Nova N 176

[1][2] The manuscript is stored in the Nova fonds of Chinese manuscripts in the IOM (call number N 176[note 1], inventory number 1055), and comprises nine quires sewn together, one loose quire, and seven loose folios, in total 63½ folios (127 leaves), together with a piece of cloth cover with Khitan characters on it.

[5] The earliest known location for the manuscript was the Institute of Language, Literature and History of the Kyrgyz Branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Zaytsev notes the possibility that the book may have been discovered during excavations of the Silk Road city of Suyab (modern day Ak-Beshim in Kyrgyzstan) during 1953–1954.

Zaytsev identified eight characters at the end of the 5th column of leaf 9 as meaning the date "Chongxi 14th year 2nd month", and seven characters at the start of the 6th column of the same leaf as meaning "Great Central [?]

Khitan State" are exactly the same as the first seven characters on the Memorial for the Princess of Yongning Commandery (Chinese 永寧郡公主), dated 1087.

[10] Not only is this the only complete Khitan manuscript text to have been discovered, but it is by far the longest example of any text written in the Khitan large script; indeed, its estimated length of approximately 15,000 characters (20 characters × 6 columns × 127 pages) is equivalent to that of the entire corpus of known monumental inscriptions written in the Khitan large script (given as 15,000 characters by Wu & Janhunen).