Tangutology
Tangutology or Tangut studies is the study of the culture, history, art and language of the ancient Tangut people, especially as seen through the study of contemporaneous documents written by the Tangut people themselves. As the Tangut language was written in a unique and complex script and the spoken language became extinct, the cornerstone of Tangut studies has been the study of the Tangut language and the decipherment of the Tangut script.
The Tangut people founded the Western Xia dynasty in northwestern China, which was eventually conquered by the Mongol Empire. The Tangut script, which was devised in 1036, was widely used in printed books and on monumental inscriptions during the Western Xia dynasty, as well as during the Yuan dynasty, but the language became extinct sometime during the Ming dynasty. The latest known examples of Tangut writing are Buddhist inscriptions dated 1502 on two dharani pillars from a temple in Baoding, Hebei. By the Qing dynasty all knowledge of the Tangut language and script had been lost, and no examples or descriptions of the Tangut script had been preserved in any surviving Chinese books from the Song, Yuan or Ming dynasties. It was not until the 19th century that the Tangut language and script were rediscovered.
The birth of Tangut studies
Earliest identification of Tangut
The earliest modern identification of the Tangut script occurred in 1804 when a Chinese scholar called Zhang Shu observed that the Chinese text of a Chinese-Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele known as the Liangzhou Stele at the Huguo Temple in Wuwei, Gansu, had a Western Xia era name, and so concluded that the corresponding inscription in an unknown script must be the native Western Xia script; and hence the unknown writing in the same style on the Cloud Platform at Juyong Pass at the Great Wall of China north of Beijing must also be the Tangut script.However, Zhang's identification of the Tangut script was not widely known, and more than half a century later, scholars were still debating what the unknown script on the Cloud Platform was. The Cloud Platform, which had been built in 1343–1345 as the base for a pagoda, was inscribed with Buddhist texts in six different scripts, but only the first five of these six were known to Chinese and Western scholars at the time. In 1870 Alexander Wylie wrote an influential paper entitled "An ancient Buddhist inscription at Keu-yung Kwan" in which he asserted that the unknown script was Jurchen, and it was not until 1899 that Stephen Wootton Bushell published a paper demonstrating conclusively that the unknown script was Tangut.
Tentative decipherments of Tangut
Bushell, a physician at the British Legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900, was a keen numismatist and had collected coins issued by the Western Xia state with inscriptions in the Tangut script. To read the inscriptions on these coins, he attempted to decipher as many Tangut characters as possible by comparing the Chinese and Tangut texts on a bilingual stele from Liangzhou, Wuwei. In 1896, he published a list of thirty-seven Tangut characters with their corresponding meaning in Chinese. Using this key he was able to decipher the four-character inscription on one of his Western Xia coins as meaning "Precious Coin of the Da'an period ". This was the first time that an unknown Tangut text, albeit only four characters in length, had been translated.At about the same time, Bushell was working on Tangut numismatic inscriptions, Gabriel Devéria, a diplomat at the French Legation in Beijing, was studying the bilingual Tangut-Chinese Liangzhou Stele. In 1898, a year before his death, he published two important articles on the Tangut script and the Liangzhou Stele.
The third European in China to undertake the study of Tangut was Georges Morisse, an interpreter at the French Legation in Beijing, who made progress in deciphering the Tangut script by comparing the text of the Chinese version of the Lotus Sutra with that of three volumes of a manuscript of the Tangut version which had been discovered in Beijing in 1900 during the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. By comparing the Tangut version of the sutra with the corresponding Chinese version of the sutra, Morisse was able to identify some 200 Tangut characters and deduce some grammatical rules for Tangut, which he published in 1904.
The development of Tangut studies (1908 to the 1930s)
The paucity of surviving Tangut texts and inscriptions, and in particular the lack of any dictionary or glossary of the language, meant that it was difficult for scholars to go beyond the preliminary work on the decipherment of Tangut by Bushell and Morisse. The breakthrough in Tangut studies finally came in 1908 when Pyotr Kozlov discovered the abandoned Western Xia fortress city of Khara-Khoto on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia. Khara-Khoto had been abruptly abandoned at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, and, partially covered by sand, it had remained largely untouched for over 500 years. Inside a large stupa outside the city walls Kozlov discovered a hoard of some 2,000 printed books and manuscripts, mostly in Chinese and Tangut, as well as many pieces of Tangut Buddhist art, which he sent back to the Russian Geographical Society in Saint Petersburg for preservation and study. The material was subsequently transferred to the Asiatic Museum of the Academy of Sciences, which later became the Saint Petersburg branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was the discovery of this unprecedented hoard of Tangut material by Kozlov that led to the development of Tangutology as a separate academic discipline within the field of oriental studies.Russia
After the arrival of the Khara-Khoto material in Saint Petersburg in autumn 1909, sinologist Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov worked on the preservation and identification of the hundreds of books and manuscripts that were written in the Tangut script, and it was not long before he discovered a bilingual Chinese-Tangut glossary called the Pearl in the Palm which he immediately realised was the key to deciphering the Tangut language. He later discovered three monolingual Tangut dictionaries and glossaries among the Khara-Khoto material: Homophones ; Sea of Characters ; and Mixed Characters. Ivanov published a number of articles on the Tangut script between 1909 and 1920, which helped disseminate knowledge of the Tangut script, and encouraged other scholars to study the language. In 1916, based on the material published by Ivanov, the German orientalist Berthold Laufer published a study of the Tangut language in which he attempted to reconstruct the pronunciations of some characters, and in which he proposed that the Tangut language belonged to the Lolo-Moso branch of the Tibeto-Burman family.Based on the Pearl in the Palm and the other dictionaries, Ivanov was able to compile a short dictionary of about 3,000 Tangut characters. His dictionary was completed in 1918, but it was not published due to the political instability of the time. Ivanov deposited the manuscript of his dictionary at the Asiatic Museum, but he took it back home in 1922, and it disappeared after his arrest and execution in 1937, a victim of Stalin's Great Purge.
Following on from Ivanov was Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky. Nevsky had been resident in Japan since 1915, where he had studied the Japanese, Ainu and Tsou languages, but after he met Ivanov in China in 1925 he started to work on the study of the Tangut texts from Khara-Khoto and the decipherment of the Tangut script. In 1929 Nevsky moved back to the Soviet Union to work at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leningrad, where he worked on a dictionary of Tangut based on the lexical materials found at Khara-Khoto. However, in late autumn 1937, before his dictionary was ready for publication, he and his Japanese wife were arrested and executed, thereby bringing a brutal end to the study of the Tangut language in the Soviet Union.
China
In 1912 the renowned antiquarian Luo Zhenyu met Ivanov in Saint Petersburg, and he was allowed to make a copy of nine pages from the Pearl in the Palm, which he published in China in the same year. He met Ivanov again in 1922 in Tianjin, and obtained a complete copy of the Pearl in the Palm, which was subsequently published by his eldest son, Luo Fucheng, in 1924. Luo Fucheng also published the first facsimile edition of the Homophones in 1935. Luo's third son, Luo Fuchang shared the family's interest in Tangut, and wrote an influential handbook on the Tangut script when he was just eighteen years old.Further discoveries of Tangut texts were made in China, most notably a cache of Buddhist sutras in five pottery jars that were unearthed in Lingwu in Ningxia in 1917. These texts were sent to Peiping, and form the nucleus of the Tangut collection of the National Library of China. A special issue of the Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping dedicated to these texts was published in 1932, with articles written by a variety of Chinese, Japanese and Russian scholars.
Elsewhere
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of scholars, including Nevsky in Russia, Laufer in Germany, Wang Jingru 王靜如 in China, and Stuart N. Wolfenden at the University of California, Berkeley in the US, focussed their attention on several manuscripts from Khara-Khoto that had Tibetan phonetic glosses to Tangut texts, which enabled them to reconstruct some of the phonetic features of Tangut.Meanwhile, in England, Gerard Clauson had started to study the thousands of Tangut manuscript fragments that had been recovered from Khara-Khoto between 1913 and 1916 by Aurel Stein, and deposited at the British Museum in London. During 1937 and 1938 Clauson wrote a Skeleton dictionary of the Hsi-hsia language, which was published in facsimile in 2016.
However, with the Second Sino-Japanese War raging in the Far East, and political repression in the Soviet Union, Tangut studies ground to a halt in China, Japan and the Soviet Union during the late 1930s. With the onset of World War II Tangut studies stagnated in Europe and America as well.