British Library Journal (volume 24, number 1, spring 1998)

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The historical importance of the Chinese fragments from Dunhuang in the British Library
(1998-05)
Xinjiang, Rong
THE Dunhuang materials obtained by Sir Aurel Stein during his second and third expeditions were divided between the British Museum, the India Office and the Indian government (this final section now being in the National Museum, New Delhi). However, most of the written material remained in Britain. When the British Library separated from the British Museum in 1973 the paintings were retained by the Museum but written materials in Chinese and other languages were deposited in the Oriental Department of the British Library. In the first part of this century, Dr Lionel Giles, Keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts at the British Museum, catalogued the Chinese and some bilingual manuscripts, and printed Chinese documents. His Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Manuscripts from Tun-huang in the British Museum was published in 1957. It covered Stein manuscript numbers Or. 8210/S.1-6980, and printed documents. Or. 8210/P.1-19, from the second and third expeditions. The Chinese Academy of Science obtained microfilm copies of these manuscripts and Liu Mingshu also completed a catalogue of S.1-6980, which was published in 1962. Until recently, only this group of manuscripts had been fully studied.
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Sir Robert Kennaway Douglas and his contemporaries
(1998-05)
Brown, Yu-Ying
SIR Robert Kennaway Douglas (1838-1913) was the first Keeper of the British Museum's new Department of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts when it was created in 1892. Despite his fame as the compiler of the first published catalogues of the Museum's Chinese as well as Japanese collections, memories of the man himself soon faded in the Department he had served so well. When in the 1980s, Barry Bloomfield, then Director of Collection Development in overall charge of the renamed Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, requested a copy of Douglas's photograph for the 'portrait gallery' of Keepers he was assembling in his office, none could be found. On my mentioning this to a former colleague, Kenji Makita, who was researching a book about distinguished members of the Museum staff, he pointed out that Douglas was present, sitting on the extreme right of the front row, in a group photograph of senior staff taken circa 1885 (fig. i). This photograph has been reproduced in P. R. Harris's A History of the British Museum Library, 1753-1973.' This monumental new book also sheds fresh light on Douglas's career in the British Museum. Some of the anecdotes it recounts on the inner workings and organization of the old British Museum have a familiar resonance to the ears of us, the curators of the new British Library. It is surely timely, therefore, to reassess Douglas's career and achievement.
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Four unpublished paintings from Dunhuang in the Oriental Collections of the British Library
(1998-05)
Whitfield, Roderick
THE Stein collection in the British Library is essentially a manuscript collection numbering thousands of scrolls of Buddhist sutra texts and other documents, the great majority originating from Cave 17 at the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas at Mogao near Dunhuang in Gansu Province, built in the mid-ninth century as a memorial for the high ranking monk Hongbian, and adopted in the early eleventh century as a safe resting place for outdated scrolls and ex-votos. Although some of the manuscripts contain illustrations, the Buddhist paintings in the collection were assigned to the Sub-Department of Oriental Prints and Drawings of the British Museum and are now kept in the Department of Oriental Antiquities. Thus the recent rediscovery of four previously unpublished and unregistered Buddhist paintings on hemp cloth, unquestionably from Dunhuang, in the British Library adds an extra dimension to the collection, in terms of both material and iconography.
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A Korean Buddhist illuminated manuscript
(1998-05)
McKillop, Beth
DURING the selection of manuscripts for loan to the 'Arts of Korea' Gallery which opened in the British Museum in July 1997, a richly decorated Korean Buddhist sutra copied in gold pigment around 1390 was identified, conserved and prepared for display. The manuscript seems to have received little attention since it was acquired by the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum in 1884, as part of a collection of important Japanese, Chinese and Korean editions amassed in Japan by the bibliophile Sir Ernest Satow (1843-1929). It may be surmised that the volume moved to Japan from Korea between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps like so many Korean inventions, treasures and skills, leaving Korea in the course of the Hideyoshi invasions of the 1590s.
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The British Library's Sado mining scrolls
(1998-05)
Todd, Hamish
AMONG the nearly eleven hundred works acquired by the British Museum from the collection of Philipp Franz von Siebold in 1868 were three hand-painted scrolls depicting mining activities on the Japanese island of Sado. The scrolls belong to a genre of manuscripts known as Kinzan emaki (Illustrated scrolls of gold mines) or Kinginzan emaki (Illustrated scrolls of gold and silver mines), which provide a detailed representation of both the underground mine workings and the various refining processes and administrative operations that went on above ground.
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Under the censor's eye: printed almanacs and censorship in ninth-century China
(1998-05)
Whitfield, Susan
SEVERAL fragmentary printed almanacs dating from the ninth century were among the documents discovered in 1900 in Cave 17 at the 'Thousand Buddha' cave temple site near Dunhuang, north-west China. One fragment, now in the British Library, bears an inscription stating that it was printed in the East Market of the then Chinese capital (see fig. i). Yet an official decree of 835 had stipulated that the private printing and possession of almanacs was forbidden by law.
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Photographs in the British Library of documents and manuscripts from Sir Aurel Stein's fourth Central Asian expedition
(1998-05)
Jiqing, Wang
ON 1 September 1995, shortly before I returned to China from a visit to the British Library on a British Academy K. C. Wong Fellowship, a box containing photographs of documents and manuscripts from Sir Aurel Stein's fourth Central Asian expedition(1930-1) was rediscovered in the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library. Through the kindness of Frances Wood, Susan Whitfield and Graham Hutt of the British Library I was able to examine these photographs as part of our joint project on Stein's fourth Central Asian expedition. It is well known that the originals of the documents and manuscripts acquired by Stein during his fourth Central Asia expedition, mostly in Chinese, Kharosthi and Brahmi, were confiscated in China in 1931 and have since disappeared. Needless to say, these photographs have been and will probably continue to be the only basis for the study of Stein's palaeographic finds from that ill-fated expedition. Before his final departure from China, Stein had taken pains to have these documents and manuscripts photographed and thereby preserved them from total loss. He had also done all he could before his death to publish these photographs in Europe for the benefit of Central Asian scholarship, but for various reasons most of them have not been seen to date. The opportunity to publish these photographs here will therefore benefit academics as well as fulfilling Stein's unrealized expectations. I have the honour to be entrusted with preparing introductory notes on these photographs to provide background material for further studies. My notes are offered here in a preliminary form and my detailed report will be published later.
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Closely observed China: from William Alexander's sketches to his published work
(1998-05)
Wood, Frances
WHEN Lord Macartney led the first British Embassy to China from 1792 to 1794, he and his entourage travelled largely by boat, even after their arrival in China. They proceeded up the coast in their flotilla and disembarked at the mouth of the Bei river, to transfer to smaller, flat-bottomed Chinese barges for the trip upriver to Tongzhou and only travelled by road for the last twenty miles to Peking. When the Embassy was dismissed by the Emperor just over a month later in early October 1793, Lord Macartney and his party proceeded south by barge along the length of the Grand Canal to Hangzhou. There, the party split, with one group travelling south to Canton (mainly by water) and the others following the river to Ningbo on the coast and the Zhoushan archipelago where their brigs and East India men waited.
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Origins and characteristics of the Japanese Collection in the British Library
(1998-05)
Brown, Yu-Ying
THE British Library's antiquarian Japanese collection has long been regarded as one of the finest outside Japan. Its quality and quantity are such that the descriptive catalogue compiled by my predecessor, the late Kenneth Gardner, had to be limited to pre-1700 printed books. Even then, it included 637 items of outstanding rarity. These range from the Hyakumanto darani (Empress Shotoku's 'One Million Pagoda Charms') of AD 764-70; to books printed in medieval Buddhist monasteries (imprints known as Kasuga-ban, Jodokyo-ban, Koya-ban, etc., from the names of their associated temples or sects); Chinese classical works printed in Japan (especially Gozanban); and the early movable-type editions (Kokatsuji-ban), which include Saga-bon and those rarest of all Japanese books, volumes printed by the Jesuit Mission Press, the Kirishitan-ban. In the category of Kokatsuji-ban, the best yardstick with which to measure the comparative strength of fine antiquarian collections, the British Library has about 120, a holding comparable with those of such great Japanese libraries as Tenri Central Library in Nara, Daitokyu Memorial Library and the Toyo Bunko (Oriental Library) in Tokyo.
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The photographs from Stein's fourth expedition: a footnote
(1998-05)
Falconer, John
WHEN Wang Jiqing prepared his report on the photographs of the missing artefacts from Sir Aurel Stein's Fourth Central Asian Expedition, it was generally believed that the original negatives, from which the 'improved' versions were made at the Thomason College at Roorkee, had been lost. By coincidence, the recent detailed listing of the Stein Photograph Collection, held in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Section of the British Library's Oriental and India Office Collections, has revealed that these negatives had not disappeared or been destroyed but, in keeping with Stein's meticulous arrangement of his collections, had been preserved along with his other photographs. They appear to have been overlooked in previous listings of the collection owing to the lack of any detailed description of the material in Stein's own negative index books.
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British Library Journal (volume 24, number 1, spring 1998)

British Library Journal (volume 24, number 1, spring 1998)

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