Eighteen Lectures On Dunhuang
Download Eighteen Lectures On Dunhuang PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Eighteen Lectures On Dunhuang book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang
In Eighteen Lectures on Dunhuang, Rong Xinjiang provides an accessible overview of Dunhuang studies, an academic field that emerged following the discovery of a medieval monastic library at the Mogao caves near Dunhuang. The manuscripts were hidden in a cave at the beginning of the 11th century and remained unnoticed until 1900, when a Daoist monk accidentally found them and subsequently sold most of them to foreign explorers and scholars. The availability of this unprecedented amount of first-hand material from China’s middle period provided a stimulus for a number of scholarly fields both in China and the West. Rong Xinjiang’s book provides, for the first time in English, a convenient summary of the history of Dunhuang studies and its contribution to scholarship.
Manuscript Philology of Dunhuang
This book explores first-hand Dunhuang manuscripts from a period of over 700 years, from 220 to 960, and as such makes a major contribution to passing on and promoting ancient Chinese culture. Perfectly combining four ingredients: an accessible writing style; a comprehensive set of typical examples and pictures; sound field research and culturally stimulating approaches; and authentically archaeological and philological results, this thorough and engaging book appeals to all the readers undertaking Dunhuang studies.
The King’s Road
Author: Xin Wen
language: en
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Release Date: 2024-12-17
An exciting and richly detailed new history of the Silk Road that tells how it became more important as a route for diplomacy than for trade The King’s Road offers a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road, emphasizing its importance as a diplomatic route, rather than a commercial one. Tracing the arduous journeys of diplomatic envoys, Xin Wen presents a rich social history of long-distance travel that played out in deserts, post stations, palaces, and polo fields. The book tells the story of the everyday lives of diplomatic travelers on the Silk Road—what they ate and drank, the gifts they carried, and the animals that accompanied them—and how they navigated a complex web of geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It also describes the risks and dangers envoys faced along the way—from financial catastrophe to robbery and murder. Using documents unearthed from the famous Dunhuang “library cave” in Western China, The King’s Road paints a detailed picture of the intricate network of trans-Eurasian transportation and communication routes that was established between 850 and 1000 CE. By exploring the motivations of the kings who dispatched envoys along the Silk Road and describing the transformative social and economic effects of their journeys, the book reveals the inner workings of an interstate network distinct from the Sino-centric “tributary” system. In shifting the narrative of the Silk Road from the transport of commodities to the exchange of diplomatic gifts and personnel, The King’s Road puts the history of Eastern Eurasia in a new light.