[
    {
        "id": 205099,
        "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-1966",
        "page_number": 55,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "50\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\nmonks, missionaries and translators of the holy scriptures came from Iranian Central Asia at a time when there was certainly no universal peace in Asia. But was there really something like a Pax Mongolica, even during a very short time? The Mongol rulers of China who had adopted the Chinese dynastic name of Yüan in 1271, regarded themselves, from Khubilai on, more as rulers of China than of a universal empire of which China was only a part. This is reflected, as we shall see, in the Yuan dynastic history which is usually vague and uninformed as soon as a geographical area outside of China proper is mentioned. Although Khubilai was the Great Khan of all Mongols, his rule was always threatened by dissatisfied pretenders who tried to set up their own kingdoms in the Northern and Western regions, and there are recorded, in Chinese historical sources at least, as many feuds, campaigns and full-scale wars with other Mongol rulers and pretenders as good-will embassies from the other Mongol ulus (dominions); those of Chagatai in Central Asia, the Ilkhans in Persia and the Golden Horde rulers of Southwestern Siberia and South Russia. The situation, at least in the fourteenth century, among the non-Chinese ulus was not much different. The Golden Horde rulers and the Persian Ilkhans were, to say the least, not friendly to each other and war was frequent. In short, it seems as if the Pax Mongolica is no more than one of those brilliant simplifications that can serve as chapter titles for world history books. There remains some doubt whether it was easier to get from, say, Venice or the Black Sea region or Persia to China under the Mongols than some centuries earlier.\n\nHowever that may be, there can be no doubt that there was a certain amount of cultural contact between China and the non-Chinese West under the rule of the Mongol emperors. But the fact remains that there was no Chinese Marco Polo, no Chinese Rubruk or Giovanni da Montecorvino. China, it seems, was not very much interested in learning more about the countries of the West; we have in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries no Chinese pilgrims like I-ching and Hsüan-tsang who had travelled to India in search of the Buddhist religion. There was no appeal and no challenge to learn more about the West. This relative indifference towards the civilization outside one's own geographical habitat and cultural background is to be seen in The Secret History of the Mongols, This fascinating book, the oldest",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212154,
        "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-1990",
        "page_number": 96,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "73\n\nelements in the term 'Syrian brilliant teaching\". The expression ‘brilliant teaching' for Christianity occurs three times in the text of the Book of the Secret Peace and Joy, but there is no reference to Ta-ch'in.\n\nWe must conclude that, by the tenth century, the Nestorian monks at Tun-huang no longer used Adam's formula Ta-ch'in ching-chiao as punctiliously as they once had, although both Ta-ch'in and ching-chiao are found separately, and that a tendency to render proper names by transliteration from the Syriac had replaced the earlier policy of finding appropriate Chinese terms for them. Other examples of this tendency can be found in the titles of some of the thirty-five books listed in the Book of Praise: The Gospels (Syriac: evangelion) are the A-wan-chü-li-yung ching; the Epistles of St. Paul (Syriac: shlicha, the Book of the Apostle) the Shih-li-hui ching; the Book of Hosannas the Wu-sha-na ching; and the Book of the Cross (Syriac: tsuliba) the Tz'u-li-po ching. Although these are the titles, according to the Book of Praise, of books translated by Adam, it is difficult to believe that he would ever have allowed them to be given such meaningless names in Chinese. We have seen how much care he took in the Sian tablet inscription to make himself clear, and suitable Chinese titles could easily have been found for these books. But book titles, as we have already seen in the case of other Tun-huang manuscripts, are obvious targets for updating in the light of changing taste, and these Syriac-influenced titles were probably given to Adam's books by the Tun-huang monks in the tenth century. They lived on the fringes of China and were not writing for discerning scholars in the capital, as Adam was. They preserved the memory of their past glories under the leadership of men like Reuben and Adam, but a definite change of style had taken place since the confident days when the Sian tablet was erected. They were conscious that an era had passed.\n\n1\n\nNOTES\n\nHong Kong has a fine collection of bronze crosses from the Ongut region, worn by Nestorian Christians during the Yüan period, in the Fung Ping Shan museum of Hong Kong University. See F. S. Drake's article \"Nestorian Crosses and Nestorians in China under the Mongols\", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 2, 1962, pp. 11-25.\n\nHis Chinese name, given in the Sian tablet inscription, was A-lo-pen. It is suggested in Volume 3 of the Cambridge History of China that A-lo-pen is a transliteration of Reuben, and this seems to me as good a guess as any.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]