ABSTRACT
The discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts at the beginning of the twentieth century in China has opened up new avenues in Chinese scholarship. These manuscripts, numbering around 40,000 scrolls, 1 offer an unprecedented source of information on medieval Chinese popular literature, economics, social structure, politics, and religious activities. The majority of the manuscripts deal with Buddhist topics, with a small portion concerning Taoist texts and Manichaean scriptures. While most of the manuscripts are written in Chinese, there are also scrolls written in Tibetan, Sanskrit, Mongolian and Uighur, just to name a few; 2 Thanks to the discovery of these manuscripts, a new research area in Chinese scholarship known collectively as 'Dunhuangology', or Dunhuangxue in Chinese, was established around the first quarter of this century. To date, Dunhuang scholarship has become a prominent area of Chinese studies not only within China, but also in the West.
