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As has often been mentioned on Language Log, Dunhuang is a desert oasis town at the far western end of the Gansu / Hexi Corridor.  This is where the fabled Silk Road splits to head north and south around the vast Tarim Basin (filled with the extremely hot [summer] / cold [winter] / arid) Taklakamakan Desert.  Site of the Mogao Grottoes (hundreds of richly decorated medieval Buddhist caves), one of which (no. 17) housed tens of thousands of manuscripts that were sealed away more than a millennium ago.  Among them were the earliest written Sinitic vernacular narratives that I worked on for the first twenty years of my Sinological and Buddhological career (see the last three items of the "Selected readings" below).

My friend, the early medieval historian Sanping Chen, heard about this important work of Japanese scholarship roughly half a dozen years ago:

Hasseiki makki jūisseiki shoki Tonkō shizoku jinmei shūsei : shizoku jinmeihen jinmeihen / Dohi Yoshikazu hen          Editorial assistance:  Ishida Yūsaku 石田勇作
八世紀末期–十一世紀初期燉煌氏族人名集成 : 氏族人名篇, 人名篇 土肥義和編
(Index of Chinese First, Family, and Clan Names appearing in the Dunhuang Chinese Documents dating from the Late Eighth to the Early Eleventh Centuries)

Part I    First (given), Family, and Clan Names
Part II    First (given) Names (consisting of 1, 2, or more syllables)

Many of the names in this volume, though written with Chinese characters, are of non-Sinitic origin (Khotanese, Sogdian, Tuoba, Tibetan, etc.)

• • Tōkyō-to Chiyoda-ku : Kyūko Shoin, 2015.
  • 東京都千代田区 : 汲古書院, 2015.

Physical Description:
    10, 1250 pages ; 27 cm 

As will be explained below, this volume is vital for a long-term research project that Sanping has been engaged in for more than a decade.  He searched for the book for three years in libraries throughout North America.  Finally, as is so often the case, he found it at Penn.

I called the book out of storage and took it to Dallas when I went to visit Sanping last week (he was there spending the holidays with his wife at her sister's place).  The book is large and heavy, but it was the best possible gift I could have brought him.

Altogether Dohi Yoshikazu's index includes more than 30,000 names occurring on a wide variety of Dunhuang documents, scriptures, literary works, cave inscriptions, paintings, etc.  They are arranged by the Japanese pronunciation of the initial characters in a given name.

Here are some notes from Sanping about the composition of the list:

All name entries are sequentially numbered. So their counting becomes straightforward. Names with a surname attached or can be derived (as that of someone's son/daughter) are numbered from 00001 to 19765 (some entries only have a surname with no given names). Names for which the surname was written but cannot be clearly read are numbered from 19766 to 19961. Then the second category: entries with only given names are numbered from 50001 to 60402 (many of them are 法名/法號 of Buddhist monks/nuns). Therefore the total count is 19961+(60402-50000)=30363.

However, the determination of the latter group is subject to question. For instance, how is one certain that 安信 is only a given name, not a full name? Also as we have casually reviewed together, many "given names" in the first category were just titles, real or honorary.

Here is why Sanping so badly wanted to get his hands on Dohi's index (to facilitate the following research):

The Calendarized Onomasticon and the Arrival of Birthday Celebration
from the Ancient Near East to China

Today most Chinese celebrate the annual return of their birthday just like people elsewhere. However, this was not the case prior to the medieval era. There were insurmountable obstacles, both technical and ideological, to this practice in ancient China, some of which remains true to this day. We then discuss the religious and political elements of birthday celebration in the Ancient Near East starting with the Book of Genesis, especially the notion that it was an occasion to highlight the relationship to one’s guardian deity, and that it became an important part of royal cults, most prominently in the Roman Empire. As observed by Herodotus and Plato, the ancient Iranians had apparently inherited this tradition after their conquests in the ANE.

In the early medieval era, the old Chinese heartlands were conquered by various nomadic groups, culminating in the final domination of the Tuoba Northern dynasties and attracting a large number of “assistant conquerors,” mostly Iranian-speaking, from Central Asia and beyond. The new masters of northern China were quick to pick up birthday celebration in their royal cult. Meanwhile, the Chinese nomenclature underwent a process of “Iranization,” introducing heavy religious elements to an originally secular onomasticon. An important component of this transformation was the calendarization of personal names, which in the pre-Islamic, largely Zoroastrian, Iranian cultural world symbolized the religious importance of one’s birthday. These calendric onomastic data help reveal how the general Chinese population adopted the arguably ANE institution of birthday celebration. The Taoist notion of benming本命, “natal destiny,” roughly the equivalent of the ancient Greek daemon and the Roman genius, was an associated outcome. The whole process was facilitated in no small scale by the loss of cultural dominance of the traditional Confucian elite under the Tuoba and their Sui and Tang heirs.

Sanping will come to Penn (from Ottawa) to deliver a lecture on this topic, probably sometime in the latter part of February or early March.

Incidentally, each entry provides useful information about the person named there, his position, activities, and so forth, when available.

I wish to emphasize how stupendously difficult the compilation of this index would have been, since all of the names in the entries were extracted from handwritten manuscripts or inscriptions, and many of them were in "colloquial characters" (súzì 俗字).  We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dohi Yoshikazu and Ishida Yūsaku for making our work on medieval history, religion, literature, and art so much easier.

 

Selected readings

• "Old Avestan lexicography" (3/11/25) — magisterial review by Hiroshi Kumamoto of a phenomenal work of Japanese scholarship on ancient Iranian language
• "Dictionary of Dunhuang Studies" (2/6/25) — with a useful bibliography
• "A medieval Dunhuang man" (7/17/23)
• Victor Mair, "Reflections on the Origins of the Modern Standard Mandarin Place-Name 'Dunhuang' — With an Added Note on the Identity of the Modern Uighur Place-Name 'Turpan'", in Li Zheng, et al., eds., Ji Xianlin Jiaoshou bashi huadan jinian lunwenji (Papers in Honour of Prof. Dr. Ji Xianlin on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday) (Nanchang: Jiangxi People's Press, 1991), vol. 2, pp. 901-954 (very long and detailed study).

Works on Middle Vernacular Sinitic (MVS) by VHM:

• Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
• Painting and Performance:  Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (University of Hawai'i Press, 1989)
• T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Harvard University Asia Center, 1989)

[Thanks to Diana Shuheng Zhang]

January 3, 2026 @ 12:55 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Manuscripts, Names, Resources

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