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.
The end of the most terrible conflict in human history reawakens the scholarship of the still-mysterious Tangut Empire…
1950s: Philologist Nishida Tatsuo (1928–2012) of Kyoto University emerges as the most prominent scholar of Xixia in Japan.
1960: Nevsky publishes the seminal Tangut Philology, the first modern dictionary of the Tangut language.
1963: Z. I. Gorbachëva and Kychanov publish a major catalogue of Tangut texts.
1964–66: Tatsuo publishes an ambitious reconstruction and 3,000 word-strong dictionary of Tangut phonology and decipherment.
1962: Tangut Philology wins the Lenin Prize.
1968: Kychanov publishes the very first overview of the Tangut state’s history,
1969: A scholarly version of the Tangut text (a monolingual rhyming dictionary), Sea of Characters is published, with contributions from scholars Kychanov, Ksenia Kepping, V. S. Kolokolov, and A. P. Terentyev-Katanskij.
1971: Eric Grinstead of the British Museum publishes Contents of the Tangut Tripitaka.
1972: Grinstead publishes Analysis of the Tangut Script, which also offered an early standard code for character use in computers.
Early 1970s: Tangutologist Li Fanwen excavates fragments of Tangut gravestones from the Xixia imperial tombs.
1976: Li publishes a study of Homophones in 1976.
1977: Tatsuo publishes Catalogue of Tangut Translations of Buddhist Texts
1979: Kepping publishes a translation of the Tangut version of Sun Zi’s Art of War.
1988: Ruth W. Dunnell publishes a translation of a 1094 Chinese-Tangut stele inscription.
1997: Li publishes the first Chinese-Tangut dictionary.
1996: Dunnell publishes The Great State of White and High: Buddhism and State Foundation in Eleventh-Century Xia.
1999: Kychanov publishes Catalogue of Tangut Buddhist Monuments at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
2006: Arakawa Shintaro and Kychanov jointly publish a Tangut-Russian-English-Chinese dictionary.
2010: The Ningxia Academy of Social Sciences launches Tangut Research, the very first regular, quarterly journal dedicated to Tangutology.
2016: 6,125 Tangut characters and 755 Tangut components are encoded in Unicode Standard 9.0, marking the first time the Tangut script can appear on the Internet.
2021: Scholar Han Xiaomang publishes a dictionary of Tangut characters and words in nine volumes.
Back to Tangut Time
“Tangut Time” header banner by Yui Iida
