Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

III. Far East, South and South-East Asia / Дальний Восток, Южная и Юго-Восточная Азия Доклады Международного конгресса по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки. Т. 1. 2020 565 The X century Chinese manuscript “Dispute of Tea and Wine” ( 茶酒論 “Cha jiu lun”), was discovered in the early XX century in the Mogao Cave complex near Dunhuang. It has long attracted the attention of specialists, since the study of this manuscript fits into the general context of studies of historical manuscripts along the routes of the Great Silk Road, as well as a number of modern projects, including the large-scale “One Belt One Road” initiative 1 . The Mogao complex 莫高窟 “Low caves” (the name first appears in a man- uscript dated VI century AD), also known as the Dunhuang caves 敦煌石窟 dunhuang shiku (or “The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas” 千佛洞 qian fo dong ), located 25 kilometers southeast of the modern city of Dunhuang, the center of a county of the same name of the Gansu province. This complex is one of the most famous Buddhist cave monasteries in the world 2 . In 1961, it was included in the register of especially important cultural monuments of China, and in 1987 was listed as a UNESCO world cultural heritage site. The complex, uniting 735 grottos stretching almost 1000 meters along the mountain slope, has gained international fame not only because of its IV–XIV centuries wall paintings and statues pre- served in 492 caves, but also for its unique, in magnitude and value, collection of ancient manuscripts and xylographs in different languages, which has been named “Dunhuang Library”. The discovered materials of secular and religious nature mutually complementing each other, provide important findings that make it possible to trace the influence of trade, political and cultural ties on the ideology of the early Middle Ages in Central Asia. The history of the study of theDunhuang Library begins in 1900, whenTaoist monk WangYuanlu, while sweeping sand in the corridor in Cave№16, accidentally discov- ered a secret vault full of rolls and stackedmanuscripts and xylographs, as well as paint- ings drawn on paper and silk 3 . The “Dunhuang Library” cave (Mogao Cave№17) was 1 Presently, scientists from all over the world are engaged in researching the Dunhuang materials within the framework of a large-scale international project, the International Dun- huang Project, established in 1994 with the goal of cataloguing, studying and preserving manuscripts and other relics found in Dunhuang. The authors express their deep gratitude to Chinese colleagues: Prof. Cai Keda ( 蔡克 大 ), graduate students Su Wenbo ( 蘇文博 ) and Wang Xiangsong ( 王祥松 ) from Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Urumqi), and Prof. Altan Bordzhigid ( 阿拉騰嘎日嘎 ) from Inner Mongolia University for the Nationalities (Tongliao), for the organization of field research to Dunhuang (Mogao caves) in October 2017 and assistance in preparing this publication. 2 Menshikov L. N. Iz opyta faksimilnyh izdaniy rukopisey iz Dunhuana [On the expe- rience of facsimile publishing of manuscripts from Dunhuang]. Leningrad, 1981. P. 173. 3 As it was later found out, the oldest text can be credited to 405 AD, and the latest to 1002 AD. A large amount of texts are written in Chinese, but there are also materials in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Hotan, Sogdian, Uyghur, and Kuchar languages. The documents