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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books
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On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 |
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varied regions, races and creeds of which Tun-huang was
the scene from Han times onwards. Needless to say that
most of the information this rapid synopsis can present is
derived from the painstaking researches which a number
of distinguished Orientalist collaborators have carried on
for years.
The great mass of Chinese manuscripts (Fig. 91) proves
that religious life at the Thousand Buddhas and also in the
Tun-huang oasis, of which it has always been the most sacred
site, was maintained mainly by Chinese Buddhists. The
Chinese materials brought away by me in 1907 comprise
about 3000 more or less complete rolls, many of great ex-
tent, and besides close on 6000 documents and detached
text-pieces. No wonder that their cataloguing, started about
1914 by Dr. L. Giles of the British Museum, after Professor
Pelliot had been obliged to abandon this task, has only now
been completed for the press. The great majority of the rolls
contain texts of the Buddhist canon as constituted in China.
The devoted labours of a Japanese scholar, Rev. K. Yabuki,
have shown that there are among them works previously
unknown or lost.
But in addition there are to be found many fragments of
secular texts, otherwise unknown, bearing on history, geo-
graphy and other branches of Chinese scholarship. There
have been found hundreds of documents throwing light on
local conditions of life, monastic administration and the
like, all representing a category of records of which prac-
tically nothing has otherwise come down to us from that
early period. The exact dates noted in the colophons of rolls
and in the documents extend from the very beginning of the
fifth down to the close of the tenth century A.D. From the
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157
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168
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178
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284
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442
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466
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477
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491
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502
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525
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537
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550
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561
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571
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578
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