Vol 20, No 4 (2023)

Manuscript Tang 1770 (11th–13th centuries) from the IOM, RAS Collection is an astrological and mantic text. It has no beginning, where we could possibly find the text’s title, but its end has survived, so we know the name of its author or compiler. Its handwriting is quite clear and structure is also easy to read and understand, which is rarely the case with Tangut books. Judging from its grammar and lexical characteristics, it appears to be an original Tangut text rather than a translation from Chinese or Tibetan. Content-wise, this work offers a description of the agricultural calendar cycle, its beginning and ending, and significant mantic and astrological characteristics of every cycle. We also find here the elements of a year-by-year chronicle: some evidence of everyday life and real facts from Xixia history. There are also some interesting language traits which deserve further research. All these aspects make this text a very important written source for the Tangut studies.

Bik, the ruler of the Kitab Domain under the Bukharan Emirate and later a general of the Russian army. The collection in question was confiscated as a war trophy following the capture of the city of Kitab by Russian troops in 1870 and donated by the first Governor-General of Turkestan, K.P. von Kaufman to the Imperial Public Library (now NLR) in St. Petersburg. An inventory of said collection (76 books), as well as the one assembled by the orientalist A.L. Kuhn during the same Shahrisabz expedition (24 books), was discovered in 2016 in the archives of the National Library of Russia. The current article briefly covers Jura Bik’s biography, provides a general outline of his collection, and sets out to identify the manuscripts listed in the mentioned inventory, based upon their published descriptions and the author’s own materials.

The article examines the content of the Arabic inscription discovered by the author in the mountainous Tsakhur village of Jinykh in Dagestan. The inscription was made on the occasion of the mosque reconstruction, it contains the name of the organizer of the repair works and is dated 821 AH, which corresponds to 1418. It has been established that the initial construction of the mosque in Jinykh took place much earlier, which is confirmed by the discovery of an Arabic Kufic inscription of the 12th–13th centuries within the wall of the mosque. The technique of the 1418 inscription, which was made in the calligraphic Naskh handwriting, greatly differs from the vast majority of other medieval inscriptions in the region. The description and translation of the text are accompanied by linguistic comments.

The following list describes booklets which were banned in the 1960s in Hong Kong and Taiwan because of dealing with sexual topics. They were available only under the counter, did not enter libraries and official bibliographies and usually do not provide exact metadata. Most names are pseudonyms and the data on the place and year of publication are mostly missing. The Sinologist Wolfram Eberhard, who had dealt with similar subjects in his Guilt and Sin in Traditional China (Berkeley 1967) and The Daily Life of a Chinese Courtesan Climbing up a Tricky Ladder (Hong Kong 1980), possibly planned on also dealing with this popular material which he collected on his travels but he never found the time. Therefore, it is to be considered serendipitous that this little collection was acquired by the Bavarian State Library in Munich, probably the only library in the world to hold it.