Dunhuang & Turfan hoards

Along the Silk Road, a handful of sealed caves and buried sites -- above all the Dunhuang library cave, along with Turfan and Khara-Khoto -- preserved tens of thousands of manuscripts that would otherwise have perished. They span Buddhist scripture, everyday contracts, and, at Dunhuang specifically, a substantial cache of Tibetan-language material. The International Dunhuang Project now catalogues and digitizes this hoard as a single searchable corpus.

Because the cave preserved everything indiscriminately -- scripture, commentary, and contracts side by side -- it is an unusually good instrument for comparing how differently prestige and ordinary writing survived. Merit copies sutras, catalogues keep sastras and Orthodoxy is enforced at the lexeme both ask whether religious scripture was copied and standardized more carefully than commentary, down to the level of individual words. Apocrypha are priced in single scrolls and Taboos die faster in contracts look at everyday contracts specifically, testing whether unwanted clauses or superstitious taboos disappear from the record faster than routine business language does.