E., are in Chinese and Tibetan. The largest collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 2002-01, Vol.65 (1), p.129-139
Main Author: VAN SCHAIK, SAM
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic libraries
Anthropology
Art and archaeology
Asia
Buddhism
Cataloging
Caves
China
Chinese
Collection acquisitions
Curators
Historical text analysis
History
Libraries
Library collections
Literature
National libraries
Scripts
Scrolls
Tang dynasty
Texts
Tibet
Tibeto Burman languages
Writing
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Summary:Early in the twentieth century a hidden cache of manuscripts was discovered in the monastic cave complex of Dunhuang in Central Asia. The majority of the manuscripts, dating from the first millennium C.E., are in Chinese and Tibetan. The largest collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are in France and England. However, the fact that there are collections of almost equal size within China is hardly known outside of that country. In this article I report on the nature and size of these Chinese collections, and the results of my own examination of the collections in Dunhuang. This information largely completes the puzzle which was left to us after the dispersal of the manuscripts to various institutions, and allows us to attempt a reconstruction of the contents of the original ‘library’ of Tibetan manuscripts in the cave in Dunhuang.
ISSN:0041-977X
1474-0699
DOI:10.1017/S0041977X0200006X