International Dunhuang Project Papers

IDP Archives: Papers (International Dunhuang Project)

The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online
IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes

• Technical Papers
• Research Papers
• Conservation Papers

Technical Papers

InfraRed Photography

• An Introduction to digital infrared photography and its application within IDP
• Jonathan Jackson, The International Dunhuang Project
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 6.4MB)

The IDP Database

• The history and future of the IDP relational database
• Dr. Susan Whitfield, The International Dunhuang Project
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 40KB)

Navigating Through Uncharted Territory

• Paper presented to the London Advisory Committee of the British Library in 2001, (previously unpublished)
• Dr. Susan Whitfield, The International Dunhuang Project
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 100KB)

Research Papers

Enjoy It While it Lasts: A Brief Golden Age of Freedom of Scholarly Information?

• Paper published in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita (The Republic) in October 2000 (in Polish, translation by Matthew Ciolek).
• Author: Dr. Susan Whitfield, The International Dunhuang Project
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 60KB)

The Question of Forgeries

• Introduction to a collection of papers from the 1998 Conference at the British Library.
• Author: Dr. Susan Whitfield, The International Dunhuang Project
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 180KB)

Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra

• A web resource (under development) presented at the first symposium held under the project 'Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Scholarly Resources on the Silk Road (China — India — Russia) 2006–2008' sponsored by the Ford Foundation in November 2006 at the National Library of China (NLC), Beijing.
• Author: Dr. Radha Banerjee
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 300KB)

A Review of Tangut Buddhism, Art and Textual Studies

• A web resource (under development) presented at the second symposium held under the project 'Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and  Scholarly Resources on the Silk Road (China — India — Russia)  2006–2008' sponsored by the Ford Foundation in April 2007 at the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
• Author: Dr. Saren Gaowa
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 568KB)

Introduction to Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Manuscripts from Tunhuang in the British Museum

• The manuscripts described in this Catalogue once formed part of a huge collection which was discovered about fifty years ago in a walled-up chamber adjoining one of the 'Caves of the Thousand Buddhas' (Qianfodong/Ch'ien Fo Tung) a few miles south-east of the Dunhuang oasis on the border of Gansu.
• Author: Lionel Giles
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD

Médecine, société et religion dans la Chine médiévale Manuscrits de Dunhuang et pratiques de santé

• Programme de recherche dirigé dans le cadre de l’Unité Mixte de Recherche UMR 8155 'Civilisations chinoise, japonaise et tibétaine'.
• Author: Catherine Despeux (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales)
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 44KB)

Abstracts of the medical manuscripts from Dunhuang

• Abstracts of seventy-four manuscripts containing medical information held in the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Institute of Oriental Studies and the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Ryūkoku University Library and Chinese archives.
• Author: Wang Shumin
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 152KB)

A Chinese Medieval Treatment for Angina

• Research into the use of saltpetre to treat the symptoms of angina.
• Authors: Anthony Butler and John Moffett
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 80KB)

Proceedings (Extract) of XII International Congress of Orientalists, Rome, October 1899

• In the evening of 3rd October 1899, delegates to the XII International Congress of Orientalists assembled in the Great Hall of the University of Rome, to elect the presidents for each of the Sessions, to discuss the format and elect speakers at the opening ceremony the following day. In addition to scholars and academics from Italy, the host nation, participants came from all over the world; each country was represented by national museums, universities and academies.
• Author: Lia Genovese
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 852KB)

Otani Kozui's 1910 visit to London

• Following the second Japanese expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Count Otani Kozui, the organizer and sponsor of the enterprise travelled to London and spent over half a year there. His primary aims were to make the results of the expedition known in the West and also to prepare for the new one, lead by the young monk Tachibana Zuicho.
• Author: Imre Galambos
• DOWNLOAD (PDF 240KB)

Orthography of Early Chinese Writing: Evidence from Newly Excavated Manuscripts

• This book is about the variability of Chinese writing in early China. The archaeological discoveries of the last few decades have provided an unprecedented amount of Warring States texts in the form of manuscripts and inscriptions on various objects. From the point of view of palaeography, an intriguing challenge is how to fit all this new material into the early history of Chinese writing. Since these new texts predate the Qin dynasty, they are able to provide the modern researcher with undigested data regarding the nature of writing in Warring States China. With the sudden increase of original documents, it has become clear that we need to revise our views regarding the nature of early writing, as well as the process and effect of the Qin unification.
• The new material, the author argues, refutes the traditional linear model of the evolution of writing in China. According to this model, characters developed along a single line from the Shang oracle-bone inscriptions to Zhou bronze inscriptions, all the way to the Qin small seal and Han clerical scripts. The author that this view is not only an oversimplification but in many cases is incorrect. This model mirrors the ideologically motivated unilateral genealogy of traditional historiography which traced the mandate of Heaven from mythical emperors to the ruling house.
• Author: Imre Galambos
• DOWNLOAD (PDF 3.3MB)

A Tenth Century Manuscript from Dunhuang Concerning the Gantong Monastery at Liangzhou

• The Gantongsi monastery at Liangzhou is a site that has been traditionally linked with the cult of the monk Liu Sahe. In a group of Sino-Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, a dated copy of an inscription from the monastery was found, shedding light on the significance of the monastery in the Buddhist pilgrimage movement during the tenth century.
• Author: Imre Galambos
• DOWNLOAD (PDF 5.2MB)

Current status and future prospects of the Hanzi Normative Glyphs (HNG) Database

• Following a presentation at the 2004 Autumn meeting of the Society for Japanese Linguistics, the Internet version of the Hanzi Normative Glyphs (HNG) database (headed by ISHIZUKA Harumichi) was launched in March 2005. Since then, every year new texts and relevant data have been added to the database. The objectives and methodology of this work was first published, with Ishizuka as the first author, in Nihongo no kenkyū 日本語の研究 (2005, vol. 1, no. 4), the official journal of the Society for Japanese Linguistics. Following the increasing amount of texts and data (62 texts, 4,554 unique characters, 432,596 character forms), this paper is an introduction to the current status of the project, its findings and future prospects.
• Author: ISHIZUKA Harumichi
• DOWNLOAD (PDF 6.3MB)

The Dunhuang Sky: A Comprehensive Study of the Oldest Known Star Atlas

• This paper presents an analysis of the star atlas included in the medieval Chinese manuscript Or.8210/S.3326 discovered in 1907 by the archaeologist Aurel Stein at the Silk Road town of Dunhuang and now housed in the British Library. Although partially studied by a few Chinese scholars, it has never been fully displayed and discussed in the Western world. This set of sky maps (12 hour-angle maps in quasi-cylindrical projection and a circumpolar map in azimuthal projection), displaying the full sky visible from the Northern Hemisphere, is up to now the oldest complete preserved star atlas known from any civilisation. It is also the earliest known pictorial representation of the quasi-totality of Chinese constellations.
• Authors: Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud, Dr Françoise Praderie and Dr Susan Whitfield
• VIEW  

Conservation Papers

When Objects are Beyond Conservation: Recovering Visual Information from Damaged Artifacts

• A summary of recent analytical work on five Tang Dynasty wall painting fragments removed from Dunhuang in 1924.
• Author: Sanchita Balachandran and Glenn Gates
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (PDF 196MB)

Fibre Analyses of Dunhuang Documents in the British Library

• A study of the fibre composition of six Tibetan objects from the British Library.
• Author: Agnieska Helman-Wazny
• VIEW | DOWNLOAD (available soon)

See also IDP News  (International Dunhuang Project)