Shaping the Stein collection’s Dunhuang corpus (2): the items from Cave 17’s ‘miscellaneous’ bundles

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In a previous blog post , we looked at the instrumental role played by Wang Yuanlu during the selection of the items from the Cave 17. Wang, who directly chose from the small repository what to hand over to Stein for inspection, was very keen to divert his attention from the so-called ‘regular’ bundles, which were composed for the most part of Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Tibetan. During their first ever transaction, which took place between 21 May and 6 June 1907, Wang Yuanlu therefore began by handing over the ‘miscellaneous’ bundles, which he seemed to hold in low estimation. To Stein’s delight, these contained mixed and diverse materials, such as manuscripts in non-Chinese languages, illustrated scrolls, paintings, drawings, ex-votos, textiles, etc. Stein picked out any of the items that jumped at him as being particularly interesting and made sure to put them aside for ‘further examination’, the phrase that he used to refer to their removal in his transaction with Wang. This
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A Few of Our Favourite Things: The Complete Series

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As part of IDP's 20th anniversary celebrations we asked twenty of our friends and supporters to select their favourite item from the IDP collections. The full selection is available as an online catalogue and will be featured in the spring and autumn 2014 editions of IDP News. A Pinterest board featuring all twenty of the ‘favourite’ items is also available. For full details of all our anniversary events and activities please see our 20th anniversary programme page.

IDP would like to thank all of the contributors for their selections and for taking part in our 20th anniversary celebrations. Below is a full list of their posts.

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