Since the last time I covered Dunhuang-related databases to browse online in 2022, a few things have changed. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was hit by a cyber-attack that made it unusable for quite some time, and Dunhuang Documents Database 敦煌遺書據庫 is no longer active. The Database of Medieval Chinese Texts, which I had barely covered in my 2022 post, has been reviewed by one of its editors, Laurent Van Cutsem, in a much more accurate way than I could have done.
The IDP has since come back, although it is clearly still recovering. As I mentioned already, this and the French “Archives et manuscrits” section of the Bibliothèque nationale de France are not really built for users to browse for general thematic searches. You can either browse them aimlessly in awe of the many Dunhuang manuscripts, wood-slips, and drawings (of which there are plenty, incredibly beautiful and interesting, as in fig. 5 below), or you have to know what to search and how to search.
As I have been doing research on Tang editions of the Analects 論語, I have been using the wonderful Dunhuang Jingji Xulu 敦煌經籍叙录 by Xu Jianping 許建平, which introduces the catalogued Dunhuang manuscripts of the Chinese classics. One of the relevant ones for me is P.2123, where “P” stands for Pelliot. As we know by now from Imre Galambos’s introduction and my previous post, in order to search in the IDP, we have to spell out “Pelliot”. The search for “Pelliot 2123” brings up at the top two results: “Pelliot Chinois 2123” and “Pelliot tibétain 2123.” (see fig. 1).
Fig. 1
“Pelliot Chinois 2123” has actually nothing to do with the Analects: it’s the edition Miao fa lian hua jing 妙法蓮華經 of the Lotus Sutra.
“Pelliot tibétain 2123” is what I wanted: a Tang edition of the 4th century Collected Explanations of the Analects 論語集解 by He Yan 何晏. Xu Jianping’s 許建平 study explains that it’s labeled “tibétain” because it has Tibetan writing (and two drawings) on the back. But, had I only had the pressmark information “P.2123”, I would not have known right away the difference between the two main results. The search results generically label these two as “Pelliot Chinese Dunhuang manuscript” and “Manuscript, Ink on paper.” This is a current shortcoming that perhaps will be fixed as the IDP continues to recover from the cyber-attack.
So while the IDP comes back to its full potential, let me introduce you to another database that I used while working on my paper: the Dunhuang Culture 敦煌文化. It is possibly one of the most comprehensive, accessible databases to research anything Dunhuang-related. Just by looking at the homepage, you can see the extent of materials and resources it covers. It brings together the scanning of manuscripts from the IDP, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the collections currently in Russia, along with a series of other resources. And, you can download pretty much anything that is there without the need of any subscription – but if you want to reuse it in your work, you have to trace down the copyright. This is something not specified on most pages in the Dunhuang Culture database, as it probably should be.
On the top-left menu, you can easily jump to a dedicated section:
- Drawings on manuscripts from the Dunhuang corpora 敦煌绢画
- Drawings on the walls of the Dunhuang grottos 敦煌壁画
- Editions of the classics among the Dunhuang manuscripts 敦煌经书遗本
- Digitized books about the Dunhuang manuscripts and artifacts 敦煌电子书
- A collection of videos, more or less scholarly, of the impact and role Dunhuang had in history 敦煌影像
- Audio lectures 敦煌音频
Of these, to me the most useful is by far the section on digitized books. In there, you have all the volumes (again, all freely downloadable) of studies such as the Collection of classics in Dunhuang 敦煌经部部文献合集, one of the most important studies on the manuscripts. It collects detailed (11 vols!) critical editions of the Chinese classics recovered from Dunhuang. Once you have found your book, you can either read it online (在线阅读, highlighted in green in fig. 2) or download it (下载, highlighted in yellow in fig. 2).
Fig. 2
The quality of the scanned books is also very decent; the images of the manuscript maintain the high resolution of the originals.
There is a search bar that allows you to go straight to what you are looking for, as long as you remember to use simplified Chinese! For example, if you know you need vol. 3 of the 敦煌经部部文献合集, type in the search box (top right) “敦煌经部部文献合集03”, select “电子书” right above it, and you will be taken straight there:
Fig. 3
Or, you can use the search function to find items for which you have some specific information, but not all. Suppose that I know that among the Dunhuang manuscripts there are editions of He Yan’s work mentioned above. I know He Yan’s work is about the Analects, but I don’t recall the title, and the day when I need to find the correct manuscript falls on the day when my religion prohibits me from using any other tool than the Dunhuang Culture database. I can still search based on what I know, so, “何晏论语”, and keep selected “all results” 全部. This returns all the images, properly captioned, of the manuscripts of the Collected Explanations to the Analects, which is a specific enough range for me to look at quite a few of them (there are “only” three pages, see fig. 4).
This is something that the IDP currently performs very badly. Not only does searching for “Lunyu” bring up all sorts of manuscripts that have nothing to do with the Analects (such as this fragment of a divination text); even with the pressmark “P.2123,” while I am taken to the correct page for this manuscript, nothing in it tells me that what I am looking at is a fragment of the Collected Explanations to the Analects. The historical information and the reference sections on the page do not mention it.
Fig. 4
Currently, the Dunhuang Culture database has the advantage of being specific. The IDP, however, has the advantage of having an English interface (although the automated translation of webpages is making these variations irrelevant) and being structured to co-reference the French repository. The IDP does also work akin to a foundation, hosting cultural events in partnership with other educational institutions. It has a section dedicated to resources that can be easily leveraged for teaching, contributing to the introduction of this material to the scholarship outside of China. In this sense, the IDP and the Dunhuang Culture database cover different areas of Dunhuang’s “digital landscape.” Users and researchers can be well served by a more straightforward promotion of each database’s strengths.
Fig 5
References
Xu, Jianping 許建平. Dunhuang Jingji Xulu 敦煌經籍叙录. (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju 中華書局, 2006).
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