66
HERBERT FRANKE
Chinese artists of the tenth and twelfth centuries respectively. One does not even have to look at reproductions of his paintings to see how Chinese he is; the titles of his paintings alone show this. "Mountains in Rain", "A Grove of Leafy Trees in Mist and Rain", "Clearing after a Spring Rain over the Mountains" -- all these and many other titles suggest strongly that Kao stayed strictly within the Chinese tradition.21 In this connection another phenomenon must be noted. These foreigners not only seem to have lost their national background but also their religion. When we read, for example, the poems written by a Nestorian Önggüt in Chinese we do not find any Christian elements, nor is there any hint to Islamic faith in the poems of writers like Sa'd ad-Daula. Nothing could, of course, prevent these authors from, say, praising Allah in Chinese or writing a Christian hymn. And there was also nothing and nobody to prevent them from continuing to use their native language as a literary medium. The Mongol Government remained, on the whole, tolerant towards foreigners and foreign languages. But it seems as if the attraction of Chinese civilization was so strong that foreigners residing in China tried hard to be acknowledged by the Chinese intelligentsia as their equals. Or must we ascribe this phenomenon to a hostility of the Chinese who did not care to preserve literature written in foreign languages? There may have been poems written in Persian or Turkish in Yüan China, but if so, they certainly did not survive. There are certain indications that later Chinese nationalism under the Ming may have wiped out any traces of foreigners. In 1269 a new script for the Mongol language had been invented by Phags-pa Lama, a script that was meant to supersede the Uighur-Mongol script. The use of this new script, the so-called square script which was based on the Tibetan alphabet, was made obligatory by Imperial decree, and also used for printing Mongol books. But only fragments of one Mongol book printed in the Phags-pa script have survived, fragments of a Buddhist text (Subhāsitaratnanidhi) that have been found in Turfan. The Yuan dynastic history contains some data on the translations of Chinese works into Mongol. Apart from Buddhist scriptures at least seven works, some of them quite lengthy, were translated and printed, and nine more have at least reached the MS stage. But not a single one of these printed books and manuscripts has survived, with the possible exception of the bilingual Chinese-Mongol Classical Book of Filial Piety (Hsiao-