The field of Tangutology, or Tangut studies, is a very narrow and specific field, but has a venerable academic history Here are some key years marking the evolution of Tangut studies, with the recent Tangut-centric panel at this year’s Association of Asian Studies symposium at Columbus, Ohio—the first of its kind—marking the next step in the evolving, increasingly interdisciplinary field.
1804: Chinese scholar Zhang Shu (1781–1847) visits Huguo Temple at Wuwei in Gansu, observing that the Chinese section of a bilingual inscription on a stele had a Western Xia “imperial era” name. He suggests that the undeciphered, mysterious language running alongside the Chinese text of this “Liangzhou Stele” must be the Tangut language. He ties this written script to the hitherto unknown writing found at the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass, at the Great Wall of China.
1870: British Sinologist Alexander Wylie (1815–1887) suggests that the script of the Liangzhou Stele might be Jurchen.
1896: Through comparing as many Chinese and Tangut characters as possible on the Liangzhou Stele, British Sinologist, numismatist and physician Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844–1908) publishes a list of thirty-seven Tangut characters with their corresponding meaning in Chinese. This enables him to make the first four-character translation of a coin’s inscription from the Xixia.
1898: French diplomat Jean-Gabriel Devéria (1844–99) publishes two pioneering studies on the Tangut script based on the Liangzhou stele.
1899: Bushell refutes Wylie and conclusively shows that the Liangzhou Stele’s non-Chinese script is indeed Tangut.
1900–04: Georges Morisse (d. 1910), a French interpreter, discovers three volumes of a manuscript of a Tangut Lotus Sutra that was discovered in the looting that occurred after the Boxer Rebellion. He compares it to the Chinese version and identifies around 200 Tangut characters, while also deducing some grammatical rules for Tangut, before publishing a study in 1904.
1908: Pyotr Kozlov discovers the archeological site and former military stronghold of Khara-khoto in Inner Mongolia. In Khara-khoto (inside a large stupa beyond the city), Kozlov finds a treasure trove of around 2,000 printed manuscripts in Chinese, Tangut, and Tibetan, along with many pieces of Tangut Buddhist art. Kozlov sends the items to the Russian Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg. The hoard of manuscripts and art is transferred to the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, which was called in Kozlov’s day the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences.
1909: Russian Tangutologist Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov (1878–1937) discovers the key to finally deciphering the Tangut script: a bilingual Chinese-Tangut glossary, Pearl in the Palm (番漢合時掌中珠). He further discovers three monolingual Tangut dictionaries and glossaries among the Khara-Khoto material. They are: Homophones, Sea of Characters, and Mixed Characters.
1912: Antiquarian Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) meets Ivanov in Saint Petersburg and makes a copy of 9 pages from Pearl in the Palm. These pages are published after his return to China.
1913–16: Aurel Stein discovers manuscript fragments at Khara-khoto.
1917: A cache of Buddhist scriptures in 5 pottery jars is discovered at Lingwu, Ningxia. They are sent to Beijing, which would eventually form the core of the Xixia collection of the National Library of China.
1918: Ivanov publishes a short dictionary of 3,000 Tangut characters.
1909–20: Ivanov publishes a series of articles that expands the knowledge of Tangut among scholars dramatically.
1922: Luo meets Ivanov again in Tianjin, and this time obtains a complete copy of Pearl in the Palm.
1924: The full Chinese version of Pearl in the Palm is published by Luo’s first son Luo Fucheng (1885–1960).
1925: Linguist Nikolai Nevsky (1892–1937) meets Ivanov in China and begins work on the decipherment of the Tangut language.
1929: Nevsky moves back to Leningrad and starts writing a dictionary of Tangut using texts from Khara-Khoto.
1930: Wang Jingru (1903–1990) publishes Notes on the Chinese and Tibetan transcriptions of the Hsi-hsia (Tangutan) language.
1931–34: Stuart Norris Wolfenden (1889–1938) publishes monographs on the Xixia language at Berkeley.
1932: A special issue of the Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping concerning the Lingwu Buddhist texts is published, with contributions from Luo Fucheng, Wang Jingru, Ishihama Juntaro (1888–1968), Ivanov, and Nevsky.
1935: Luo Fucheng publishes the first facsimile edition of Homophones.
1937–38: Gerard Clauson (1891–1974), who had been studying Tangut fragments deposited at the British Museum by Aurel Stein, writes a Skeleton dictionary of the Hsi-hsia language.
1937: Ivanov and Nevsky are executed amidst Stalin’s Great Purge. Ivanov’s dictionary of Pearl in the Palm, which he left at his home, disappears.
As the world descends into the conflagration of World War Two, the work of Tangutology must wait. . .
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