SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS
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ching) which may be, however, an early Ming print of the late fourteenth century.22 One thing is certain: there has been virtually no lasting influence of foreigners on intellectual and artistic life in China under the Mongols. The non-Chinese intellectuals tried to become Chinese and to make the Chinese forget their non-Chinese, Western or Near Eastern origins.
In the East-West direction, the situation is different. Here we see China as a cultural center from which all kinds of influences spread west and reached Central Asia as well as Near Eastern countries. It is out of the question even to try to enumerate the many cultural elements that found their way into Western Asia and even to Europe. I shall have to confine myself to just a few examples, which do not even pretend to be representative — they have rather been selected for showing the variety of fields where Chinese influences were absorbed, sometimes with a lasting effect. It should be mentioned here that some scholars suggest that the invention of gunpowder and printing in Europe are due to a stimulus diffusion spreading from China. These things are hard to prove, in particular because there are missing links. The Islamic civilizations of the Near East, for example, never adopted printing. Books in Arabic, Persian, or Turkish were, until quite recently, always copied by hand. But in Central Asia, book printing by xylograph became fairly common. The Tibetans had, at a comparatively early date, taken to printing, and Uighurs as well as Mongols had printed books at least as early as the thirteenth century. The various expeditions to Central Asia at the beginning of this century brought to light many examples of early Uighur and Mongol prints. Some of these prints, if not most of them, were Buddhist. Their printers were probably Chinese, because usually there are Chinese paginations and Chinese characters used for identifying the woodblocks of individual texts.
Another field where Chinese influence in Central Asia and beyond turned out to be strong was institution and bureaucracy. It is surprising to see that even after the Islamisation of Eastern Turkestan (middle of the fourteenth century), Chinese institutions survived, although direct contacts with China proper were neither frequent nor intensive. There is, for example, an unpublished Mongol document in Kyoto from which we can see that the
SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS
67
ching) which may be, however, an early Ming print of the late fourteenth century.22 One thing is certain there has been vir- tually no lasting influence of foreigners on intellectual and artistic life in China under the Mongols. The non-Chinese intellectuals tried to become Chinese and to make the Chinese forget their non-Chinese, Western or Near Eastern origins.
In the East-West direction the situation is different. Here we see China as a cultural center from which all kinds of influences spread west and reached Central Asia as well as Near Eastern countries. It is out of the question even to try to enumerate the many cultural elements that found their way into Western Asia and even to Europe. I shall have to confine myself to just a few examples which do not even pretend to be representative — they have rather been selected for showing the variety of fields where Chinese influences were absorbed, sometimes with a lasting cffect. It should be mentioned here that some scholars suggest that the invention of gunpowder and printing in Europe are due to a stimulus diffusion spreading from China. These things are hard to prove, in particular because there are missing links. The Islamic civilizations of the Near East, for example, never adopted printing. Books in Arabic, Persian or Turkish were, until quite recently, always copied by hand. But in Central Asia book printing by xylograph became fairly common. The Tibetans had at a comparatively early date taken to printing, and Uighurs as well as Mongols had printed books at least as early as the thirteenth century. The various expeditions to Central Asia at the beginning of this century brought to light many examples of early Uighur and Mongol prints. Some of these prints, if not most of them, were Buddhist. Their printers were probably Chinese, because usually there are Chinese paginations and Chinese characters used for identifying the woodblocks of indivi- dual texts.
Another field where Chinese influence in Central Asia and beyond turned out to be strong was institution and bureaucracy. It is surprising to see that even after the Islamisation of Eastern Turkestan (middle of the fourteenth century) Chinese institutions survived, although direct contacts with China proper were neither frequent nor intensive. There is, for example, an unpublished Mongol document in Kyoto from which we can see that the
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