Abstract:
Elite Uighurs active in China under Mongol rule in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries played a major role as middlemen spreading Buddhist print culture. This talk examined selected individuals as sponsors, users, and transmitters of Buddhist books over long distances. It drew on Buddhist printed fragments excavated in Turfan, Xinjiang and an epigraphic source found in Quanzhou in southeast China. Taken together with the Mongol postal relay system, visualized in an online map using ArcGIS, the elite Uighurs’ vast network extending from China to the Uighur homeland in Central Asia can shed light on the dynamic spread of Buddhist print culture under Mongol rule.
Biography:
Susan Huang (Ph.D., History of Art, Yale) is an Associate Professor at Rice University’s newly-founded Department of Transnational Asian Studies. Her book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asian Center, 2012), translated into Chinese by Dr. Zhu Yiwen, was published by the Zhejiang University Press in 2022. She co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of the Middle Period China with Patricia Ebrey (Brill, 2017). Her recent articles explore Song-to-Ming book art of the Lotus Sutra and Diamond Sutra, Buddhist printing under Tangut Xi Xia rule, and painting and printing connections. Huang is completing a monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and its Neighbors, which examines printed images and texts as objects “on the move,” as they were transmitted along networks and book roads in a transnational context. For more information, visit https://shihshansusanhuang.com/