Unattested character variant

Posted on 01/04/2011 by imre

Last May, Sam and I went on a trip to Gansu and Qinghai provinces to visit the sites along a medieval pilgrimage route. (On this trip, see Sam’s entry on his blog: Amdo Notes II.) I got to Lanzhou first and I had a day to wander around the city and in a small shop I noticed a sign that said 谢绝还价 (No bargaining!). What caught my attention is that the character 謝 was written in a variant form, with a 又 on the right side, instead of the usual 寸 (see Image 2). I have not seen this form before and was interested whether this was a local way of writing it or one of the common vulgar forms. So I asked the shop keeper about the character but he had no doubts that this was the normal way of writing the character 謝. I also insisted that the standard form was different and finally he went over to the shop next to his to ask how it was written. There he had a small realization and after thinking for a few more seconds, said, “Then I wrote it wrong.”

I tried to stick to my initial aim to determine where this form comes from. Yet the man was now adamant that this was not a variant form but that he simply made a mistake writing the character. So I did not get anywhere with my inquiries and had to leave it at that. But I remained convinced that this was not simply a mistake but a vulgar form that might have some local tradition. So when I got home, I tried to track down this particular variant and to my surprise could not find it. The closest I came to it was a form in the Longkan shoujing 龍龕手鏡 which was written with a 夊 on the right side (see Image 3). This was close but not identical.

Now I am still convinced that this is not a solitary mistake but that a form that is occasionally used and possibly goes back centuries. After all, this is the Hexi corridor where the Dunhuang manuscripts come from. So I am most interested if anyone else has come across this variant. Or other examples of seemingly unattested variants.

Shop sign in Lanzhou

Image 1. Shop sign in Lanzhou

 

Variant form of xie
Image 2. Variant form of the character 謝 (cropped from above shop sign)
A variant form of xie in the Longkan shoujing
Image 3. Variant form of 謝 in the

Longkan shoujing

Posted in 20th century, Character variants, Chinese writing, Dunhuang, epigraphy, Orthography | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Cangjie created writing and the ghosts wailed at night

Posted on 11/26/2010 by imre

“When Cangjie created writing, Heaven rained millet and the ghosts wailed at night” 蒼頡作書而天雨粟鬼夜哭.

The above cryptic statement comes from the Huainanzi 淮南子, a text compiled during the 2nd century B.C. Since there are very few details regarding the invention of writing in China, it is all the more puzzling to have something that makes so little sense as this. Why were the ghosts wailing? And why did Heaven rain millet? Why millet?

In his book on the origin of Chinese writing, Professor Boltz (1994) collects the available evidence that could help to understand these strange events. He quotes Gao You’s 高誘 commentary from the early 3rd century A.D., which explains that this was because when people knew how to write, they turned away from “the basics and busied themselves with the peripheral… Heaven knew of their impending hunger, and so made it ‘rain millet’ for them. Ghosts feared they would be impeached by written records, so they ‘wailed in the night.’” (tr. Boltz 1994: 132).

Feeling the weak logic in this argument, Professor Boltz goes further and introduces another possible explanation from Anna Seidel’s (1993) work, the bottom line of which is that writing could be used to ward off demons and their malevolent effects by writing down their names.

Whether the authors of the Huainanzi had the same in mind when they wrote that passage remains a mystery. But it is interesting that a similar kind of argument appears in a “ghost story” collected orally by modern ethnographers from informants near Taicang 太倉 in Jiangsu province (Zhongguo guihua 中國鬼話, pp. 507-508). According to this story, Cangjie was instructed by Fuxi, the Great Thearch 伏羲大帝, to teach people how to read and write in order to help them remember things. But this was opposed by Taishang laojun 太上老君 (i.e. Laozi) because if people became too smart, that would upset the tranquility of Heaven. Thus in an attempt to prevent Cangjie from continuing his work, he gathered together the various spirits 神靈 and the ghosts of the deceased 前世鬼魂 and ordered them to scare away the people who studied with Cangjie. So these spirits and ghosts wailed by Cangjie, telling people that Cangjie was going to harm them. In order to continue his task, Cangjie had to create a Yinyang Taiji Bagua Chart 陰陽太極八卦圖 to control the ghosts. So this is the same type of function of writing as mentioned above, although in this case the ghosts were controlled as a way of stopping their wailing. But this was an act for which Cangjie got punished himself, and this is why there is no shrine dedicated to him.

Obviously, this story is part of modern folklore the essence of which based on a literary source (i.e. the Huainanzi). It is unlikely that it preserves any information about what the passage in question in the Huainanzi means, but at least it tells us how people in later times interpreted it.

Posted in 20th century, Chinese writing | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Denison Ross and the Tibetan monks in London

Posted on 11/19/2010 by imre

While in Shanghai, I also visited the Xujiahui branch of the Shanghai Library, where they have old western books and newspapers. This is the old Bibliotheca Zi-Ka-Wei with an amazing architecture and equally impressive holdings of books. I spent some time reading through old newspapers and came across an amusing story in The Shanghai Times (2 March, 1925) about “Sir Dickinson Ross,” head of the London School of Oriental Languages. This was obviously a mistake for Sir Denison Ross who indeed was the first director of that school (known today as SOAS). Nevertheless, the story itself was quite interesting so I decided to include it here, as it is not readily accessible anymore.

Dalai Lama’s love poems shock Tibetan priests
Holy men make astonishing discovery during visit to London School of Oriental Languages, seeing book for first time.
London, Jan. 27.

Quite by accident, Sir Dickinson Ross, the learned head of the London School of Oriental Languages, to-day provided the holy people of Tibet with a first-class social and religious scandal.

At his invitation the party of Tibetan Lamas who came to England some seven weeks ago to take part in the filming of the “Epic of Everest” at the Scala Theatre visited the School of Oriental Languages.

Before showing them around the school library, the inspection of which was the main object of their visit, Sir Dickinson took the Tibetan priests into his study and showed them priceless books written in their own language, some of which were centuries old.

Coming as a surprise to them, the literary treat sent the Lamas into ecstasies of excitement (writes an “Evening Post” representative).

Each grabbing a book, they proceeded to chant the contents in droning voices, which soon made the room resemble an industrious beehive in summer.

Then came the climax of their treat. The youngest priest, a clever mischievous youngster, who has developed most of the traits, of a naughty schoolboy since his arrival in England, came across a book of poems — love poems of the most exotic description — written by their Dalai Lama, in other words their revered spiritual and temporal head; their Pope and King!

The young discoverer’s excitement broke all bounds and in a super-falsetto he began to chant the themes embodied in the poems: “The bullet has come to the ground, My hear has found its Sweetheart!”

And on he went until, piercing the droning of the other priests, his strident little voice reached the ears of the chief Lama, who, with a look, brought the youngster’s forbidden enjoyment to an abrupt end.

Tete-A-Tete Rebuke!
This particular young priest has proved very adaptable since his arrival.

He has picked up some English — and also ideas which his chief has had trouble in suppressing.

A few days ago, when the party were being taken through a big West End stores, this youngster actually had the precocity to make a bet with one of the other young priests.

Unfortunately for him his chief overheard the making of the wager. Noiselessly stepping up behind the two young men, he seized them by the ears, and cracked their heads together.

The report of the collision of heads rang through the building like falling bricks, and caused great excitement in the establishment.

After the Lamas had examined the books in Sir Dickinson’s room, they were conducted to the library. Once installed there, it was very difficult to remove them, so great was their interest in the books.

These Lamas, it must be remembered, derive practically all their amusement and learning from continuous reading of religious books.

Still chattering amongst themselves, out of the hearing of their chief, on the enthralling subject of the love poems of the Pope and King, the Lamas were asked to sign their names in the visitors’ book.

Little Brown Bag
On some document or other they were shown the signature of some Tibetan priest who had visited the college years ago. The chief Lama read the signature.

Its final syllables were: “Ha! Ha! Hee! Hee!

Here the humorous intent of the writer broke through the reserve and dignity of even the chief Lama, and, with the others, he burst into merry laughter.

Never since they came to London have these Lamas had such enjoyment as they had to-day perusing books which had never before come within their reach; reading of matters they had never before thought were in print, and seeing beyond doubt that their Pope was somewhat of a poet on the sly.

One of the most interesting discoveries was hand-written history of Tibet. Never before had these learned men known that such a thing as history existed.

When They’re Back Home
Sir Dickinson, who speaks their language fluently, had to describe history to them as “stories of day-to-day life backwards.” There is no word for history in their vocabulary.

Great things may happen in their monasteries 14,000 feet above the seal-level when they reach there in a short while. For they are leaving this country in a couple of weeks.

The Chief Lama predicts great difficulty in reducing his youthful followers to subjection and to the ordinary routine of life when they return.

Some of them may be given a few years’ solitary confinement — in which the younger ones may try to emulate the Pope and King as poets.

Posted in 20th century, History of scholarship, Tibetan | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Impossible dates in manuscripts

Posted on 10/01/2010 by imre

Every now and then we come across impossible dates in Chinese manuscripts and inscriptions, which refer to years in reign periods that never existed. The common explanation for these is that the place where the manuscript was written was remote or peripheral and it took years until the news of the death of an emperor reached these lands, and, until that happened, people continued to use the old calendar. This explanation is puzzling because a lot has been written about the surprising efficiency of Chinese bureaucracy, in which information travelled at great speed. Thus by lighting the fire on watchtowers, news of a foreign invasion could reach the capital lying thousands of miles away within a single day. Surely, the death of a monarch and the ascension of his successor was an event worthy of communicating rapidly to the remotest corners of the empire. But then how are we to explain these impossible dates?

I suspect that a big portion of such dates are actually not impossible at all. Thus in manuscript IOL Tib J 754/C (from the Stein collection at the British Library), which is an early Song copy of an inscription in Liangzhou, we read in Enoki’s catalogue (“Appendix on the Chinese manuscripts,” in Vallée-Poussin, Louis de La. Catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts from Tun-huang in the India Office Library. London: Oxford University Press, 1962) that the text talks about “the 9th year of the Baoding era” 保定九年, which is an impossible date because the Baoding reign (561-565) only lasted 5 years. Now looking at the photograph of the manuscript one notices that it actually has “the 1st year of the Baoding era” 保定元年, only the character 元 is written in running hand style. This date in the text refers to the founding of the Gantong monastery and, no surprise, in transmitted sources we can find that the monastery was indeed established in the 1st year of Baoding. So there goes the mystery.

In manuscript P.3720 from the Pelliot collection at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, there is a copy of a record about the building of the Mogao caves. The end concludes with the following words:

至大歷三年戊申即四百四年﹐又至今大唐庚午即四百九十六[年]
[時咸] 通六年正月十五日
Until the 3rd year of the Dali era (768), a wushen year, it has been 404 years; further on, until the gengwu year (850) of our present Great Tang dynasty, it has been 496 years.
The time is the 15th day of the 1st month of the 6th year of the Xiantong era

Now there is an obvious problem here with the numbers. The two dates of 768 and 850 are 82 years apart, whereas 496 minus 404 comes to 92. So we have a discrepancy of ten years inexplicable on the basis of the text alone. The solution to the problem lies in the date of 850, referred to as “the gengwu year.” The rest of the text points to 860, which would have been a gengchen year, and the first year of the Xiantong reign period. Thus the mistake was in a single character, substituting [geng]wufor [geng]chen.

At other times, it is simply a mistake in the original text. Hans Bielenstein, for example, compared biographies from the Houhanshu that also survived as inscriptions (“Later Han inscriptions and dynastic biographies: A historiographical comparison”). There he cites some examples of impossible dates where the transmitted biography corrects the date on the inscription. Only in one case does the inscription correct the official biography, which is obviously a case of an error in the course of textual transmission. After listing several examples, Bielenstein also adds, “in rare cases, there is no way of reconciling dates at all.” But this simply means that we do not have enough data. Were we to find another inscription or a group of Han wood slips in a tomb, perhaps we could understand where the mistake is.

1st year of Baoding on the manuscript

1st year of Baoding on the manuscript

Posted in archaeology, Dating, Dunhuang, epigraphy, History of scholarship, Palaeography | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A mysterious manuscript about the discovery of Dunhuang manuscripts

Posted on 09/18/2010 by imre

The mysterious manuscript referred to in the title is a little notebook written in a cursive caoshu hand and is currently located at the Gansu Provincial Library. The title Dunhuang xianhua 敦煌闲话 (Idle Chat about Dunhuang) is included in the notebook so it is the original title. Otherwise nothing is known about it. Its content describes the manuscript discoveries at the early part of the 20th century at the Thousand Buddha Caves near the town of Dunhuang. This is a well-known story involving foreign explorers such as Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and Tachibana Zuicho but a number of aspects make this particular description of events peculiar. Not the least of these was that this seemed to be a text dating before all of this information had become commonly known in China.

I came across this notebook in a recent publication by the same title (Dunhuang xianhua, Gansu renmin chubanshe, 2009) that came out in a series called Dunhuang jiyi shuxi 敦煌记忆书系 (Dunhuang memory books) which I picked up at the bookshop of the GansuProvincial Museum. I was on a field trip with my colleague Sam van Schaik, re-tracing the pilgrimage of a tenth-century Chinese pilgrim through the Hexi Corridor. (See Sam’s blog Earlytibet.com for some of our discoveries during the trip.) The book Dunhuang xianhua intrigued me from the very start. First of all, there was no date to it, nor author. One could only hypothesize about who and why wrote it. Then there was a markedly Japanese-friendly voice that differed from the usual Chinese attitude towards A) the Japanese and B) foreigners who took Dunhuang manuscripts out of the country. Based on a few references to historically identifiable references such as one of Chiang Kai Shek’s military campaigns or Sven Hedin’s expedition, Li Zhengyu, who wrote the Preface to the published edition dated the notebook to about 1943. This, of course, made the pro-Japanese voice appear even more bizarre, as this would have been during the prime of the Resistance War with Japan.

Since I was already in Lanzhou and I still had a few hours before my plane left, I decided to visit the Provincial Library and look at the original. I was directed to the Northwestern Regional Texts section on the 3rd floor where I soon found out that there was yet another copy of the same manuscript, only this one in a single volumes, as opposed to the two volumes of the original. I asked to look at both. The two-volume notebook was the original, written in an extremely cursive script (kuangcao 狂草)which was very hard to read. The one-volume item was a manuscript copy of the original manuscript, according to the colophon completed in 1980 by Zhang Bangyan 張邦彥. This was in a more legible running xingshu script. The two “editions” were more or less the same, with minor discrepancies, such as writing dates in Western numerals vs. Chinese characters, substituting some of the simplified forms of the original cursive script with traditional forms, etc.

To me, one of the surprising points in the manuscript was that the surname of Tachibana Zuicho 橘瑞超, the young Japanese explorer who visited the caves with his colleague Yoshikawa Koichiro 吉川小一郎 in January 1912 was written as 立花 (as opposed to 橘), which makes two conjectures possible regarding the person who wrote down the story in this notebook. First, that he was not Japanese because, apart from the fact that the narrative is written in classical Chinese, he would have known the correct way of writing Tachibana’s name who had been well-known in Japan on account of the expeditions. Secondly, that he heard the story rather than read it, otherwise he would have remembered how it was written. This latter point is of course corroborated by occasional references in the text to having heard all this from a “Master” over tea and at his studio, etc.

The really interesting issue with regard to this text is, of course, who the Master was. Zhang Bangyan who made a copy in 1980 thought that this must have been Zhang Daqian 張大千, the celebrated Chinese painter who was also an avid collector and who had spent an extended period of time at the Dunhuang caves, copying the paintings. He also thought that the text was written by a Japanese author and then translated into Chinese. Li Zhengyu, however, in his Preface to the published edition hypothesized that the Master might have been a Japanese scholar and artist, and the best candidate would have been Nakamura Fusetsu 中村不折, the famous Japanese painter, calligrapher and collector. To me this latter choice is particularly appealing because Nakamura was well-known for his interest in Chinese art and calligraphy, especially the Dunhuang manuscripts. In fact, his immense collection, which is now part of the Nakamura Museum of Calligraphy, includes about a hundred and fifty Dunhuang manuscripts, and a number of others from Turfan and other sites in Xinjiang. For this very reason I found it strange that no mention was made of a piece of Nakamura’s writing called Shinkyo to Kanshuku no tanken 新疆ト甘肅ノ探険 (Exploration of Xinjiang and Gansu) published in 1933.

Nakamura Fusetsu in front of his collection of Chinese art

Nakamura Fusetsu in front of his collection of Chinese art (From the Taito City Culture Guidebook website.)

Unfortunately, this is an extremely rare publication and although I have come across it before, I was not able to consult a copy now when I needed it for a specific task. Eventually I had no choice but to buy a copy in Tokyo, hoping that I would be able to find something useful in it and thus my investment would pay off. A quick read through the first pages seemed to confirm my earlier hunch that there is a connection between the two texts, although the Chinese one is definitely not a translation of the Japanese. Instead, my guess would be that Nakamura held talks about the topic of Dunhuang manuscripts, either publicly or to a select group of his disciples, and this manuscript in the Gansu Provincial Library is a record of these talks. Recorded not by Nakamura himself but by one of his disciples who happened to be Chinese. How this notebook got to Gansu remains a mystery but one would think that this had to have happened because of the proximity of the Dunhuang caves.

Posted in 20th century, Aurel Stein, books, Dunhuang, exploration, History of scholarship, Japanese, Otani expeditions | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Chinese books, starting at the end

Posted on 08/07/2010 by imre
Entrance to the Chinese Collection

"Entrance to the Chinese Collection" (A Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Collection, Now Exhibiting at St. George's Place, Hyde Park Corner, London 1843)

William B. Langdon’s catalogue of Nathan Dunn’s Chinese collection (A Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Collection, Now Exhibiting at St. George’s Place, Hyde Park Corner, London 1843) has been one of the best-sellers of its time, selling about a 100,000 copies. The exhibition supposed to have featured “Ten Thousand Things” , thus the catalogue is an interesting list of Chinese artefacts that had reached Europe in the first half of the 19th century. In the section on books (p. 96) the first entry reads, “Specimens of Chinese books, with the titles on the ends, shewing the mode of binding, with the envelope.” I suppose “titles on the ends” simply means that there was relatively little awareness of the fact that Chinese books began from the other end and thus to European readers the title labels seemed to have been glued to the back cover.

A few years earlier, William Frend has commented upon the unusual way of reading a Chinese text in one of his lectures at the London Mechanics’ Institution: “There are some peculiarities attached to the Chinese method of reading, which appear rather singular to the English eye. In the first place, the beginning of their books is at what we should consider the end, and consequently they would appear to us to read backwards.  In the next place, instead of reading as we do, from the left of the page to the right, the Chinese read from the top of the page to the bottom.” (The London Mechanics’ Register, 1826, p. 340)

Obviously, the direction of the text would have been obvious for anyone who have been able to read Chinese even on an elementary level. But there must have been few Westerners capable of this at this time, especially outside of China.

Posted in 19th century, books, History of scholarship | Tagged | Leave a comment

Criticism of Chen Mengjia by fellow scholars

Posted on 03/10/2010 by imre

Reading on the history of simplified characters I came across a small book called 1957年文字改革辩论选辑 (Shanghai: Xin zhishi, 1958) which contains a series of articles from contemporary periodicals about the writing reform. I was surprised to find two vicious articles criticizing Chen Mengjia 陳夢家 (1911-1966), the famous archaeologist and palaeographer, for his opposing the simplification of Chinese characters. I knew about him encountering such criticism during the Cultural Revolution that eventually led to his suicide in 1966, what surprised me about these two articles that they were written by the eminent linguists Tang Lan 唐蘭 (1901-1979) and Wang Li 王力 (1900-1986).

Tang Lan’s article is titled “Is the rightist Chen Mengjia a ‘scholar’?” 右派分子陈梦家是“学者”嗎？ (I am reproducing the characters as they appear in the book: you can see that this was written between the two large waves of simplification, with some characters simplified, others not). Right in the first paragraph, Tang Lan answers the question whether Chen can be called a scholar at all with a definite “No!” and explains that he is a “counterfait scholar, in fact an overzealous and unscrupulous carreerist, an opportunist always on a lookout for personal gain, only pretending to know things, a swindler who has gained his fame by deceiving the world.” Wow! — was my reaction to this short introduction. But the rest of the article continues along these lines, for a total of 15 pages. And this was written by Tang Lan, one of the top palaeographers of modern China, whose works are still being used by new generations of linguists and philologists.

Wang Li’s article is called “Criticizing the rightist Chen Mengjia for his absurd views against the reform of writing” 批判右派分子陈梦家关于反对文字改革的荒謬言論. This text is not as malicious as that by Tang Lan, yet it is still a direct criticism of Chen, seeing his opposition as a covert attack on the Communist Party. I am sure in later years, after the Cultural Revolution was over and China began its economic reforms, Wang Li was not proud of this article. Since Tang Lan died in 1979, he might have not lived to regret his attitude.

These were the kinds of attacks that eventually led to the suicide of Chen Mengjia. Many of his attackers are still alive, fulfilling important academic positions. Of course, we can claim that Chen was overly sensitive — he was a poet and an aesthete, apparently not the surviving type. But judging from the amount of criticism that survives about him from the 1950s, he must have been under tremendous pressure.

Posted in 20th century, archaeology, Chinese writing, History of scholarship | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Chinese seals found in Ireland

Posted on 02/02/2010 by imre

A while ago I published an article called “The story of the Chinese seals found in Ireland” (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2008, 18: 465-479) about a group of Chinese porcelain seals discovered in different locations throughout Ireland during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Since at the time there was no easily available information on the date and origin of these objects, they went down in history as one of the great mysteries. After learning from an expert that the inscriptions on them were written in the “seal script” which was in use in China at the time of Confucius, everyone assumed that the seals themselves were three thousand years old, which, of course, made their appearance in Ireland even more enigmatic. The discovery of these artefacts coincided with the period of Irish nationalism which sought to separate themselves from England as much as possible, and part of this trend was the increased belief in the Oriental origin of the Irish people. The “ancient” Chinese seals came to signify a long-lost connection between Ireland and the East.

The reality was of course much simpler, yet not less interesting. The seals were fairly new and came to Ireland shortly before their discovery. That the inscriptions on them were in the seal script had ne bearing on their age, since most seals in China use the same archaicized seal script, even today. But the story of the mystery is intriguing because it sheds light on nationalistically driven attitudes during the 19th century and an overzealous eagerness to use the seals to support contemporary theories.

This is the story in a nutshell. In any case, I am posting this here because there were a few inscriptions (out of the total sixty-one) that I was not able to read. Perhaps the images will trigger someone else’s memory and we can finally have all of them deciphered. You will see that there is some overlap between them, some characters appear in more than one inscription, and the first three inscriptions are the same. Yet I can only read part of them — the undeciphered characters are marked with a square box.

 chinese-seals-of-ireland

Posted in 19th century, archaeology, Chinese writing, History of scholarship, Palaeography, Seals | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment