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46-455: The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and undocumented contents of the caves were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers Stein and Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took these treasures from China to Europe. In addition to

92-617: A cache of documents hidden by Wang from the authorities was later found in the 1940s. Those purchased by Western scholars are now kept in institutions all over the world, such as the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France . All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project , and can be freely accessed online. “The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote

138-531: A cave, the so-called Library Cave (Cave 17), which had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century. The documents in the cave were discovered by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu , who was interested in restoring the Mogao Caves, on 25 June 1900. In the next few years, Wang took some manuscripts to show to various officials who expressed varying level of interest, but in 1904 Wang re-sealed the cave following an order by

184-562: A distinction that Chinese lacked. There is no certainty that the distinction was vowel length and so other researchers have remained skeptical. Miyake reconstructs the vowels differently. In his reconstruction, the 95 vowels of Tangut formed from a six-vowel system in Pre-Tangut because of preinitial loss. (The two vowels in parentheses appeared only in loanwords from Chinese, and many of the vowels in class III were in complementary distribution with their equivalents in class IV.) The classes here

230-486: A height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet. The area left clear within the room was just sufficient for two people to stand in. Stein had the first pick and he was able to collect around 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments for which he paid £130, although these include many duplicate copies of the Diamond and Lotus Sutras . Pelliot took almost 10,000 documents for

276-455: A largely random selection of the works. Later, Paul Pelliot would purchase what is considered the most valuable among them. Because of his involvement in the discovery and sale of the Dunhuang manuscripts to Westerners for a fraction of their value ( £ 220 in 1907), Wang is both "revered and reviled." Tangut language Tangut (Tangut: 𗼇𗟲 ; Chinese : 西夏語 ; pinyin : Xī Xiàyǔ ; lit. 'Western Xia language')

322-422: A type of palimpsest whereby papers were reused and Buddhist texts were written on the opposite side of the paper . Hundreds more of the manuscripts were sold by Wang to Ōtani Kōzui and Sergey Oldenburg . In addition to the manuscripts that he acquired from Wang, Pelliot also uncovered a large number of manuscripts and printed texts from Caves 464 and 465 (Pelliot's Caves 181 and 182) in the northern section of

368-689: Is an extinct language in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Tangut was one of the official languages of the Western Xia dynasty , founded by the Tangut people in northwestern China. The Western Xia was annihilated by the Mongol Empire in 1227. The Tangut language has its own script, the Tangut script . The latest known text written in the Tangut language, the Tangut dharani pillars , dates to 1502, suggesting that

414-669: Is growing a school of Tangut studies in China. Leading scholars include Shi Jinbo ( 史金波 ), Li Fanwen, Nie Hongyin ( 聶鴻音 ), Bai Bin ( 白濱 ) in mainland China, and Gong Hwang-cherng and Lin Ying-chin ( 林英津 ) in Taiwan. In other countries, leading scholars in the field include Yevgeny Kychanov and his student K. J. Solonin in Russia, Nishida Tatsuo and Shintarō Arakawa ( 荒川慎太郎 ) in Japan, and Ruth W. Dunnell in

460-494: The Pearl in the Palm , a Tangut–Chinese bilingual glossary, permitted Ivanov (1909) and Laufer (1916) to propose initial reconstructions and to undertake the comparative study of Tangut. This glossary in effect indicates the pronunciation of each Tangut character with one or several Chinese characters, and inversely each Chinese character with one or more Tangut characters. The second source is

506-632: The Dunhuang Caves"), a pioneering work about the Dunhuang manuscripts. The variety of languages and scripts found among the Dunhuang manuscripts is a result of the multicultural nature of the region in the first millennium AD. The largest proportion of the manuscripts are written in Chinese, both Classical and, to a lesser extent, vernacular Chinese . Most manuscripts, including Buddhist texts, are written in Kaishu or 'regular script', while others are written in

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552-461: The " Library Cave ". There, he found a yet-undiscovered cache of thousands of ancient manuscripts, many of which relate to early Chinese Buddhism . He first spoke of the manuscripts to the local officials in an attempt to gain funding for their conservation. The officials ordered the reseal of the cave, in preparation for transportation, preservation and study. He would also later sell numerous manuscripts to archaeologist Aurel Stein , who took

598-567: The British sinologist Arthur Waley . “I think the best way to understand [the feelings of the Chinese] on the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking. [...] Pelliot did, of course, after his return from Tun-huang, get in touch with Chinese scholars; but he had inherited so much of

644-643: The Buddhist texts a number of unique compilations, not known either in Chinese or in Tibetan versions, were recently discovered. Furthermore, the Buddhist canon, the Chinese classics , and a great number of indigenous texts written in Tangut have been preserved. These other major Tangut collections, though much smaller, belong to the British Library , the French National Library (' Bibliothèque nationale de France '),

690-633: The Chan (or Zen ) texts, which have revolutionized the history of Chan Buddhism. Among the Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts, the texts of early Tibetan tantric Buddhism, including Mahayoga and Atiyoga or Dzogchen have been the subject of many studies. 40°02′14″N 94°48′15″E  /  40.03722°N 94.80417°E  / 40.03722; 94.80417 Wang Yuanlu Wang Yuanlu ( simplified Chinese : 王圆箓 ; traditional Chinese : 王圓籙 ; pinyin : Wáng Yuánlù ; c. 1849 – 1931)

736-489: The Chinese lexicographic tradition. Although these dictionaries may differ on small details (e.g. the Tongyin categorizes the characters according to syllable initial and rime without taking any account of tone), they all adopt the same system of 105 rimes. A certain number of rimes are in complementary distribution with respect to the place of articulation of the initials, e.g. rimes 10 and 11 or rimes 36 and 37, which shows that

782-883: The Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved a large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), several hundred years after the Library Cave was sealed, and are written in various languages, including Tibetan, Chinese, and Old Uyghur . The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history, medicine and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist , but other religions and philosophy including Daoism , Confucianism , Nestorian Christianity , Judaism , and Manichaeism , are also represented. The majority of

828-669: The National Library in Beijing, the Library of Beijing University and other libraries. The connection between the writing and the pronunciation of the Tangut language is even more tenuous than that between Chinese writing and the modern Chinese varieties . Thus although in Chinese more than 90% of the characters possess a phonetic element, this proportion is limited to about 10% in Tangut according to Sofronov. The reconstruction of Tangut pronunciation must resort to other sources. The discovery of

874-846: The Russian Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg . These survived the Siege of Leningrad , but a number of manuscripts in the possession of Nevsky at the time of his arrest by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) in 1937 went missing, and were returned, under mysterious circumstances, to the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts only in October 1991. The collections amount to about 10,000 volumes, of mostly Buddhist texts, law codes and legal documents dating from mid-11th up to early 13th centuries. Among

920-508: The Tangut language is far from perfect: although certain aspects of the morphology ( Ksenia Kepping , The Morphology of the Tangut Language , Moscow: Nauka, 1985) and grammar ( Tatsuo Nishida , Seika go no kenkyū , etc.) are understood, the syntactic structure of Tangut remains largely unexplored. The Khara-Khoto documents are at present preserved in the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of

966-613: The United States. The Tangut syllable has a CV structure and carries one of two distinctive tones, flat or rising. Following the tradition of Chinese phonological analysis the Tangut syllable is divided into initial ( 聲母 ) and rhyme ( 韻母 ) (i.e. the remaining syllable minus the initial). The consonants are divided into the following categories: The rhyme books distinguish 105 rhyme classes, which are, in turn, classified in several ways:/grade ( 等 ), type ( 環 ), and class ( 攝 ). Tangut rhymes occur in three types ( 環 ). They are seen in

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1012-420: The corpus of Tibetan transcriptions of Tangut. These data were studied for the first time by Nevsky (Nevskij) (1925). Nonetheless, these two sources were not in themselves sufficient for a systematic reconstruction of Tangut. In effect, these transcriptions were not written with the intention of representing with precision the pronunciation of Tangut, but instead simply to help foreigners to pronounce and memorize

1058-415: The cursive Xingshu or 'running script'. An unusual feature of the Dunhuang manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries is that some appear to have been written with a hard stylus rather than with a brush. According to Akira Fujieda this was due to the lack of materials for constructing brushes in Dunhuang after the Tibetan occupation in the late 8th century. The Dunhuang manuscripts represent some of

1104-573: The earliest examples of Tibetan writing . Several styles are represented among the manuscripts, forebears of the later Uchen (dbu can) and Ume (dbu med) styles. Both Old Tibetan and Classical Tibetan are represented in the manuscripts, as well as the undeciphered Nam language and a language that some have identified as the Zhangzhung language . Other languages represented are Khotanese , Sanskrit , Sogdian , Tibetan , Old Uyghur , and Hebrew , as well as Old Turkic (e.g. Irk Bitig ). By far

1150-562: The early 20th centuries. He was a self-appointed caretaker of the Dunhuang cave complex and a self-styled Taoist priest. The cave complex contained 50,000 manuscripts detailing medieval China, the Silk Roads, and Buddhism. He died in 1931 at the Mogao Grottoes. When engaging in an amateur restoration of statues and paintings in what is now known as Cave 16, Wang noticed a hidden door which opened into another cave, later named Cave 17 or

1196-471: The equivalent of £90, but, unlike Stein, Pelliot was a trained sinologist literate in Chinese, and he was allowed to examine the manuscripts freely, so he was able to pick a better selection of documents than Stein. Pelliot was interested in the more unusual and exotic of the Dunhuang manuscripts, such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men's groups. Many of these manuscripts survived only because they formed

1242-415: The fact that, according to Rong and Hansen (1999) there was an organized method to the manner in which many manuscripts in the caves were placed; “Buddhist texts that had been divided into sections, labeled, and then placed in wrapped bundles." The reason for the cave's sealing has also been the subject of speculation. A popular hypothesis, first suggest by Paul Pelliot, is that the cave was sealed to protect

1288-475: The first Tangut dictionary and reconstructed the meaning of a number of Tangut grammatical particles, thus making it possible to actually read and understand Tangut texts. His scholarly achievements were published posthumously in 1960 under the title Tangutskaya Filologiya (Tangut Philology), and the scholar was eventually (and posthumously) awarded the Soviet Lenin Prize for his work. The understanding of

1334-418: The governor of Gansu concerned about the cost of transporting these documents. From 1907 onwards, Wang began to sell them to Western explorers, notably Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot . According to Stein who was the first to describe the cave in its original state: Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to

1380-424: The initial. Consequently, the reconstructions of Arakawa and Gong do not account for this distinction. Gong represents these three grades as V, iV, and jV. Arakawa accounts for them as V, iV, and V. In general rhyme class ( 攝 ) corresponds to the set of all rhymes under the same rhyme type which have the same main vowel. Gong further posits phonemic vowel length and points to evidence that indicates that Tangut had

1426-425: The language was still in use nearly three hundred years after the collapse of Western Xia. Since the 2010s, Tangutologists have commonly classified Tangut as a Qiangic or Gyalrongic language. On the basis of both morphological and lexical evidence, Lai et al. (2020) classify Tangut as a West Gyalrongic language, and Beaudouin (2023) as a Horpa language . Modern research into the Tangut languages began in

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1472-486: The largest proportion of manuscripts from the Dunhuang cave contain Buddhist texts. These include Buddhist sutras , commentaries and treatises, often copied for the purpose of generating religious merit . Several hundred manuscripts have been identified as notes taken by students, including the popular Buddhist narratives known as bian wen ( 變文 ). Much of the scholarship on the Chinese Buddhist manuscripts has been on

1518-493: The late 19th century and early 20th century when S. W. Bushell , Gabriel Devéria , and Georges Morisse separately published decipherments of a number of Tangut characters found on Western Xia coins , in a Chinese–Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele at Wuwei, Gansu , and in a copy of the Tangut translation of the Lotus Sutra . The majority of extant Tangut texts were excavated at Khara-Khoto in 1909 by Pyotr Kozlov , and

1564-552: The manuscripts Pelliot took and are stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collection are in Tibetan. Other languages represented are Chinese, Khotanese , Kuchean , Sanskrit , Sogdian , Tibetan , Old Uyghur , Prakrit , Hebrew , and Old Turkic . The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, medicine, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies. The majority of surviving Dunhuang manuscripts were kept in

1610-593: The manuscripts after seeing samples of the documents in Pelliot's possession. Due to the efforts of the scholar and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu , most of the remaining Chinese manuscripts were taken to Beijing in 1910 and are now in the National Library of China . Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and libraries in the region. Rumours of caches of documents taken by local people continued for some time, and

1656-491: The manuscripts at the advent of an invasion by the Xixia army, and later scholars followed with the alternative suggestion that it was sealed in fear of an invasion by Islamic Kharkhanids that never occurred. Even though cave 16 could easily have been enlarged or extended to cave 17, Yoshiro Imaeda has suggested cave 16 was sealed because it ran out of room. Liu Bannong compiled Dunhuang Duosuo (敦煌掇瑣 "Miscellaneous works found in

1702-445: The manuscripts themselves. Various reasons have been suggested for the placing of the manuscripts in the library cave and its sealing. Aurel Stein suggested that the manuscripts were "sacred waste", an explanation that found favour with later scholars including Fujieda Akira. More recently, it has been suggested that the cave functioned as a storeroom for a Buddhist monastic library, though this has been disputed. Reasons for this include

1748-466: The nineteenth-century attitude about the right of Europeans to carry off ‘finds’ made in non-European lands that, like Stein, he seems never from the first to last to have had any qualms about the sacking of the Tun-huang library.” While most studies use Dunhuang manuscripts to address issues in areas such as history and religious studies, some have addressed questions about the provenance and materiality of

1794-406: The phonological system of the dictionaries with the other sources in order to "fill in" the categories with a phonetic value. N. A. Nevsky reconstructed Tangut grammar and provided the first Tangut–Chinese–English–Russian dictionary, which together with the collection of his papers was published posthumously in 1960 under the title Tangut Philology (Moscow: 1960). Later, substantial contribution to

1840-447: The research of Tangut language was done by Tatsuo Nishida ( 西田龍雄 ) , Ksenia Kepping , Gong Hwang-cherng ( 龔煌城 ), M.V. Sofronov and Li Fanwen ( 李範文 ). Marc Miyake has published on Tangut phonology and diachronics. There are four Tangut dictionaries available: the one composed by N.A. Nevsky, one composed by Nishida (1966), one composed by Li Fanwen (1997, revised edition 2008) and one composed by Yevgeny Kychanov (2006). There

1886-404: The scholars who composed these dictionaries had made a very precise phonetic analysis of their language. In distinction to the transcription in foreign languages, the Tangut fanqie makes distinctions among the rhymes in a systematic and very precise manner. Due to the fǎnqiè , we now have a good understanding of the phonological categories of the language. Nonetheless, it is necessary to compare

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1932-460: The script was identified as that of the Tangut state of Xixia. Such scholars as Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov , Ishihama Juntaro ( 石濱純太郎 ), Berthold Laufer , Luo Fuchang ( 羅福萇 ), Luo Fucheng ( 羅福成 ), and Wang Jingru ( 王靜如 ) have contributed to research on the Tangut language. The most significant contribution was made by the Russian scholar Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky (1892–1937), who compiled

1978-418: The site. These documents date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur . The documents also include over two hundred fragments of texts written in the Tangut language , which is significant as the Tangut script (devised in 1036) is entirely absent from the Library Cave documents. Scholars in Beijing were alerted to the significance of

2024-535: The tradition of Nishida, followed by both Arakawa and Gong as 'normal' ( 普通母音 ), 'tense' ( 緊喉母音 ), and 'retroflex' ( 捲舌母音 ). Gong leaves normal vowels unmarked and places a dot under tense vowels and an -r after retroflex vowels. Arakawa differs only by indicating tense vowels with a final -q. The rhyme books distinguish four vowel grades ( 等 ). In early phonetic reconstructions, all four were separately accounted for, but it has since been realized that grades three and four are in complementary distribution, depending on

2070-482: The words of one language with the words of another which they could understand. The third source, which constitutes the basis of the modern reconstructions, consists of monolingual Tangut dictionaries: the Wenhai ( 文海 ), two editions of the Tongyin ( 同音 ), the Wenhai zalei ( 文海雜類 ) and an untitled dictionary. The record of the pronunciation in these dictionaries is made using the principle of fǎnqiè , borrowed from

2116-512: Was a Taoist priest and abbot of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang during the early 20th century. He is credited with the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts and was engaged in the restoration of the site, which he funded with the sale of numerous manuscripts to Western and Japanese explorers. Wang Yuanlu was an itinerant monk, originally from Shanxi Province. He was active from the late 19th to

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