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126-581: The institute conducts guided tours of selected caves throughout the year, and collaborates with other organizations to increase digital access to artifacts, most notably through the International Dunhuang Project . At the start of the twentieth century, the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu appointed himself caretaker of the Mogao Caves, which by this time were ancient temples. His accidental discovery of

252-512: A relational database using the 4th Dimension database management tool. Records can be searched for by means of an online search form that allows users to restrict the search on the basis of a number of different criteria, such as type of artefact, holding institute, archaeological site, and language or script. The database was updated to support Unicode in 2010, and the IDP website is now fully encoded using UTF-8 , allowing characters from most of

378-544: A | and single-storey | ɑ | forms both representing the Latin letter ⟨ A ⟩ . Variants also emerge for aesthetic reasons, to make handwriting easier, or to correct what the writer perceives to be errors in a character's form. Individual components may be replaced with visually, phonetically, or semantically similar alternatives. The boundary between character structure and style—and thus whether forms represent different characters, or are merely variants of

504-555: A bribery scandal, and much of his collection was moved to Ōtani's villa in Lüshun , China. His collection was later dispersed to various libraries, museums and collections across Japan, Korea, and China. Four German expeditions to Turpan were made in the years 1902–1903, 1904–1905, 1905–1907, and 1913–1914, the first and third expeditions led by Albert Grünwedel (1856–1935), and the second and fourth expeditions led by Albert von Le Coq (1860–1930). These expeditions brought back to Berlin

630-437: A brush onto silk, bamboo, or paper, and being printed using woodblocks and moveable type . Technologies invented since the 19th century allowing for wider use of characters include telegraph codes and typewriters , as well as input methods and text encodings on computers. Chinese characters are accepted as representing one of four independent inventions of writing in human history. In each instance, writing evolved from

756-416: A character's meaning. Examples of phono-semantic compounds include 河 ( hé ; 'river'), 湖 ( hú ; 'lake'), 流 ( liú ; 'stream'), 沖 ( chōng ; 'surge'), and 滑 ( huá ; 'slippery'). Each of these characters have three short strokes on their left-hand side: 氵 , a simplified combining form of ⽔   'WATER' . This component serves

882-408: A collection of over 1,500 archaeological artefacts collected from various Silk Road sites by Stein, as well as non-literary items from Dunhuang Cave 17, comprising more than 240 paintings on silk or paper, 200 textiles, and about 30 woodblock prints. The museum also holds over 4,000 coins collected by Stein, about three quarters of which are Chinese, and most of the rest are Islamic. Images of all of

1008-457: A digitisation project such as the IDP benefits both the institutions involved, who are often able to obtain more substantial funding than they would for an internal project, and also the scholarly community, who are given access through the digital images to fragile and often inaccessible items that might previously have been difficult or impossible to view. Catalogue records are stored in XML format on

1134-641: A few Chinese, Persian and Uyghur manuscripts, is now held by the British Library. Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) led an expedition to Kucha and Dunhuang between 1906 and 1908. In Kucha and elsewhere in Chinese Turkestan he collected hundreds of woodslips with inscriptions in Sanskrit and Tocharian. Pelliot arrived at the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang a year after Stein, where he acquired thousands of manuscripts from

1260-428: A few characters in length at their shortest, to several dozen at their longest. The Shang king would communicate with his ancestors by means of scapulimancy , inquiring about subjects such as the royal family, military success, and the weather. Inscriptions were made in the divination material itself before and after it had been cracked by exposure to heat; they generally include a record of the questions posed, as well as

1386-690: A given position in the compound. Components within a character may serve a specific function: phonetic components provide a hint for the character's pronunciation, and semantic components indicate some element of the character's meaning. Components that serve neither function may be classified as pure signs with no particular meaning, other than their presence distinguishing one character from another. A straightforward structural classification scheme may consist of three pure classes of semantographs , phonographs and signs —having only semantic, phonetic, and form components respectively, as well as classes corresponding to each combination of component types. Of

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1512-590: A huge amount of material, including murals and other artefacts, as well as about 40,000 manuscript and woodblock fragments written in more than twenty different scripts and languages. The items collected during these four expeditions are now divided between two institutions in Berlin. The IDP has digitised over 14,000 items from these collection, mostly the Chinese, Brahmi and Sanskrit fragments. The Middle Persian, Old Turkic and Mongolian fragments have been digitised as part of

1638-558: A language. Specifically, characters represent the smallest units of meaning in a language, which are referred to as morphemes . Morphemes in Chinese—and therefore the characters used to write them—are nearly always a single syllable in length. In some special cases, characters may denote non-morphemic syllables as well; due to this, written Chinese is often characterized as morphosyllabic . Logographs may be contrasted with letters in an alphabet , which generally represent phonemes ,

1764-580: A large number of manuscripts that he acquired from the 'Library Cave' (Cave 17) of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang during his second expedition. Some of the material that he collected, including murals, paintings, artefacts and manuscripts, was sent to India as his first three expeditions had been sponsored by the Indian government. Most of this material is now held at the National Museum of India in New Delhi , but

1890-406: A line, and later evolved into their present forms with less potential for graphical ambiguity in context. More complex indicatives include 凸 ('convex'), 凹 ('concave'), and 平 ('flat and level'). Compound ideographs ( 会意 ; 會意 ; huìyì )—also called logical aggregates , associative idea characters , or syssemantographs —combine other characters to convey

2016-542: A mature form, also called 八分 ( bāfēn ). Bamboo slips discovered during the late 20th century point to this maturation being completed during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han ( r.  141–87 BCE ). This process, called libian ( 隶变 ; 隸變 ), involved character forms being mutated and simplified, with many components being consolidated, substituted, or omitted. In turn, the components themselves were regularized to use fewer, straighter, and more well-defined strokes. The resulting clerical forms largely lacked any of

2142-419: A model first popularized in the 2nd-century Shuowen Jiezi dictionary. More recent models have analysed the methods used to create characters, how characters are structured, and how they function in a given writing system. Most characters can be analysed structurally as compounds made of smaller components ( 部件 ; bùjiàn ), which are often independent characters in their own right, adjusted to occupy

2268-685: A new, synthetic meaning. A canonical example is 明 ('bright'), interpreted as the juxtaposition of the two brightest objects in the sky: ⽇   'SUN' and ⽉   'MOON' , together expressing their shared quality of brightness. Other examples include 休 ('rest'), composed of pictographs ⼈   'MAN' and ⽊   'TREE' , and 好 ('good'), composed of ⼥   'WOMAN' and ⼦   'CHILD' . Many traditional examples of compound ideographs are now believed to have actually originated as phono-semantic compounds, made obscure by subsequent changes in pronunciation. For example,

2394-719: A semantic component. Pictographs have often been extended from their original meanings to take on additional layers of metaphor and synecdoche , which sometimes displace the character's original sense. When this process results in excessive ambiguity between distinct senses written with the same character, it is usually resolved by new compounds being derived to represent particular senses. Indicatives ( 指事 ; zhǐshì ), also called simple ideographs or self-explanatory characters , are visual representations of abstract concepts that lack any tangible form. Examples include 上 ('up') and 下 ('down')—these characters were originally written as dots placed above and below

2520-563: A semantic function in each example, indicating the character has some meaning related to water. The remainder of each character is its phonetic component: 湖 ( hú ) is pronounced identically to 胡 ( hú ) in Standard Chinese, 河 ( hé ) is pronounced similarly to 可 ( kě ), and 沖 ( chōng ) is pronounced similarly to 中 ( zhōng ). The phonetic components of most compounds may only provide an approximate pronunciation, even before subsequent sound shifts in

2646-665: A small amount of the material from his first expedition is held at the Indian Museum in Calcutta , and at Lahore Museum in Pakistan. The rest of the material collected by Stein was taken to England, and is now shared between the British Library, British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The British Library holds over 45,000 items collected by Stein, mostly comprising manuscripts, printed texts, and inscribed pieces of wood, written in

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2772-429: A stylus in clay moulds used to cast ritual bronzes . Characters have also been incised into stone, or written in ink onto slips of silk, wood, and bamboo. The invention of paper for use as a writing medium occurred during the 1st century CE, and is traditionally credited to Cai Lun ( d.  121 CE ). There are numerous styles, or scripts ( 书 ; 書 ; shū ) in which characters can be written, including

2898-540: A system using two distinct types of ideographs . Ideographs could either be pictographs visually depicting objects or concepts, or fixed signs representing concepts only by shared convention. These systems are classified as proto-writing , because the techniques they used were insufficient to carry the meaning of spoken language by themselves. Various innovations were required for Chinese characters to emerge from proto-writing. Firstly, pictographs became distinct from simple pictures in use and appearance: for example,

3024-540: A time and without indicating any greater context. Qiu concludes, "We simply possess no basis for saying that they were already being used to record language." A historical connection with the symbols used by the late Neolithic Dawenkou culture ( c.  4300  – c.  2600 BCE ) in Shandong has been deemed possible by palaeographers, with Qiu concluding that they "cannot be definitively treated as primitive writing, nevertheless they are symbols which resemble most

3150-811: A transitional form between clerical and regular script which remained in use through the Three Kingdoms period (220–280 CE) and beyond. Cursive script ( 草书 ; 草書 ; cǎoshū ) was in use as early as 24 BCE, synthesizing elements of the vulgar writing that had originated in Qin with flowing cursive brushwork. By the Jin dynasty (266–420), the Han cursive style became known as 章草 ( zhāngcǎo ; 'orderly cursive'), sometimes known in English as 'clerical cursive', 'ancient cursive', or 'draft cursive'. Some attribute this name to

3276-510: A village near Anyang in Henan —discovered to be the site of Yin , the final Shang capital—which was excavated by a team led by Li Ji (1896–1979) from the Academia Sinica between 1928 and 1937. To date, over 150 000 oracle bone fragments have been found. Oracle bone inscriptions recorded divinations undertaken to communicate with the spirits of royal ancestors. The inscriptions range from

3402-481: A well-developed writing system, which suggests an initial emergence predating the late 2nd millennium BCE. Although written Chinese is first attested in official divinations, it is widely believed that writing was also used for other purposes during the Shang, but that the media used in other contexts—likely bamboo and wooden slips —were less durable than bronzes or oracle bones, and have not been preserved. As early as

3528-461: A wide variety of scripts and languages, including Chinese , Tibetan , Sanskrit , Tangut , Khotanese , Tocharian , Sogdian , Uyghur , Turkic and Mongolian : The British Library Stein Collection also includes some artefacts such as textile fragments, sutra wrappers and paste brushes, as well as over 10,000 photographs, negatives and lantern slides taken by Stein. The British Museum holds

3654-414: A word is used to indicate a different word with a similar pronunciation, depending on context. This allowed for words that lacked a plausible pictographic representation to be written down for the first time. This technique preempted more sophisticated methods of character creation that would further expand the lexicon. The process whereby writing emerged from proto-writing took place over a long period; when

3780-601: Is a collection of Central Asian manuscripts collected by the Indian government. 22 consignments were sent to Hoernle in Calcutta between 1895 and 1899, and these were sent to the British Museum in 1902. A further ten consignments were sent to Hoernle in London after his retirement in 1899. The Hoernle Collection, which comprises over 2,000 Sanskrit manuscripts, 1,200 Tocharian manuscripts, and about 250 Khotanese manuscripts, as well as

3906-474: Is given by Xu as 轉注 ( zhuǎnzhù ; 'reversed and refocused'); however, its definition is unclear, and it is generally disregarded by modern scholars. Modern scholars agree that the theory presented in the Shuowen Jiezi is problematic, failing to fully capture the nature of Chinese writing, both in the present, as well as at the time Xu was writing. Traditional Chinese lexicography as embodied in

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4032-399: Is not required, and character forms may be accentuated to evoke a variety of aesthetic effects. Traditional ideals of calligraphic beauty often tie into broader philosophical concepts native to East Asia. For example, aesthetics can be conceptualized using the framework of yin and yang , where the extremes of any number of mutually reinforcing dualities are balanced by the calligrapher—such as

4158-402: Is now written with five strokes instead of eight, and a system of five basic stroke types is commonly employed in analysis—with certain compound strokes treated as sequences of basic strokes made in a single motion. Characters are constructed according to predictable visual patterns. Some components have distinct combining forms when occupying specific positions within a character—for example,

4284-574: Is planned to open an IDP centre in Sweden, and digitise the Central Asian collections held in Swedish institutions. The IDP database includes material from a number of important collections held by participating institutions of the IDP. Aurel Stein (1862–1943) made four expeditions to Central Asia (1900–1901, 1906–1908, 1913–1916, and 1930–1931), during which he collected a vast amount of material, including

4410-457: Is regularly done with corporate brand names: for example, Coca-Cola 's Chinese name is 可口可乐 ; 可口可樂 ( Kěkǒu Kělè ; 'delicious enjoyable'). Some characters and components are pure signs , whose meaning merely derives from their having a fixed and distinct form. Basic examples of pure signs are found with the numerals beyond four, e.g. 五 ('five') and 八 ('eight'), whose forms do not give visual hints to

4536-446: The I ;Ching . According to one tradition, Chinese characters were invented during the 3rd millennium BCE by Cangjie , a scribe of the legendary Yellow Emperor . Cangjie is said to have invented symbols called 字 ( zì ) due to his frustration with the limitations of knotting, taking inspiration from his study of the tracks of animals, landscapes, and the stars in the sky. On

4662-548: The ⼑   'KNIFE' component appears as 刂 on the right side of characters, but as ⺈ at the top of characters. The order in which components are drawn within a character is fixed. The order in which the strokes of a component are drawn is also largely fixed, but may vary according to several different standards. This is summed up in practice with a few rules of thumb, including that characters are generally assembled from left to right, then from top to bottom, with "enclosing" components started before, then closed after,

4788-646: The 3500 characters that are frequently used in Standard Chinese, pure semantographs are estimated to be the rarest, accounting for about 5% of the lexicon, followed by pure signs with 18%, and semantic–form and phonetic–form compounds together accounting for 19%. The remaining 58% are phono-semantic compounds. The Chinese palaeographer Qiu Xigui ( b.  1935 ) presents three principles of character function adapted from earlier proposals by Tang Lan  [ zh ] (1901–1979) and Chen Mengjia (1911–1966), with semantographs describing all characters whose forms are wholly related to their meaning, regardless of

4914-570: The Bodleian Library at Oxford University . A collection of personal papers and photographs held at the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences have been added to the IDP database. The removal by Stein of so much cultural and archaeological material from China has caused anger in China, and there have been calls for the texts and artefacts collected by Stein from Dunhuang that are now in

5040-949: The Digital Turfan Archive hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Tocharian fragments have been digitised as part of the TITUS project of the Goethe University Frankfurt . The following are some of the notable items in the IDP database. In November 2010 the IDP was awarded the Casa Asia Award by the Spanish governmental consortium, Casa Asia , for its work in digitizing and preserving manuscripts. Chinese character Chinese characters are logographs used to write

5166-626: The Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences to "work together for the protection of the Cultural Relics of Dunhuang". The partnership is focused on the development of technology for restoration and digitization of artifacts, as well as the creation of multi-media virtual tour presentations to "allow visitors to see more of the Dunhuang art in higher detail, and help conserve

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5292-951: The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts and the Hermitage Museum . The Institute of Oriental Manuscripts holds the more than 19,000 manuscript fragments and 365 manuscript scrolls collected from Dunhuang by Oldenburg, as well as about thirty manuscripts collected by Sergey Malov during an expedition to Khotan during 1909–1910, and some 183 Uyghur manuscripts collected by N. N. Krotkov, the Russian Consul in Urumqi and Ghulja . The Hermitage Museum holds artefacts from both of Oldenburg's expeditions, including 66 Buddhist banners and banner-tops, 137 fragments of Buddhist silk paintings, 43 fragments of Buddhist paintings on paper, 24 murals, 38 pieces of textile, and eight manuscript fragments. Oldenburg's personal papers, diaries, maps and photographs relating to

5418-839: The Mellon Foundation , work started on the digitisation of manuscripts held at collections in Paris and Beijing, and in 2003 digital images of Dunhuang paintings held at the British Museum were added to the database. By 2004 the IDP database included images of some 50,000 manuscripts, paintings, artefacts, and historical photographs. IDP Centres were opened in Beijing in 2001, in St. Petersburg and Kyoto in 2004, in Berlin in 2005, in Dunhuang in 2007, in Paris in 2008, and in Seoul in 2010. The first director of

5544-753: The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) led to considerable standardization in character forms, which prefigured later script reforms during the 20th century. This print orthography , exemplified by the 1716 Kangxi Dictionary , was later dubbed the jiu zixing ('old character shapes'). Printed Chinese characters may use different typefaces , of which there are four broad classes in use: Before computers became ubiquitous, earlier electro-mechanical communications devices like telegraphs and typewriters were originally designed for use with alphabets, often by means of alphabetic text encodings like Morse code and ASCII . Adapting these technologies for use with

5670-467: The Shuowen Jiezi describes 信 ('trust') as an ideographic compound of ⼈   'MAN' and ⾔   'SPEECH' , but modern analyses instead identify it as a phono-semantic compound—though with disagreement as to which component is phonetic. Peter A. Boodberg and William G. Boltz go so far as to deny that any compound ideographs were devised in antiquity, maintaining that secondary readings that are now lost are responsible for

5796-462: The Shuowen Jiezi has suggested implausible etymologies for some characters. Moreover, several categories are considered to be ill-defined: for example, it is unclear whether characters like 大 ('large') should be classified as pictographs or indicatives. However, awareness of the 'six writings' model has remained a common component of character literacy, and often serves as a tool for students memorizing characters. The broadest trend in

5922-576: The Shuowen Jiezi . For nearly two millennia, this scheme was the primary framework for character analysis used throughout the Sinosphere. Xu based most of his analysis on examples of Qin seal script that were written down several centuries before his time—these were usually the oldest specimens available to him, though he stated he was aware of the existence of even older forms. The first five categories are pictographs, indicatives, compound ideographs, phono-semantic compounds, and loangraphs. The sixth category

6048-507: The Sinosphere . In Japanese , Korean , and Vietnamese , Chinese characters are known as kanji , hanja , and chữ Hán respectively. Writing traditions also emerged for some of the other languages of China , like the sawndip script used to write the Zhuang languages of Guangxi . Each of these written vernaculars used existing characters to write the language's native vocabulary, as well as

6174-557: The Sui dynasty (581–618) required test takers to write in Literary Chinese using regular script, which contributed to the prevalence of both throughout later Chinese history. Each character of a text is written within a uniform square allotted for it. As part of the evolution from seal script into clerical script, character components became regularized as discrete series of strokes ( 笔画 ; 筆畫 ; bǐhuà ). Strokes can be considered both

6300-492: The University of Pennsylvania , has noted that there are many advantages of the IDP providing high resolution digital images of Dunhuang manuscripts online for access to all. Whereas in years gone by scholars often needed to travel long distances to access the original manuscripts, or could only access them by means of low quality reproductions, now anyone can access images from the convenience of their computer, wherever they are in

6426-470: The loanwords it borrowed from Chinese . In addition, each invented characters for local use. In written Korean and Vietnamese, Chinese characters have largely been replaced with alphabets, leaving Japanese as the only major non-Chinese language still written using them. At the most basic level, characters are composed of strokes that are written in a fixed order. Methods of writing characters have historically included being carved into stone, being inked with

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6552-589: The tombs of Astana outside the ancient city of Gaochang , taking back to Japan nine mummies and many grave goods and funerary texts. The three Ōtani expeditions produced a large collection of manuscripts (especially Buddhist sutras ), woodslips, murals, sculptures, textiles, coins, and seals. These items were originally deposited in the Nishi Honganji Monastery, and later at Ōtani's residence, Villa Niraku in Kobe , but in 1914 Ōtani resigned as abbot due to

6678-664: The ' Library Cave ' (Cave 17), as well as hundreds of manuscripts and printed texts from Caves 464 and 465. The items collected by Pelliot are held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France , and are divided into the following sub-collections: Pyotr Kozlov (1863–1935) made an expedition to the Tangut fortress city of Khara-Khoto during 1907–1909. The city had been abandoned in the late 14th century, and had been largely buried in sand for several hundred years. Kozlov unearthed thousands of manuscripts and woodblock prints, mostly written in

6804-519: The 13th century BCE in what is now Anyang , Henan, as part of divinations conducted by the Shang dynasty royal house. Character forms were originally highly pictographic in style, but evolved over time as writing spread across China. Numerous attempts have been made to reform the script, including the promotion of small seal script by the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE). Clerical script , which had matured by

6930-519: The Asiatic Museum) in St Petersburg, made two expeditions to Central Asia (1909–1910 and 1914–1915), which were to become known as the 'Russian Turkestan expeditions'. During the first expedition Oldenburg explored a number of sites around Turpan , including Shikchin , Yarkhoto and Kucha , and collected murals, paintings, terracottas, and about one hundred manuscripts, mostly fragments written in

7056-510: The Brahmi script. During his second expedition Oldenburg surveyed the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, and revisited some of the sites in Turpan that he had visited during his first expedition. He found a large number of artefacts and manuscript fragments (nearly 20,000 fragments, some of them tiny) at Dunhuang, and also purchased about 300 scrolls from local people. Oldenburg's collections are shared between

7182-536: The British Library). Susan Whitfield was appointed to edit the newsletter. The first meeting of the IDP steering group was held on 11 April 1994, when the name International Dunhuang Project was adopted. The first newsletter was published on 16 May 1994. The IDP was initially founded with 3-year grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation , and had only one member of staff. The following year

7308-465: The British Museum and British Library to be repatriated to China. Although the Chinese government has not formally requested their return, in 2003 an official at the Chinese Embassy in London stated that "[l]ittle by little, we will expect to see the return of items taken from Dunhuang — they should go back to their original place". The Hoernle Collection, named after Augustus Hoernle (1841–1918),

7434-500: The Buddhist terminology introduced to China in antiquity, as well as contemporary non-Chinese words and names. For example, each character in the name 加拿大 ( Jiānádà ; 'Canada') is often used as a loangraph for its respective syllable. However, the barrier between a character's pronunciation and meaning is never total: when transcribing into Chinese, loangraphs are often chosen deliberately as to create certain connotations. This

7560-467: The Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture . Chinese characters have a documented history spanning over three millennia, representing one of the four independent inventions of writing accepted by scholars; of these, they comprise the only writing system continuously used since its invention. Over time, the function, style, and means of writing characters have evolved greatly. Unlike letters in alphabets that reflect

7686-509: The IDP database are made from (paper, textile, and wood), the IDP has supported a number of conservation projects (such as the analysis of paper and textile fibres), and has organised regular conferences on conservation issues at venues across the world. In addition to developing techniques for the conservation and preservation of documents and artefacts, the IDP hopes to foster good conservation practices and common standards amongst participating institutes, ensuring that artefacts are stored under

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7812-619: The IDP database was designed and implemented, and in 1996 a grant from the British Academy allowed the hiring of a part-time research assistant to input catalogue data into the database. In 1997, with funding of £148,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund , the IDP started to digitise manuscripts held at the British Library, and in 1998 the database went online with an initial 20,000 catalogue entries and about 1,000 images of digitised manuscripts. In 2001, with substantial support from

7938-510: The IDP organised a major exhibition entitled "The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith", which was held at the British Library. This was the most successful exhibition ever held at the British Library, and attracted 155,000 visitors. The foundations for the project were laid in October 1993 when an international conference on Dunhuang Cave 17 was held at Sussex University . This conference brought together curators and conservators from across

8064-547: The IDP was Susan Whitfield, who retired from the position in July 2017. The following institutions are participating in the project. The International Dunhuang Project has centres in seven countries. The London centre, based at the British Library, acts as the directorate for the IDP, and is responsible for maintaining the IDP database and the main English-language website. The other centres maintain local-language versions of

8190-436: The IDP website, currently Chinese , French , German , Japanese , Korea , and Russian . Each centre is responsible for the conservation, cataloguing, and digitisation of manuscripts in its country. The staff at these centres help train participating institutions in the use of digitisation equipment and computer software, as well as providing training in conservation and research techniques. In addition to these centres, it

8316-599: The Kozlov Collection includes about 660 manuscripts and printed books in Chinese, mostly Buddhist texts. The site of Khara-Khoto was excavated by Aurel Stein in 1917, during his third expedition, and several thousand Tangut manuscript fragments recovered by Stein are in the Stein Collection of the British Library. Sergey Oldenburg (1863–1934), who was the first director of the Institute of Oriental Studies (formerly

8442-641: The Ministry of Education, but soon after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911 the manuscripts were deposited in the newly founded Metropolitan Library (later to become the National Library of China ). The 8,697 manuscripts that Fu Baoshu brought back from Dunhuang form the core of the Dunhuang collection in the National Library of China, but they have since been augmented by various purchases and donations over

8568-554: The Mogao Caves. In 1950 the institute was renamed the Research Institute on Cultural Relics of Dunhuang. It was subsequently given its current name in 1984. In 1979 the Mogao Caves were opened to the public, and received 27,000 visitors that year. By 2014, the Dunhuang Research Academy was handling up to 1 million visitors yearly. "Tourist hordes" are reported to be a potential threat to conservation efforts. Since

8694-457: The Qin small seal script was standardized for use throughout the entire country under the direction of Chancellor Li Si ( c.  280  – 208 BCE). It was traditionally believed that Qin scribes only used small seal script, and the later clerical script was a sudden invention during the early Han. However, more than one script was used by Qin scribes: a rectilinear vulgar style had also been in use in Qin for centuries prior to

8820-410: The Shang royal house. Contemporaneous inscriptions in a related but distinct style were also made on ritual bronze vessels. This oracle bone script ( 甲骨文 ; jiǎgǔwén ) was first documented in 1899, after specimens were discovered being sold as "dragon bones" for medicinal purposes, with the symbols carved into them identified as early character forms. By 1928, the source of the bones had been traced to

8946-586: The Shang, the oracle bone script existed as a simplified form alongside another that was used in bamboo books, in addition to elaborate pictorial forms often used in clan emblems. These other forms have been preserved in what is called bronze script ( 金文 ; jīnwén ), where inscriptions were made using a stylus in a clay mould, which was then used to cast ritual bronzes . These differences in technique generally resulted in character forms that were less angular in appearance than their oracle bone script counterparts. Study of these bronze inscriptions has revealed that

9072-620: The Sinosphere during the 20th century as a result of Western influence. Many publications outside mainland China continue to use the traditional vertical writing direction. Western influence also resulted in the generalized use of punctuation being widely adopted in print during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, the context of a passage was considered adequate to guide readers; this was enabled by characters being easier than alphabets to read when written scriptio continua , due to their more discretized shapes. The earliest attested Chinese characters were carved into bone, or marked using

9198-414: The ancient and modern scripts found in the manuscripts to be added to the catalogue records. Each online catalogue record incorporates a physical description of the item, catalogue records from existing print sources, translations if available, and bibliographic references. The IDP also encourages scholarly users to submit their own catalogue entries and research results on individual items for addition to

9324-611: The ancient pictographic script discovered thus far in China... They undoubtedly can be viewed as the forerunners of primitive writing." The oldest attested Chinese writing comprises a body of inscriptions produced during the Late Shang period ( c.  1250  – 1050 BCE), with the very earliest examples from the reign of Wu Ding dated between 1250 and 1200 BCE. Many of these inscriptions were made on oracle bones —usually either ox scapulae or turtle plastrons—and recorded official divinations carried out by

9450-436: The answers as interpreted in the cracks. A minority of bones feature characters that were inked with a brush before their strokes were incised; the evidence of this also shows that the conventional stroke orders used by later calligraphers had already been established for many characters by this point. Oracle bone script is the direct ancestor of later forms of written Chinese. The oldest known inscriptions already represent

9576-419: The apparent absence of phonetic indicators, but their arguments have been rejected by other scholars. Phono-semantic compounds ( 形声 ; 形聲 ; xíngshēng ) are composed of at least one semantic component and one phonetic component. They may be formed by one of several methods, often by adding a phonetic component to disambiguate a loangraph, or by adding a semantic component to represent a specific extension of

9702-541: The basic unit of handwriting, as well as the writing system's basic unit of graphemic organization. In clerical and regular script, individual strokes traditionally belong to one of eight categories according to their technique and graphemic function. In what is known as the Eight Principles of Yong , calligraphers practice their technique using the character 永 ( yǒng ; 'eternity'), which can be written with one stroke of each type. In ordinary writing, 永

9828-492: The calligrapher Zhong Yao ( c.  151  – 230), who was living in the state of Cao Wei (220–266); he is often called the "father of regular script". The earliest surviving writing in regular script comprises copies of Zhong Yao's work, including at least one copy by Wang Xizhi. Characteristics of regular script include the 'pause' ( 頓 ; dùn ) technique used to end horizontal strokes, as well as heavy tails on diagonal strokes made going down and to

9954-639: The character as 明 . However, the increased usage of 朙 was followed by the proliferation of a third variant: 眀 , with ⽬   'EYE' on the left—likely derived as a contraction of 朙 . Ultimately, 明 became the character's standard form. From the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century, texts were generally laid out vertically—with characters written from top to bottom in columns, arranged from right to left. Word boundaries are generally not indicated with spaces . A horizontal writing direction—with characters written from left to right in rows, arranged from top to bottom—only became predominant in

10080-404: The collections material from Dunhuang and other Eastern Silk Road sites held by participating institutions. Digitised images of the items in the IDP database are made available to the public on the IDP website. The digital images are intended to be at least as legible as the original manuscripts, and allow scholars to access the material from anywhere in the world without causing any more damage to

10206-403: The components they enclose. For example, 永 is drawn in the following order: Over a character's history, variant character forms ( 异体字 ; 異體字 ; yìtǐzì ) emerge via several processes. Variant forms have distinct structures, but represent the same morpheme; as such, they can be considered instances of the same underlying character. This is comparable to visually distinct double-storey |

10332-400: The database. To facilitate the locating of items on the IDP database the project has also digitised a large number of catalogues and bibliographic sources, and made them available online, with links from the original catalogue entries to the corresponding online catalogue entry in the IDP database. In order to better understand how to conserve the fragile materials that most of the items in

10458-610: The day that these first characters were created, grain rained down from the sky; that night, the people heard the wailing of ghosts and demons, lamenting that humans could no longer be cheated. Collections of graphs and pictures have been discovered at the sites of several Neolithic settlements throughout the Yellow River valley, including Jiahu ( c.  6500 BCE ), Dadiwan and Damaidi (6th millennium BCE), and Banpo (5th millennium BCE). Symbols at each site were inscribed or drawn onto artefacts, appearing one at

10584-484: The dead Tangut language , which had been preserved beneath the sands of Khara-Khoto. The collection of Tangut texts that Kozlov brought back from Khara-Khoto were originally housed in the museum of Alexander III of Russia in St Petersburg, but were transferred to the Asiatic Museum in 1911. They are now held at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St Petersburg. In addition to the several thousand Tangut texts,

10710-417: The distinct process of semantic extension, where a word acquires additional senses, which often remain written with the same character. As both processes often result in a single character form being used to write several distinct meanings, loangraphs are often misidentified as being the result of semantic extension, and vice versa. Loangraphs are also used to write words borrowed from other languages, such as

10836-519: The distinct units of sound used by speakers of a language. Despite their origins in picture-writing, Chinese characters are no longer ideographs capable of representing ideas directly; their comprehension relies on the reader's knowledge of the particular language being written. The areas where Chinese characters were historically used—sometimes collectively termed the Sinosphere —have a long tradition of lexicography attempting to explain and refine their use; for most of history, analysis revolved around

10962-439: The duality between strokes made quickly or slowly, between applying ink heavily or lightly, between characters written with symmetrical or asymmetrical forms, and between characters representing concrete or abstract concepts. Woodblock printing was invented in China between the 6th and 9th centuries, followed by the invention of moveable type by Bi Sheng (972–1051) during the 11th century. The increasing use of print during

11088-822: The early Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), abstracted the forms of characters—obscuring their pictographic origins in favour of making them easier to write. Following the Han, regular script emerged as the result of cursive influence on clerical script, and has been the primary style used for characters since. Informed by a long tradition of lexicography , states using Chinese characters have standardized their forms: broadly, simplified characters are used to write Chinese in mainland China , Singapore , and Malaysia , while traditional characters are used in Taiwan , Hong Kong , and Macau . After being introduced in order to write Literary Chinese , characters were often adapted to write local languages spoken throughout

11214-504: The evolution of Chinese characters over their history has been simplification, both in graphical shape ( 字形 ; zìxíng ), the "external appearances of individual graphs", and in graphical form ( 字体 ; 字體 ; zìtǐ ), "overall changes in the distinguishing features of graphic[al] shape and calligraphic style, [...] in most cases refer[ring] to rather obvious and rather substantial changes". The traditional notion of an orderly procession of script styles, each suddenly appearing and displacing

11340-679: The expedition divided into two groups, Ōtani and two others travelling to Srinagar and India, before returning to Japan; and the two others exploring the region of Khotan and Turpan , and excavating the previously unexplored site of Kucha , before returning to Japan in 1904. Ōtani became abbot of the Nishi Honganji Monastery in Kyoto on his father's death in 1903, and so was unable to personally take part in any further expeditions, but he financed further expeditions to Chinese Turkestan in 1908–1909 and 1910–1914. The final expedition excavated

11466-406: The extent that the original objects represented are no longer obvious. This proto-writing system was limited to representing a relatively narrow range of ideas with a comparatively small library of symbols. This compelled innovations that allowed for symbols to directly encode spoken language. In each historical case, this was accomplished by some form of the rebus technique, where the symbol for

11592-554: The fact that the style was considered more orderly than a later form referred to as 今草 ( jīncǎo ; 'modern cursive'), which had first emerged during the Jin and was influenced by semi-cursive and regular script. This later form was exemplified by the work of figures like Wang Xizhi (303–361), who is often regarded as the most important calligrapher in Chinese history. An early form of semi-cursive script ( 行书 ; 行書 ; xíngshū ; 'running script') can be identified during

11718-460: The forms of pictographs have been simplified in order to make them easier to write. As a result, modern readers generally cannot deduce what many pictographs were originally meant to resemble; without knowing the context of their origin in picture-writing, they may be interpreted instead as pure signs. However, if a pictograph's use in compounds still reflects its original meaning, as with 日 in 晴 ('clear sky'), it can still be analysed as

11844-487: The fragile items themselves. The central core of the project is the online database of catalogue records and images. This is intended to serve three main purposes: In 2002, Lynne Brindley , Chief Executive Officer of the British Library, put forward the International Dunhuang Project as a good example of the sort of complex, collaborative, and international digitisation projects that the British Library

11970-637: The hidden Library Cave, which contained the Dunhuang manuscripts , attracted the attention of many Western archaeologists and explorers. In 1907 and 1908, British and French expeditions led by Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot , respectively, persuaded Wang to allow them to purchase and remove tens of thousands of items which were shipped to Europe and India. For the next forty years, the site suffered extensive damage due to further removal of items, as well as Russian (1921) and Kuomintang (1939) military activities. In 1941, Sichuanese painter Chang Dai-chien arrived at

12096-649: The historical forms like seal script and clerical script. Most styles used throughout the Sinosphere originated within China, though they may display regional variation. Styles that have been created outside of China tend to remain localized in their use: these include the Japanese edomoji and Vietnamese lệnh thư scripts. Calligraphy was traditionally one of the four arts to be mastered by Chinese scholars, considered to be an artful means of expressing thoughts and teachings. Chinese calligraphy typically makes use of an ink brush to write characters. Strict regularity

12222-401: The initial development of Chinese writing, and has remained common throughout its subsequent history. Some loangraphs ( 假借 ; jiǎjiè ; 'borrowing') are introduced to represent words previously lacking another written form—this is often the case with abstract grammatical particles such as 之 and 其 . The process of characters being borrowed as loangraphs should not be conflated with

12348-626: The late 1980s, the Dunhuang Research Academy has engaged in a long-term partnership with the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles. The partnership has focused on conservation and monitoring practices, including the development of the China Principles , a set of national conservation and management guidelines. As of June 2015, there was a plan to transform the Mogao Caves into a tourist attraction and theme park. The plan, which

12474-488: The late Han, with its development stemming from a cursive form of neo-clerical script. Liu Desheng ( 劉德升 ; c.  147  – 188 CE) is traditionally recognized as the inventor of the semi-cursive style, though accreditations of this kind often indicate a given style's early masters, rather than its earliest practitioners. Later analysis has suggested popular origins for semi-cursive, as opposed to it being an invention of Liu. It can be characterized partly as

12600-499: The mainstream script underwent slow, gradual evolution during the late Shang, which continued during the Zhou dynasty ( c.  1046  – 256 BCE) until assuming the form now known as small seal script ( 小篆 ; xiǎozhuàn ) within the Zhou state of Qin . Other scripts in use during the late Zhou include the bird-worm seal script ( 鸟虫书 ; 鳥蟲書 ; niǎochóngshū ), as well as

12726-548: The method by which the meaning was originally depicted, phonographs that include a phonetic component, and loangraphs encompassing existing characters that have been borrowed to write other words. Qiu also acknowledges the existence of character classes that fall outside of these principles, such as pure signs. Most of the oldest characters are pictographs ( 象形 ; xiàngxíng ), representational pictures of physical objects. Examples include 日 ('Sun'), 月 ('Moon'), and 木 ('tree'). Over time,

12852-549: The most suitable conditions, and are handled as little as possible. The IDP centre at the British Library set up a digitisation studio in 2001, and now similar studios have been established at IDP centres across Europe and Asia. In addition to making high-quality digital images of items, infrared photography is used for manuscripts with faded ink or which are otherwise hard to read in normal light. The IDP also engages in various educational activities, organising exhibitions, workshops, and educational events for schools. In 2004

12978-507: The one previous, has been disproven by later scholarship and archaeological work. Instead, scripts evolved gradually, with several coexisting in a given area. Several of the Chinese classics indicate that knotted cords were used to keep records prior to the invention of writing. Works that reference the practice include chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching and the " Xici  II" commentary to

13104-474: The paintings and some of the artefacts are now included in the IDP database, and the coins may be added at a future date. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a collection of more than 650 textiles collected by Stein from various Silk Road sites, all of which have now been added to the IDP database. Many of Stein's personal papers and diaries are held at the Western Manuscript Department of

13230-405: The phonetic series of characters using 余 ( yú ; jyu4 ), a literary first-person pronoun. The Old Chinese pronunciations of these characters were similar, but the phonetic component no longer serves as a useful hint for their pronunciation due to subsequent sound shifts. The phenomenon of existing characters being adapted to write other words with similar pronunciations was necessary in

13356-428: The pictograph 大 , meaning 'large', was originally a picture of a large man, but one would need to be aware of its specific meaning in order to interpret the sequence 大鹿 as signifying 'large deer', rather than being a picture of a large man and a deer next to one another. Due to this process of abstraction, as well as to make characters easier to write, pictographs gradually became more simplified and regularized—often to

13482-489: The pictorial qualities that remained in seal script. Around the midpoint of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), a simplified and easier form of clerical script appeared, which Qiu terms 'neo-clerical' ( 新隶体 ; 新隸體 ; xīnlìtǐ ). By the end of the Han, this had become the dominant script used by scribes, though clerical script remained in use for formal works, such as engraved stelae . Qiu describes neo-clerical as

13608-529: The purely pictorial use of symbols disappeared, leaving only those representing spoken words, the process was complete. Chinese characters have been used in several different writing systems throughout history. The concept of a writing system includes both the written symbols themselves, called graphemes —which may include characters, numerals, or punctuation—as well as the rules by which they are used to record language. Chinese characters are logographs , which are graphemes that represent units of meaning in

13734-525: The quantities they represent. The Shuowen Jiezi is a character dictionary authored c.  100 CE by the scholar Xu Shen ( c.  58  – c.  148 CE ). In its postface, Xu analyses what he sees as all the methods by which characters are created. Later authors iterated upon Xu's analysis, developing a categorization scheme known as the 'six writings' ( 六书 ; 六書 ; liùshū ), which identifies every character with one of six categories that had previously been mentioned in

13860-423: The regional forms used in non-Qin states. Examples of these styles were preserved as variants in the Shuowen Jiezi . Historically, Zhou forms were collectively referred to as large seal script ( 大篆 ; dàzhuàn ), a term which has fallen out of favour due to its lack of precision. Following Qin's conquest of the other Chinese states that culminated in the founding of the imperial Qin dynasty in 221 BCE,

13986-451: The renowned scholar and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) persuaded the Ministry of Education to recover the 8,000 or so remaining manuscripts. In 1910 Fu Baoshu 傅寶書 was dispatched to Dunhuang to bring the remaining manuscripts back to Beijing, although he left the Tibetan manuscripts behind. Some of the manuscripts were stolen by the minister Li Shengduo 李盛鐸 shortly after they had arrived at

14112-472: The result of clerical forms being written more quickly, without formal rules of technique or composition: what would be discrete strokes in clerical script frequently flow together instead. The semi-cursive style is commonly adopted in contemporary handwriting. Regular script ( 楷书 ; 楷書 ; kǎishū ), based on clerical and semi-cursive forms, is the predominant form in which characters are written and printed. Its innovations have traditionally been credited to

14238-534: The right. It developed further during the Eastern Jin (317–420) in the hands of Wang Xizhi and his son Wang Xianzhi (344–386). However, most Jin-era writers continued to use neo-clerical and semi-cursive styles in their daily writing. It was not until the Northern and Southern period (420–589) that regular script became the predominant form. The system of imperial examinations for the civil service established during

14364-426: The same character—is often non-trivial or unclear. For example, prior to the Qin dynasty the character meaning 'bright' was written as either 明 or 朙 —with either ⽇   'SUN' or 囧 'WINDOW' on the left, and ⽉   'MOON' on the right. As part of the Qin programme to standardize small seal script across China, the 朙 form was promoted. Some scribes ignored this, and continued to write

14490-466: The site and began work repairing and copying the murals. He exhibited and published his copies in 1943, which elevated the Mogao artworks to national prominence. Subsequently, historian Xiang Da persuaded Yu Youren , a prominent Kuomintang member and Nationalist government official, to propose the establishment of the Dunhuang Research Academy to prevent further destruction to the artifacts and artwork within

14616-428: The sounds of speech, Chinese characters generally represent morphemes , the units of meaning in a language. Writing a language's entire vocabulary requires thousands of different characters. Characters are created according to several different principles, where aspects of both shape and pronunciation may be used to indicate the character's meaning. The first attested characters are oracle bone inscriptions made during

14742-414: The spoken language. Some characters may only have the same initial or final sound of a syllable in common with phonetic components. A phonetic series comprises all the characters created using the same phonetic component, which may have diverged significantly in their pronunciations over time. For example, 茶 ( chá ; caa4 ; 'tea') and 途 ( tú ; tou4 ; 'route') are part of

14868-571: The treasures inside the caves." International Dunhuang Project The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is an international collaborative effort to conserve, catalogue and digitise manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from the Mogao caves at the Western Chinese city of Dunhuang and various other archaeological sites at the eastern end of the Silk Road . The project

14994-454: The two expeditions are also held at the Hermitage. During 1907–1908 Stein and Pelliot had visited Dunhuang, and had both purchased large quantities of manuscripts from Wang Yuanlu (c.1849–1931), a Taoist priest and self-proclaimed guardian of the Mogao Caves. News of the discovery of these manuscripts was brought to the attention of Chinese scholars when Pelliot visited Beijing in 1909, and

15120-579: The wars of unification. The popularity of this form grew as writing became more widespread. By the Warring States period ( c.  475  – 221 BCE), an immature form of clerical script ( 隶书 ; 隸書 ; lìshū ) had emerged based on the vulgar form developed within Qin, often called "early clerical" or "proto-clerical". The proto-clerical script evolved gradually; by the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), it had arrived at

15246-616: The world, including the British Library, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences , Bibliothèque nationale de France , and the National Library of China , and in its aftermath an IDP Steering Group was set up by Graham Shaw (Deputy Director of the Oriental & India Office Collection at the British Library), Frances Wood (Head of the Chinese Section at the British Library), and Peter Lawson (Conservator at

15372-453: The world. This not only makes research into these manuscripts easier, but helps in their conservation as there is far less need for them to be handled in person. Moreover, the high quality images provided by the IDP often show up details that would be difficult to see with the human eye. The main activities of the IDP are the conserving, cataloguing, and digitising of manuscripts, woodblock prints, paintings, photographs and other artefacts in

15498-551: The years, so that the library collection now amounts to some 16,000 items, including 4,000 small manuscript fragments. Ōtani Kōzui (1876–1948) was a hereditary Buddhist abbot from Kyoto , Japan, but he had studied in London, and after meeting the explorers Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin (1865–1952) he decided to explore Central Asia himself from a Buddhist perspective. In 1902 he left England to return to Japan overland via St Petersburg, and together with four other returning Japanese students he made his way to Kashgar . From Kashgar

15624-489: Was drafted by commercial tourism development company Boya Strategy Consultation Group at the request of Gansu provincial officials, has been criticized and opposed by Fan Jinshi , longtime director of the Dunhuang Research Academy, and He Shuzhong of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center . On September 13, 2016, the Dunhuang Research Academy signed a memorandum of understanding with

15750-614: Was established by the British Library in 1994, and now includes twenty-two institutions in twelve countries. As of 18 February 2021 the online IDP database comprised 143,290 catalogue entries and 538,821 images. Most of the manuscripts in the IDP database are texts written in Chinese , but more than fifteen different scripts and languages are represented, including Brahmi , Kharosthi , Khotanese , Sanskrit , Tangut , Tibetan , Tocharian and Old Uyghur . Victor H. Mair , Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at

15876-439: Was increasingly engaged in. She explained that none of the individual institutions participating in the project had the resources or facilities to allow scholars full access to all of the manuscripts in their collections, but by joining together and sharing knowledge and resources the institutions would be able to offer access to the combined collections of all the institutions by means of high-quality digital images. She noted that

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