Shih-shan Susan Huang
Rice University

Mapping Buddhist Book Roads: From Turfan to Beijing to Hangzhou in the 13th and 14th Centuries

This study explores material remains pertinent to woodblock printing, a major emerging technology transmitted from China westwards along the Silk Roads. A group of printed fragments discovered in Turfan, now housed in Berlin, sheds light on an inter-regional network of elite Uighurs who had a strong Buddhist background and migrated from their homeland in Eastern Central Asia to Mongol-Yuan China. Virtually stitching various fragment pieces together, Shih-shan Susan Huang argues that they are part of a six-fold Buddhist frontispiece originally made in Hangzhou. Multiple copies of this frontispiece were likely sponsored by the elite Uighur Mengsusu’s Beijing-based family and subsequently transported to the Uighur homeland via Uighur and Mongol networks. Elite Uighurs with connections in Beijing and Hangzhou may have been active middlemen facilitating this long-distance transfer. Applying the metaphor of Buddhist Book Roads to map the locations of Buddhist prints enables us to see Buddhist prints as “things in motion,” traveling both through integrated networks and across extensive Book Roads. Using ArcGIS, Huang created a multi-layered map of the Chinese Mongol postal system boasting more than 940 relay stations to highlight the relationships among centers of Buddhist print culture and other nodes of this multi-layered infrastructure.

Tuesday, October 15, 12:15 pm

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.