Tangutology
[5] Bushell, a physician at the British Legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900, was a keen numismatist and had collected coins issued by the Western Xia state with inscriptions in the Tangut script.
[7] At about the same time, Bushell was working on Tangut numismatic inscriptions, Gabriel Devéria (1844–1899), a diplomat at the French Legation in Beijing, was studying the bilingual Tangut-Chinese Liangzhou Stele.
The breakthrough in Tangut studies finally came in 1908 when Pyotr Kozlov discovered the abandoned Western Xia fortress city of Khara-Khoto on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia.
Khara-Khoto had been abruptly abandoned at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, and, partially covered by sand, it had remained largely untouched for over 500 years.
[10] It was the discovery of this unprecedented hoard of Tangut material by Kozlov that led to the development of Tangutology as a separate academic discipline within the field of oriental studies.
[1][2][11] After the arrival of the Khara-Khoto material in Saint Petersburg in autumn 1909, sinologist Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov (1878–1937) worked on the preservation and identification of the hundreds of books and manuscripts that were written in the Tangut script, and it was not long before he discovered a bilingual Chinese-Tangut glossary called the Pearl in the Palm (Chinese: 番漢合時掌中珠; pinyin: Fān-Hàn Héshí Zhǎngzhōngzhū) which he immediately realised was the key to deciphering the Tangut language.
Ivanov deposited the manuscript of his dictionary at the Asiatic Museum, but he took it back home in 1922, and it disappeared after his arrest and execution in 1937, a victim of Stalin's Great Purge.
However, in late autumn 1937, before his dictionary was ready for publication, he and his Japanese wife were arrested and executed, thereby bringing a brutal end to the study of the Tangut language in the Soviet Union.
[12] In 1912 the renowned antiquarian Luo Zhenyu (1866–1940) met Ivanov in Saint Petersburg, and he was allowed to make a copy of nine pages from the Pearl in the Palm, which he published in China in the same year.
He met Ivanov again in 1922 in Tianjin, and obtained a complete copy of the Pearl in the Palm, which was subsequently published by his eldest son, Luo Fucheng (羅福成, 1885–1960), in 1924.
Further discoveries of Tangut texts were made in China, most notably a cache of Buddhist sutras in five pottery jars that were unearthed in Lingwu in Ningxia in 1917.
A special issue of the Bulletin of the National Library of Peiping dedicated to these texts was published in 1932, with articles written by a variety of Chinese, Japanese and Russian scholars (Luo Fucheng, Wang Jingru, Ishihama Juntarō (石浜純太郎), Ivanov, and Nevsky).
[1] During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a number of scholars, including Nevsky in Russia, Laufer in Germany, Wang Jingru 王靜如 (1903–1990) in China, and Stuart N. Wolfenden (1889–1938) at the University of California, Berkeley in the US, focussed their attention on several manuscripts from Khara-Khoto that had Tibetan phonetic glosses to Tangut texts, which enabled them to reconstruct some of the phonetic features of Tangut.
Meanwhile, in England, Gerard Clauson (1891–1974) had started to study the thousands of Tangut manuscript fragments that had been recovered from Khara-Khoto between 1913 and 1916 by Aurel Stein, and deposited at the British Museum in London.
During the 1960s a group of young scholars at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in Leningrad, led by E. I. Kychanov, started to study and translate the huge hoard of Tangut texts that had been brought back from Khara-Khoto nearly half a century earlier.
[12] One of the main fruits of this research was a scholarly edition by Kychanov, Ksenia Kepping, V. S. Kolokolov, and A. P. Terent'ev-Katanskij of the Tangut monolingual rhyming dictionary, the Sea of Characters (1969).
[4] Other young scholars included Shi Jinbo, Bai Bin and Huang Zhenhua, who together produced an important study and translation of the Sea of Characters in 1983.
In Taiwan, Gong Hwang-cherng (1934–2010), who specialized in Sino-Tibetan comparative linguistics, worked on Tangut phonology, and provided the phonetic reconstructions for Li Fanwen's 1997 dictionary.
In the UK, Imre Galambos has continued the work of Grinstead in the study of Tangut manuscripts from Khara-Khoto held at the British Library, in particular The General's Garden.
