Turfan

The Yuanduan Guanxin Shifajietu (Illustration of the Ten Realms of Mind Comnemplation in the Perfect and Immediate Teaching), drawn by the Northern Song Tendai priest Ciyun Zunshi 慈雲遵式 was the source for the Kumano Kanjin Jikkai Mandara 熊野観心十界曼荼羅 handed in Japan. This diagram is a schematic of the ten realms, with the heart character 心 in the center, and ranging from the Buddha realm to the realm of hell. This mandala was to be used to reflect on one's own heart.
In this article, we first examine and compare the iconography and text of Zunshi's Yuanduan Guanxin Shifajietu and Khara-khoto work, then we compare the Khara-khoto work and the mural painting from Bezeklik cave, Turfan.

The Turfan Collection in the Museum of Asian Art in Dahlem is now closed in preparation for its move to the Humboldt Forum in the center of Berlin, where it will re-open in 2019. This article gives some background information to the history and future of this important collection.

Four letters of A von Lecoq, Director of the II and IV Prussian Turfan Expeditions in Eastern Turkestan, to S.F. Oldenburg, Permanent Secretary of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, who headed two Russian archaeological expeditions in the Eastern Turkestan, are published below. Also Lecoq's relations with Russian colleagues on the data from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St.-Petersburg branch) are considered

Studying Old Tibetan (OT) documents can help us to unravel and thus better comprehend particular stages in the development of a lexeme that at first view gives the impression of having been coined in its ultimate form in only one step. Using the oldest extant sources on written Tibetan I will attempt to puzzle out the history of the compound mya ngan and to demonstrate the influence a multilingual and multicultural environment of Central Asian oases could have wielded on the formation of Tibetan language. The paper also endeavours to trace the origins of one of the most important Buddhist terms in Tibetan: mya ngan las ʼdas pa. It is perplexing and indeed rather uncommon that a nominalised verbal phrase of five syllables was chosen to render a simple Sanskrit lexeme – nirvāṇa.

Turfan Bek Manggalik was a ruler of Turfan area with the support of the Zunghars. When the Qing army attacked Dawaci, he surrendered to the Qing Empire and ended the long-term history of Turfan’s freedom from the rule of Dynasties on the Central Plains. The submission of Manggalik provided the Qing army with an important military and logistics base in the western regions and accelerated the process of defeating the Zunghars and the control of the Uyghur regions. After that, the Qing Empire began to adjust the local ruling order that had formed during the long-term following of Zunghar and moved Emin Khwaja back to Turfan to contain Manggalik’s power. The political pattern of dividing the East and West was formed in Turfan. After Manggalik was involved in a rebellion and was killed, his followers were temporarily put under the control of Emin Khwaja. In order to control the Emin Khwaja families’ power, the Qing Empire adjusted the political structure of Turfan many times, and set up the Grand Minister Superintendent of Pichan and the Leading Grand Minister of Turfan to separate powers, which reflected the Qing Empire’s extremely flexible and pragmatic border governance strategy.
吐鲁番伯克莽噶里克是准噶尔任命的吐鲁番地区统治者，于清军征讨达瓦齐之际归附清朝， 结束了吐鲁番地区长期游离于中原王朝统治之外的历史。莽噶里克的归附使清军在西域有了重要的军事和 后勤基地，加速了准噶尔的灭亡和控制回部的进程。莽噶里克归附后，清朝着手调整当地在长期追随准噶 尔期间形成的统治秩序，将额敏和卓迁回吐鲁番，牵制莽噶里克的势力。又为其编设旗佐，将扎萨克制度 引入，吐鲁番形成了东西分治的政治格局。莽噶里克卷入叛乱被杀后，其部众暂时被交由额敏和卓管束。 为了防止额敏和卓家族在吐鲁番一家独大，清朝又多次调整吐鲁番政治格局，设置辟展办事大臣、吐鲁番 领队大臣等予以分权，反映出清朝极为灵活务实的边疆统治策略。

The first millennium BCE was pivotal for the environment and for human societies in Central and Eastern Eurasia because transformations accelerated and altered natural and cultural landscapes to hitherto unknown dimensions. Among the major driving forces was the increasing use of horse riding, which extended range of movement significantly and led to the development of cavalry units as a part of large armies. Empires with enormous outreach and gravitational pull formed and disintegrated in close dependence. The wide spread of military technologies demonstrates their bonds, though mostly in the form of metal objects due to the inherent survivability of their materials. Equipment and protective clothing of organic material, albeit produced in large numbers and thus an economic and environmental factor, are rarely preserved. In Yanghai cemetery site, Turfan, the remains of one leather scale armour were discovered. In this study, the results of the AMS radiocarbon dating as well as the construction details of the Yanghai find are presented and compared with a contemporary armour of unknown origin in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York (MET) and with finds and depictions from the Near East, the adjacent northern steppe areas and the territory of China. The armour, datable to 786–543 cal BCE (95% probability), was originally made of about 5444 smaller scales and 140 larger scales, which, together with leather laces and lining, had a total weight of ca. 4–5 kg. Our reconstruction demonstrates that it can be donned quickly and without the help of another person by wrapping the left part around the back, tying it to the right part under the right arm and fastening with thongs crosswise over the back to laces at the opposite hip parts. Fitting different statures, it is a light and highly efficient defensive garment. In age, construction details and aesthetic appearance it resembles the MET armour. The stylistic similarities but constructional differences suggest that the two armours were intended as outfits for distinct units of the same army, i.e. light cavalry and heavy infantry, respectively. As such a high level of standardization of military equipment during the 7th century BCE is only known for the Neo-Assyrian military forces, we suggest that the place of manufacture of both armours was the Neo-Assyrian Empire. If this supposition is correct, then the Yanghai armour is one of the rare actual proofs of West-East technology transfer across the Eurasian continent during the first half of the first millennium BCE, when social and economic transformation enhanced.

While there has been much scholarly attention devoted to the Enochic Book of the Watchers , much less has been paid to the Book of Giants from Qumran. This volume is the proceedings of a conference that convened in Munich, Germany, in June 2014, which was devoted to the giants of Enochic tradition and in particular the Qumran Book of Giants . It engages the topic of the giants in relation to various ancient contexts, including the Hebrew Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and ancient Mesopotamia. The authors of this volume give particular attention to Manichaeism, especially the Manichaean Book of Giants , fragments of which were found in Turfan (western China). They contribute to our understanding of the range of stories Jews told in antiquity about the sons of the watchers who descended to earth and their vibrant Nachleben in Manichaeism. Survey of contents Matthew Goff: Introduction Part One: Gibborim and Gigantes: Antecedents, Reception, and Comparative Contexts from the Hebrew Bible ...

Map drawn for a review published in Journal Asiatique, 291 1-2, 2003, p. 295-300 of Bregel, Yuri, An Historical Atlas of Central Asia, (Handbuch der Orientalistik, VIII : Central Asia, 9), Leiden : Brill, 2003, 109 p. Please feel free to modify and adapt it to your needs: the layers can be modified in Illustrator. Although I have drawn it I claim no copyright, but would welcome that you mention the source. Actually, the best map of this region and this period has been published in J. Hamilton, Manuscrits Ouïghours du IXe-Xe de Touen-Houang, Louvain, 1986

Individual scenes of the paintings of visualizing monks in Toyok Cave 42 agree well with those found in Chinese Visualization texts, but the overall arrangement or the scene does not agree with any known text. This may be because the paintings and art were individually based on the oral tradition of local practitioners.

WOODEN ARTIFACTS FROM JIAOHE (YAR-HOTO) CEMETERY
IN TURFAN BASIN IN XINJIANG: ANALOGIES AND DATINGS

The ancient city of Jiaohe (Yar-Hoto) is situated 10 km to the west from the modern Turfan city in Xinjiang. According to Chinese chronicles, in Han times Jiaohe was the capital of Jushi (Gushi) princedom. In the season of 1993-1994 at the cemetery to the north of the ancient city two big graves and more than 50 ordinary burials were excavated. Both big and small graves have been plundered; almost no grave good have remained. Only some burials gave stray finds. The whole cemetery yielded about 40 wooden artifacts. Chinese archaeologists describe arrows, quivers, knives, wallet-storages, buckles, fasteners, statuettes, vessels and other categories.
They consider the culture of Jiaohe cemetery to be a local one, belonging to the nobility and common people of Jushi (Gushi). Our analysis of pottery found in Jiaohe burials supports such an opinion. But the attribution of all the graves to Han period is a matter of doubts. A lot of bone and/or antler horse harness equipment from Jiaohe, especially details of saddles have direct analogies in Russian Altai, in frozen tombs of Pazyryk culture, which are dated to the IV century B.C. Many of wooden artifacts from Jiaohe also do have analogies in Pazyryk culture: wooden models of mirrors with side handle, wooden ribs for soft leather quivers, wooden models of knives. Turfan wooden vessels are not so well preserved co compare them with Pazyryk ones.
Wooden wallet-storages like the ones from Jiaohe were never met in Pazyryk culture, but are quite common for burrows of Yaloman II burial ground in Altai, which belongs to hunno-sarmatian time (I cent. B.C. – IV cent. A.D.). Wooden statuettes from Jiaohe are quite original. They differ from Chinese Han time grave figurines, both wooden and clay, because the latter ones do always have hands and legs. No wooden statuettes were ever met in Altai. In Kazakhstan and Central Asia wood in archaeological sites is poorly preserved because of local climate and soils. But some of the Central Asian sites, which belong to the I century B.C. – IV century A.D. have yielded terracotta or alabaster “idols”, closely resembling Jiaohe specimen: short cylinders with the neck and face just marked. It is generally considered, that these statuettes were transferred from Western China (i.e. Xinjiang) by Yuezhi or Wusun tribes.
So we may assume that burials of Jiaohe cemetery belong to different periods of time and different cultures. The distribution of different categories of grave goods among the graves of different constructions can help us to determine more precisely their ethnic and cultural attribution.

РЕЗЮМЕ
Городище Цзяохэ (Яр-Хото)  расположено в 10 км к западу от г. Турфана, центра одноименного уезда в Синьцзян-Уйгурском автономной районе КНР. В начале 90-х гг. XX в. раскопан и издан могильник к северу от городища. Всего встречено около 40 деревянных изделий. Выделяются стрелы, колчаны, ножи, футляры-пеналы, застежки, пряжки, статуэтки, посуда и другие категории. Китайские археологи считают культуру могильника Цзяохэ местной, турфанской. Анализ керамики позволяет согласиться с таким мнением, но предложенная китайскими исследователями датировка памятника только ханьским временем вызывает обоснованные сомнения. Очень многие деревянные изделия, в первую очередь, связанные с предметами вооружения, костяные (роговые) детали конской сбруи, и особенно седельные принадлежности из Цзяохэ имеют прямые аналогии на российской территории, в первую очередь, в памятниках пазырыкской культуры. Это обстоятельство позволяет датировать многие его погребения IV в. до н.э. Другая часть  находок из дерева встречает аналогии в памятниках гунно-сарматского времени, так что могильник к северу от городища Цзяохэ оказывается разновременным и разнокультурным.

This article draws upon archival materials from late Qing Turpan Prefecture to explore Qing mass vaccination efforts in East Turkestan (Xinjiang) from 1881-1911. Following the reconquest of the region in 1877, Xiang Army leaders quickly determined that vaccination was necessary to maintain the readiness of the region's military garrison. In Turpan, local Musulmans (Uyghurs) lacked a tradition of inoculation, forcing the Qing government and the Xiang Army to become directly involved in administering mass vaccination for the very first time by setting up "vaccination bureaus" across the newly established Xinjiang Province. However, Musulman distrust of the vaccine and pervasive corruption within the bureaus led to widespread vaccine avoidance in Turpan. Xiang army authorities thus mandated vaccination for all the prefecture's mostly Musulman children. This article therefore argues that the conquest of the northwest and Musulman attitudes toward vaccination brought about government-led, mandated vaccination for the first time in Chinese history.

The letters of A.A. Dyakov – Russian consul in Kulja – to S.F. Oldenburg – Head of Russian Turkestan expeditions in 1909-1910 and in 1914-1915 are published. These documents shed some more light on the conditions in which the expedition of the Russian Committee or the Exploration of Central and Eastern Asia had to work in Turfan.

In its transition through political and cultural borders, Christianity encountered both hostility and a warm welcome from the cultural-political territories that it penetrated. In the course of time, it became an integral element of the social fabric of these many cultures, leaving its everlasting mark, as witnessed by the products of both literary and material culture discovered in our time.

初論〈開寶藏〉向西域的流傳——西域出土印本漢文佛典研究，國際佛教學大學院大學、京都大學人文科學研究所、南華大學主编，《佛教文獻と文學——日臺共同ワークショップの記錄》，東京，2008，第67-96页，14幅圖版 (‘A Preliminary Study on the Spread of the Kaibao Canon to Chinese Central Asia’, in: Buddhist Source Texts and Literature—Documentation of the First Japanese-Taiwanese Workshop, Tokyo 2008, pp. 67-96, 14 Pls.)

The last sentence of this review, in which I thank Gerd Carling for her efforts, though corrected here, went into print with an embarrassing mistake; there, I clearly "gendered"  Gerd Carling as male, which is of course wrong. My - feeble - excuse can only be that "Gerd" is a very common male name in my native German - though very obviously not everywhere. I wish to apologize to all readers of Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher, and of course to Gerd Carling herself, for this blunder, which, of course, illustrates that my knowledge of the contemporary Tokharological scene was, and, alas, is, less perfect than I would wish.