國際敦煌項目(IDP)

內容摘要：為促進散藏于世界各地的藏經洞文物的綜合利用，國際敦煌項目（IDP）于1994年正式啟動，其核心工作是敦煌與新疆出土古文獻及文物的修復、編目與保護。隨著網絡技術的發展，IDP希望通過與收藏機構的合作，以高質量的數字圖像將這些藝術品重新拼合在一起，使學者和公眾可以在網上獲得越來越多的相關信息。20年來，IDP的工作極大地推動了敦煌文獻與文物的保護與共享，并在多國建立了IDP中心，包括中國的敦煌研究院。本文簡要介紹了IDP在這20年間的工作與成就，討論了IDP對藏經洞文物的研究所產生的巨大影響以及今后工作的主要目標。

關鍵詞：國際敦煌項目（IDP）；數字化；合作；互聯網

中圖分類號：K206.6文獻標識碼：A文章編號：1000-4106（2014）03-0051-05

IDP—Preservation of and Access to Manuscripts and Artefacts from Dunhuang and Chinese Central Asia

Susan WHITFIELD

（British Library, London, Britain）

Abstract: In order to promote the comprehensive use of the Dunhuang Library Cave materials dispersed worldwide, the International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was founded in 1994 to ensure the restoration, cataloguing and conservation of Dunhuang, Turfan and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts and artefacts. With the development of network technology, IDP hopes to create high quality images of the material and make them freely accessible to everyone online through working together internationally. Over the past decade, IDP Centres have been established in several countries. This paper gives a brief history of IDP in its first two decades and discusses its impact on scholarship of the Library Cave contents.

It is an honour to be asked to contribute to this volume celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Dunhuang Academy. I first visited Dunhuang in 1984 and this set me on a course—in developing the International Dunhuang Project(IDP)—that would take up much of my time and scholarship since. But none of us can compare to the achievements of Fan Jinshi who has devoted her life to Dunhuang. She has established it as a professional heritage institution and ensured its success for the coming generations. I would like to take this opportunity first to congratulate the Academy and Director Fan Jinshi on their outstan- ding work.

In its heyday, Dunhuang was part of a connected global world, on routes leading from China across the Tarim into West Asia and beyond, and down to Indian sea ports and thence to Persia, Arabia and Africa. Other routes led north to the steppes and thence to the shores of the Caspian, Black and Baltic seas, and south to the Tibetan plateau and through to India.These connections, as Fan Jinshi has shown in her many publications, are reflected throughout Dunhuang in its rich mural art, but also in the portable paintings and manuscripts that were stored in the Library Cave and discovered by Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu in 1900.

The story of the dispersal of the cave's contents worldwide is well-known and resulted in an unfortunate situation for scholars who wished to study these collections. Although most ended up in public museums where they were stored in appropriate conditions and were available for scholars, the worldwide turmoil in the twentieth century was not conducive to their conservation, cataloguing and study, although work continued throughout. It was only in the late twentieth century, in 1993, that scholars, curators and conservators of all the major collections were able to meet together for the first time to discuss the importance of the collections, their preservation and their access.This meeting took place in the UK and was attended by delegates from China, India, Japan, Germany, France, Russia, Britain and the USA. The overwhelming desire was to work together collaboratively to ensure the best preservation of and access to the contents of the LibraryCave， andofothermanuscriptsdisco

vered at Turfan and other sites during these decades of imperial archaeology. IDP was thus formed, producing its first newsletter in 1994 and holding its second conference in Paris in 1996. Beijing, Berlin, St Petersburg, Kyoto, Stockholm, Budapest and Dunhuang have hosted IDP conferences since then. This article gives a brief history of IDP in its first two decades and discusses its impact on scholarship of the Library Cave contents.

IDP's two main aims formulated in 1993 have remained the same: firstly, to ensure the preservation of the Dunhuang, Turfan and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts and artefacts through working together internationally to agree the best methods for their conservation and storage; and secondly, to ensure greater access to scholars and others to this material. Because IDP was formed in the early years of the Internet, it has been able to take advantage of the new technologies of the past twenty years to create high quality images of the material and make them freely accessible to everyone online.

But as a young scholar new to this field (my doctorate was on Liu Zongyuan), my questions when starting work at the British Library in 1992 hadbeen: howmanymanuscripts

are there？And where are they？ And what languages are they in？ The questions were surprisingly difficult to answer precisely and it is only after twenty years that we are coming close to a realistic estimate.

When I started at the British Library conservation and cataloguing of all the collections was ongoing and there were few electronic lists. The Dunhuang manuscripts in Chinese at the British Library were part of the Stein collections, acquired by M. Aurel Stein on his first three expeditions to Chinese Central Asia. These were then curated by Frances Wood and Beth McKillop who, over the previous decade, had initiated many contacts with Chinese scholars and conservators. This had resulted in the conservation and num- bering of the previously inaccessible fragments, in conjunction with Chinese conservators. Work had also started on the photography and publication of the non-Buddhist Chinese manuscripts, together with Chinese colleagues.

The Dunhuang manuscripts included many in Tibetan and other languages and curated by other sections in the British Library. There were also manuscripts in over fifteen languages and scripts excavated by Stein from scores of archaeological sites in the Lop and Taklamakan deserts, towns and temples of the ancient Silk Road as well as other manuscripts acquired by the British Consul in Kashgar, George Macartney, and the scholar A. F. R. Hoernle. These were also under the curatorship of various sections. Many of these were originally part of the British Museum collections and were transferred to the newly-established British Library in 1973, while others were originally acquisitioned into the India Office Library(IOL). These latter collections came to the British Library in trust in 1982. As Professor Rong Xinjiang has explained in various articles, the two institutions had managed their collections in distinct ways, using different numbering conventions and different methods of conservation and storage. Other curatorial sections also had various existing collaborations to ensure the conservation and cataloguing of this material but there remained much work to do on all the Stein Central Asian collections.

The foundation of IDP created a focus for all this material for the first time. This led to IDP UK becoming a separate section within the British Library with lead curatorial responsibility for all the Chinese Central Asian material in all languages. This shows the importance with which the British Library views this material, ensuring that it has dedicated curators to ensure its preservation and accessibility for scholars.

I was originally employed as coordinator of IDP in 1994 on external funding and started by designing a database to record the data about the collections, their conservation and cataloguing. The system was designed to hold information about all the Stein and other Chinese Central Asian manuscripts, not only the Chinese ones from Dunhuang. I hoped that, in this way, we could start to get comprehensive documentation on all the collections, thus making them more accessible for scholars and starting to answer the questions I had as a young scholar①.

The database now contains information on over 40 000 manuscripts in the British Library collections, of which over 16 800 are from the Dunhuang Library cave.Major conservation, curatorial and research projects on the Han dynasty Chinese woodslips and wood shavings, the Chinese non-Dunhuang fragments, the Tibetan woodslips, the Khotanese and the Sanskrit manuscripts, have resulted in new catalogues and comprehensive data being available to scholars online. All these projects have been the result of collaborations with scholars worldwide. Several have also incorporated funding for conservation and complete digitisation, such as the Sans- krit project funded by the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University, led by Professor Seishi Karashima. Over 30000 of the 40 000 manuscri-

pts in the British Library on the database have now been digitised and are freely accessible to all through the IDP multilingual websites. The major conservation project remaining at the British Library is that of the Xixia manuscripts from Khara-Khoto. These probably amount to about 6 000 items, although only just over a thousand have been fully conserved and numbered and entered onto the database. This will be IDP UK's next major project, subject to securing funding as most of IDP's work remains dependant on external funds. Work continues on research and digitisation of the Chinese and other material.

IDP was founded as a collaboration and the international partners continued to meet at conferences throughout the 1990s. But the National Library of China (NLC) took the internationalisation of IDP to a new stage in 2001 with the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the British Library to establish an IDP Centre and website in Beijing (http://idp.nlc.gov.cn). The Centre included a digitisation studio to photograph the Dunhuang manuscripts in the NLC collection. The Chinese language IDP China website hosted by the NLC went online in November 2002, offering scholars in China easier access to the material from British and Chinese collections. As of 2014 they had digitised over 2 000 Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts, resulting in over 100 000 images.

Over the next decade all the other major partners followed the example of NLC and IDP Centres were established in Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Korea and Sweden.In 2006 the Dunhuang Academy also established an IDP Centre,with astudiodigitisingthemanu-

scripts at the Dunhuang Academy and at other local institutions.

With all the major holders of Dunhuang Library Cave material working together, it started to become possible to see the contents of the Library Cave reunited virtually online. By 2014 over 60% of the Library cave contents had been digitised. Scholars who for years had to visit libraries and rely on often poor quality microfilms or cumbersome facsimilevolumescould now access high quality images of manuscripts from their homes. This has led to much greater interest and scholarship on the material and, of course, more demand for scholarsto consulttheoriginals. The British Library saw a record number of visitors to the Reading Rooms to consult these collections in the first three months of 2014, with over 20 scholars viewing over 300 manuscripts.

As I continued my own research and helped others with theirs through IDP, I found it necessary to consult both the textual and other archaeological material—the paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and the other Chinese Central Asia sites. This material was especially important for research for my book Life Along the Silk Road, published in 1999, and for the British Library 2004 exhibition,“The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith.” Because of its flexible design the IDP database was easily able to accommodate these additional data.

Thus the scope of IDP was expanded to encompass all the archaeological material from Chinese Central Asia. Agreements with the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London enabled us to include their Steincollectionsandshowtextiles,arte-

factsandmanuscriptsfromthesamear-

chaeo-logical sites together online. The Musée Guimet, Paris and the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, have since become partners and as of 2014 we were in discussion with The State Hermitage, St Petersburg and the National Museum, New Delhi.

IDP has also engaged over this period in several major research projects, notably on the codicology and palaeography of the Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang, on the medical manuscripts, the Dunhuang Star Chart and the analysis of the paper used throughout the Tarim region. In keeping with its founding aims, all the results are made freely available online. Its 2012 Memorandum of Understanding with the National Silk Museum in Hangzhou will also lead to more information becoming available on the textiles from Dunhuang and other Chinese Central Asian sites.

Over the past decade IDP has also started to enter more data on the archaeological context, creating records for archaeological sites and including the archives, maps, plans and photographs taken by the various archaeo-

logists in the early twentieth century. Much of this has been done with the help of Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology and IDP is also discussing collaboration with the Turfan Academy.

IDP has also recently been involved with the preliminary discussions on the Dunhuang Academy's exciting plans for “Digital Dunhuang.” Preservation is a key issue for all of us curating Dunhuang material, whether the in-situ murals and statues or the material from the Library Cave. The Dunhuang Academy faces enormous challenges in meeting the demands of ever-increasingvisitors and scho-

lars and carrying out the highest-quality digitisation and ensuring access online will help address these.

In terms of scholarship, it has often been the case that the art historians and textual scholars of Dunhuang have followed separate paths with little interaction. Yet a painting and a manuscript of a sutra are representations of the same concept and both need to be studied and understood together. With the greater availability of both images and texts we can expect to see more scholarship in this area. And it is our hope that, in the future, the material on IDP can be linked into Digital Dunhuang.

The aim of the international team of curators, conservators and scholars who founded IDP was to encourage scholarship on the collections, originally by providing high-quality images and metadata. The growth of the Internet has allowed us to have more ambitious aims: to provide additional contextual material not only for scholars but also for a much wider audience. We are already starting to see the results of this in IDP UK with many more students taking courses in Central Asian and Silk Road studies, where Dunhuang is a major focus. We also receive frequent enquiries from a diverse range of people in Europe and America about how they can learnmore about the artisticand historical riches of Chinese Central Asia.

I feel privileged to have been introduced to Dunhuang early in my scholarly career, to work with such distinguished scholars worldwide and to have had the opportunity to research Dunhuang's manuscripts and art. These are worldwide treasures and I hope that IDP continues to play a part in ensuring their preservation for future generations while enabling their access for this generation.

① Twenty years on and we are still using the same system although in 2014 are in the process of updating to a new Open Source MySQL database.

收稿日期：2014-05-16

作者簡介：魏泓（1960—），女，英國人，英國國家圖書館國際敦煌項目(IDP)負責人，主要從事絲綢之路歷史和物質文化、歷史編纂學的研究。

Keywords: IDP; Digitization;Collaboration;Internet