[
    {
        "id": 204562,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1963",
        "page_number": 43,
        "title": "RAS-1963",
        "content_text": "38 \n\nL. CARRINGTON GOODRICH \n\nTibet, Paris, 1940, p. 161.) Actually from the last named (see p. 129, n. 5) and from other sources (such as S. Lévi, Le Népal, II, Paris, 1905, p. 148), we learn that writing was just then being introduced to Tibet. This is a far cry from China's experience of two millennia of writing (before A.D. 600), and the great urge for multiple copies of texts on the part of all sections of the literate community. \n\nThe first known example of wood-block printing came from Japan during the years 764-770. This is explained by the constant coming and going of Japanese students to T’ang China, and some scholars and Buddhist priests from the mainland to Japan. We learn, for example, of one Chinese scholar becoming head of the new University at Nara in 735, and of one Japanese who, after 19 years in the Chinese capital, returned to Nara, and in 735 became tutor to the empress Shotoku. It was she who ordered the production of one million three storey stupas, in each of which were to be placed six charms. (Only last spring I saw at Horyuji # 96 of these reliquaries, together with six copies of the printed dharani.) \n\nThe first recorded notice in China is dated 835. It tells of a memorial to the throne suggesting an edict forbidding the printing of calendars from wood-blocks. After this the notices and dated materials recently discovered multiply. I list some of these: \n\n1. Under the date of 839 Ennin mentions seeing one thousand copies of the Nirvana Sutra at Mount Wu-t'ai § J. This is so large a figure one may well wonder if they were printed. 2. It has been suggested that the Vinaya was first printed before 845. We know that the wood-blocks were burned in a fire at Ching-ai ssu in Loyang. So the poet Ssu-k’ung T'u (837-908) proposed the preparation of a fresh edition. \n\n3. Fan Shu, who flourished during the years 860-874, is authority for the statement that Ho-kan Chi T✯ who was active in Kiangsi ⇓ in 846-851, printed several thousand copies of a book concerned with alchemy. \n\n5 \n\n4. A beautiful copy of the Diamond Sutra &♬Į✯, printed 868 (it is 174 feet long and 10 inches wide) on white buff paper, was discovered in 1907 at Tunhuang and is now in the British Museum.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1963.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/4m90m091v",
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    },
    {
        "id": 205284,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1967",
        "page_number": 46,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "39\n\nPRINTING - A NEW DISCOVERY\n\nL. CARRINGTON GOODRICH\n\nIn 1963 the Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society published a paper of mine entitled \"The development of printing in China and its effect on the renaissance under the Sung dynasty (960 - 1279).\" Recently a new find was made which, if confirmed, pushes back the history of block printing some fifteen years, possibly more. The discovery occurred last October when certain Korean scholars noticed that a stone stupa known as Sokka Tap 釋迦塔, at Pulguk sa 佛國寺, had been damaged. On investigation they found a printed Buddhist sutra hidden in its interior. (See plates 5 and 6) It was in the form of a scroll made of thick mulberry paper, mounted on a piece of bamboo, lacquered at each end. The text is some 630 cm. long and 6 cm. wide, the printed portion being 5.3 cm. in width. The exact length cannot be determined as the scroll has not been fully unrolled due to its poor condition. In fact, about one third has suffered serious damage from worms; the rest of it, however, is in fair condition. Later examination revealed that the printing had been executed by means of a series of woodblocks, twelve in number, each about 20 or 21 inches in length. Then the separate pieces of paper had been joined together to form a continuous scroll, just as was the text of the famous Diamond Sutra of 868, discovered in 1907 at the cave library of Ch'ien-fo-tung near Tun-huang (west China) by Sir Aurel Stein, now at the British Museum. The scholars who have pronounced this an authentic piece of printing are Professors Kim Sanggi and Yi Hongjik, members of the Cultural Assets Preservation Committee, Ministry of Education, Seoul.\n\nIn the cavity of the stupa there were, besides the scroll, reliquary vessels, Buddhist images, tiny pagodas, incense sticks, pieces of silk, etc. (See plate 7). They seem to be typical of the period not only in Korea, but also in China and in Japan. These items are important discoveries in themselves, and deserve further study.\n\nThe text is well known. Its title in Chinese is Wu kou ching kuang ta to-lo-ni ching (in Sanskrit: Raśmivimalavaviśuddhaprabhā dhāranī). It was first rendered into",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205285,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1967",
        "page_number": 47,
        "title": "RAS-1967",
        "content_text": "40\n\nL. CARRINGTON GOODRICH\n\nChinese by Mi-t'o-hsien tu, a monk from Tokhara in central Asia, who lived at Ch'ang-an (then capital of China) from 680 to 704, after which he returned home. These are the years when the Empress Wu (reigned 684-704) ruled the land. This fact\n\n武后 is important as the Empress foisted certain strange characters upon her Chinese subjects. One at least of these appears in the sutra:  for (heaven; the elements sun, moon, and earth appearing inside an old form for ); this helps to establish the genuineness of the text. Now the stupa seems to have been erected at the same time as the temple itself, which was completed in 751. Unfortunately no date has so far been found on the text, as was the case in the above-mentioned Diamond Sutra of 868. There seems little reason to doubt the mid-8th century attribution, however, as the calligraphy of the scribe who brushed out the characters for the woodblock is like that of other literary remains of mid-T'ang provenance (found at Tun-huang and elsewhere), and the scholars reporting the discovery assert that the artifacts found together with the text showed no sign of a disturbing hand.\n\nIf then the date of 751 or earlier may be accepted, Korea has revealed evidence for printing which pre-dates the evidence from Japan. As may be recalled, the exact dates for the printing of the charms distributed by the Empress Shōtoku are not exactly known but they run between 764 and 770. (See the discussion in my revision of Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and its Spread Westward, 2nd edn., Columbia University Press 1955, chapter 7.) Add to this another remarkable fact: both the Japanese empress and the unknown individual responsible for the printing at Pulguk sa made use of the same sutra. They must have considered that it had unusual powers. The main difference between the texts is that the Korean made much more use of it. His runs to twenty feet or more as against eighteen inches in the Japanese examples. The width of the two texts is almost identical (2 inches). These measurements may be compared with the sutras printed about two centuries later; one group, found in the pagoda of a monastery at Hu-chow (Chekiang) bearing a date equivalent to 956, and others found in the Thunder Peak Pagoda near Hangchow, dated 975. The first measured 2.5 inches in width (inner portion 1.95 ins.), length not specified; the second 2.8 inches wide and 6 feet 9 inches long. Incidentally the items dated 956 were also dhāranīs taken from the sutra translated by Mi-t'o-hsien.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1967.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/0c488p70g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 208470,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1978",
        "page_number": 194,
        "title": "RAS-1978",
        "content_text": "178\n\nDAVID H. S. CHAU\n\nThe fact that in the Tsin Dynasty (#), 303-379 AD, the technique had been widely used, and about the seventh or eighth century the Chinese already used woodblock to print calendars (Ɔ).\n\nThe oldest woodblock printed book still in existence, so far as we understand, is the Diamond Sutra (✨#∞) a Buddhist text (**) printed in the year 868 AD, which was found along with thousands of manuscripts from Mokao (†) the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (†) at Tun-huang ( ). Tun-huang, a city situated on the outskirt of the Lob Desert in western Kansu Province (+), was once the main gate of the Old Silk Road (***). From the first century until the fourteenth century, merchants, caravans, travellers, monks, and armies leaving for the West all passed through Tun-huang on their way to the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Europe. The Italian merchant Marco Polo („§ +) used the same route to come to China.\n\nHollowed out in irregular tiers along the face of a steep cliff, the cave temples of the Thousand Buddhas were known in the Tang Dynasty () as Mokao or “Grottos of Surpassing Height\". They are located a few miles southeast of Tun-huang City. There had been huge Buddhist monasteries at the place for centuries, but it became forgotten when the Ming Dynasty (#9) began trading with the West by sea, and since then most of the caves had been buried by the shifting sand of the desert. In the late nineteenth century, it was rediscovered by a Taoist Priest called Wang Yuan-lu (10*), but by then all the wooden structures of the monasteries had vanished, and only the stone caves used as shrines remained.\n\nMokao is more than five thousand feet in length and consists of four hundred and ninety-two caves of various sizes. Over two thousand Buddhist statues and numerous huge murals can still be found in the caves. If we could have all the murals linked together, they would be at least twenty-five miles long.\n\nIn the year 1899, Wang Yuan-lu discovered an old monastery library in a walled-up chamber behind a mural in one of the caves. In the chamber, he found more than twenty thousand volumes of manuscripts and woodblock-printed documents and books, among them the Diamond Sutra. The news of the discovery soon spread abroad. In 1907 an Englishman, Sir Aurel Stein, traded with the priest and carried away 29 cases of manuscripts and books. More",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1978.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/8g84t8593",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214577,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1998",
        "page_number": 435,
        "title": "RAS-1998",
        "content_text": "404\n\nVISIT TO THE AUREL STEIN COLLECTION OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM\n\nPAUL BOLDING\n\nThe collection that Marc Aurel Stein took to London in the first decade of the 20th century yielded some of its secrets to a group of \"Friends\" who visited the British Museum on October 25, 1999. Dr Anne Farrer, the curator, kindly agreed to show some of the undisplayed objects to members of the Friends of the HK Branch of the RAS in London.\n\nThe BM collection includes scrolls, paintings on silk and other textiles that Aurel Stein removed from Cave 17 at Dunhuang, Gansu province. The cave, a memorial chapel to a 9th century monk, was walled up in the 10th century for reasons that are unclear and was opened on June 21, 1900. Aurel Stein was the first foreigner to gain access to the cave, in 1907.\n\nHe collected many thousands of objects, some 5,000 of which rest in the tiny, windowless, air-conditioned \"Stein Room\" in a corner of the BM. (He also bought some fakes, but that is another story.) The cave itself contained some 40,000 objects. The British Library alone holds some 14,000 scrolls and fragments in Chinese. It acquired textual material, including the \"Diamond Sutra\", the world's earliest known dated printed book, after it was founded in 1973. As Stein had financial support from the Government of India as well as the British Museum, further material went to the National Museum in Delhi, mainly three-dimensional pieces and wall paintings.\n\nThis was a period when countries were vying to expand their museum collections, and others were soon attracted to the area. As a result, objects from Dunhuang are found in Russia, Japan, France, Germany and elsewhere. A thriving international scholarship surrounds the material today. China has made no secret of the fact that it would like the Dunhuang material returned!\n\nDr Farrer showed a dozen or so of the most beautiful and interesting objects, explaining their significance.\n\nPage 435\nPage 436",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794",
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    }
]