Dūnhuáng lù 燉煌錄
Records of Dūn-huáng
(anonymous local-gazetteer compilation; late Tang to Five-Dynasties)
About the work
A 1-juan anonymous late-Tang / Five-Dynasties Dūnhuáng local gazetteer, providing a brief catalogue of the toponyms, water-features, fortifications, and historical-religious sites of the Dūnhuáng 敦煌 (here written 燉煌) prefecture — covering an area roughly the modern Sūzhōu 肅州 / Guāzhōu 瓜州 / Shāzhōu 沙州 region of the Héxī corridor. Transmitted in Taishō 51 (T2091) as a brief 1-juan compilation; the original very likely a Dūnhuáng cave-temple manuscript that was incorporated into the printed canon at a later date. The dating bracket is 850 – 950 — the period of the Guīyìjūn 歸義軍 administration of Dūnhuáng under the Zhāng 張 and Cáo 曹 families, when the local-gazetteer genre was developed at the local level.
Abstract
The text is structured as a sequence of short topographical entries, each treating one named place. The treatments are brief — typically 1–3 lines per place — and combine historical-administrative, religious-mythological, and physical-geographical information. Representative entries in the surviving recension include:
- Xiàogǔ chéng 効穀城 — “originally a fishing-marsh; in the time of Hàn Xiàodì, Cuī Bùyì 崔不意 taught the people to plough; obtaining grain, [the place] was named [for that grain — 効穀]; later it was made a county.”
- Èrshī quán 貳師泉 (“Èrshī Spring”) — “three days’ ride east of Shāchéng; in the Hàn period Lǐ Guǎnglì’s 李廣利 army was thirsty; he prayed to the mountain god and stabbed the mountain with his sword, whence the spring flowed forth,” with a continuing-supernatural local explanation: “if the people are many, the water is abundant; if the people are few, the water diminishes; if the prefectural multitude drink at it heavily …” — the spring as a sentient register of the population’s behaviour.
- Shígāo shān 石膏山 (“Gypsum Mountain”) — “256 lǐ north of the prefecture; gypsum issues from between the Wūshān and Fēngshān beacon-towers. In Kāihuáng 19 (599) the Wūshān turned white; the augury proved not in vain. They sent the Daoist priest Huángfǔ Décóng 皇甫德琮 and six others to perform the jìjiào 祭醮 sacrificial ritual; thereafter [the mountain] looked like a snow-peak.”
- Hécāng chéng 河倉城 (“River-Granary City”) — “230 lǐ northwest of the prefecture; in ancient times the army’s grain-stores were there.”
- Cháng chéng 長城 (“the Long Wall”) — “in the north of the prefecture; the wall is 63 lǐ; due west into the desert; the former Hàn divined and established it; northward into the Yīzhōu 伊州 boundary.”
The work is therefore one of the principal late-Tang local-administrative-religious documents of the Héxī corridor — a text-type that survives unusually well at Dūnhuáng owing to the conditions of cave-temple manuscript preservation. Its incorporation into the Buddhist canon (rather than into a secular fāngzhì compendium) reflects the close interpenetration of Buddhist religious topography and secular local-administrative geography at Dūnhuáng — the Buddhist establishment served as the principal documentary custodian of local toponymic knowledge.
Translations and research
- Lionel Giles, Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Manuscripts from Tunhuang in the British Museum (London, 1957) — the principal early bibliographical treatment of the Dūn-huáng manuscripts including local-gazetteer materials.
- 唐耕耦 / 陸宏基, 敦煌社會經濟文獻真蹟釋錄 (Běijīng, 1986) — the standard modern Chinese editorial treatment of the Dūn-huáng local-administrative materials.
- 黃永武, 敦煌寶藏 — comprehensive photo-reproduction of the Dūn-huáng manuscript holdings.
- Erik Zürcher and others on the broader Dūn-huáng materials.
Other points of interest
The work is one of the very few complete local-gazetteer compilations that survived in canonical-Buddhist transmission rather than in the standard secular bibliographical tradition. Its ethnographic-religious content (the treatment of mountain-spring-stūpa sites with local supernatural explanations) makes it a valuable witness to the integrative late-Tang religious geography in which Buddhist, Daoist, and local-cult elements were treated as continuous components of a single sacralised landscape.
Links
- CBETA: T51n2091