The Dunhuang and Turfan materials held at The East Asian Library and Gest Collection of Princeton University have been digitized and added to the International Dunhuang Project (IDP): (http://idp.bl.uk/).

Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi desert in western China, is perhaps the most famous place on the legendary Silk Road, since its cave library, sealed and hidden at the end of the first millennium CE, was re-discovered in 1900. Forty thousand manuscripts, paintings and printed documents on paper and silk were found in this library, dating from 100 BCE to CE 1400. In addition, tens of thousands more items have been excavated from other Silk Road archaeological sites, such as Turfan. The study of this material, which illuminates multifarious aspects of all walks of life, is a major and thriving sub-discipline of Chinese and Central Asian Studies, in fields as diverse as economy, law, literature and religion.

The documents, found, collected, bought and acquired in various ways by archeologists and others from many different countries, subsequently became dispersed over a large number of different collections, making access difficult. It is not rare that fragments of the same document have been dispersed across several continents. The main collections are in the UK, China, France, Germany, Japan and Russia.

The turmoil of the twentieth century also meant that conservation and cataloging were delayed, further hindering access. Following a conference in 1993 to discuss the problem of preservation and access, the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was established with external funds in order to reunite these artifacts in a virtual archive and to coordinate the preservation and cataloging of the objects, using the then-new web technologies to make this material fully accessible. The IDP’s directorate was established at the British Library; it has additional centers in China, Russia, Japan and Germany, and publishes a newsletter.

The core activities of conservation and cataloging have been supplemented with digitization, education and research. Access to the on-line IDP database with high-quality images of the manuscripts and other material is free.

The Princeton East Asian Library collection, with some one hundred eighty, sometimes very small fragments, is the largest one in the US, although it is dwarfed by the collections in Europe and Asia. They were acquired from Lucy Lo in the late 1980s. Some of the fragments collected by Ms. Lo and her late-husband, James, had been received, most already mounted, from the famous twentieth-century Chinese collector and painter Zhang Daqian when they were engaged in the 1940s with a large project to document photographically the paintings and sculptures of the Mogao caves in Dunhuang.

The 2590 photographs of the James and Lucy Lo Photograph Archive, indispensable for serious research due to deterioration and other changes having occurred in the caves since the 1940s, are available to scholars in digitized format in the Mellon International Dunhuang Archive project, part of ARTStor.

The Princeton collection includes a wide variety of items—religious sutras, student examination papers of the Confucian classics, a painting of unclear origin, Manichaean illustrations, letters and administrative records from several venues (the Dunhuang library cave, but also the “northern area” of Dunhang as well as the Astana tombs in Turfan)—in various languages, including Chinese, Uighur and Tangut. In addition to this main collection, the original Gest Collection already possessed one Buddhist scroll from Dunhuang, as well as a hemp wrapper dating to 645 CE. Some fragments have been directly linked with recently excavated material from the northern area of Dunhuang, and with documents in the Tenri Library, Nara, Japan which also were acquired from Zhang Daqian. A former graduate student at Princeton, Dr. Chen Huaiyu, is preparing a detailed catalog of the Chinese documents, to be published in the East Asian Library Journal. In addition, the Princeton University Art Museum holds the widely debated Suo Dan Laozi scroll, which, if genuine, may date to 270 CE.

In September 2007 scholars from China, the United Kingdom, France and the United States came to the Princeton campus to participate in a conference in honor of James and Lucy Lo devoted to Dunhuang studies.

In conjunction, thanks to a grant from the American Trust for the British Library, a digitization team from IDP London photographed the manuscripts in the Princeton East Asian Library and the Princeton University Art Museum. In addition, Lucy Lo’s still-private collection of Dunhuang fragments was photographed for the first time.

To view the Princeton images on IDP, Go to Advanced Search and select the Lo Archive, Princeton East Asian Library, or the Princeton University Art Museum as the holding institution.

For material on these collections in English, see e.g.

Frederick Mote, “The oldest Chinese book at Princeton,” Gest Library Journal I:1 (Winter 1986), pp. 34-44.

Judith Ogden Bullitt, “Princeton’s manuscript fragments from Tun-huang,” Gest Library Journal III:1-2 (Spring 1989), pp. 7-29.

Chen Guocan (tr, Jonathan K. Skaff), “Turfan documents of the Gest Collection, Princeton University,” Early Medieval China VI (2000), pp. 74-103.

Chen Huaiyu, “Chinese manuscripts from the Dunhuang and Turfan materials at the East Asian Library and the Gest Collection, Princeton University,” East Asian Library Journal (forthcoming).