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The Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2002

SAM VAN SCHAIK
SAM VAN SCHAIK
Affiliation:
The British Library
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Abstract

Early in the twentieth century a hidden cache of manuscripts was discovered in the monastic cave complex of Dunhuang in Central Asia. The majority of the manuscripts, dating from the first millennium C.E., are in Chinese and Tibetan. The largest collections of Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang are in France and England. However, the fact that there are collections of almost equal size within China is hardly known outside of that country. In this article I report on the nature and size of these Chinese collections, and the results of my own examination of the collections in Dunhuang. This information largely completes the puzzle which was left to us after the dispersal of the manuscripts to various institutions, and allows us to attempt a reconstruction of the contents of the original ‘library’ of Tibetan manuscripts in the cave in Dunhuang.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , February 2002 , pp. 129 - 139
Copyright
© School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2002

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