This article evaluates the first part of Alphonse Mingana’s seminal work ‘The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East’, published 100 years ago. After a short introduction to Mingana and his place in the study of Syriac literature, the present author examines pages 297–343 of Mingana’s article, suggesting extensive corrections to factual errors either made or perpetuated by Mingana, as well as the need to supplement the many out-of-date sources he used. The article then reflects on Mingana’s contribution to the study of Syriac Christianity in Central Asia and China; although it has perhaps been helpful in the past, it cannot now be relied on as an authoritative source, given the amount of erroneous information it contains.

The aim of this article is to introduce a little known version of the story of the Seven Sages in the Karaim Language, spoken in the Crimea, but written using the Hebrew alphabet. Throughout the article, reasoned arguments with evidence or various expert but evidentially unsupported opinions, usually because of missing earlier sources, are presented to support this hypothesis. Moreover, a necessarily brief overview of the Seven Sages type stories is discussed to set the background to our research. We suggest that the manuscript at the centre of our research appears to be most similar to the Historia Septem Sapientum version of The Seven Sages of Rome , one of the versions of the Seven Sages stories placed in the Western group.

A range of early Chinese texts features the term louyi 螻蟻, which modern scholars and translators often interpret as signifying mole crickets and ants. This essentially means that they understand the two characters as standing for two different words, each denoting a different animal. However, a closer look at the examples in early Chinese texts shows that this was probably a disyllabic word referring to a single insect, namely, ants, with no involvement of mole crickets. Understanding what the term actually meant is important because it demonstrates how we, basing ourselves on pre-modern commentarial and lexicographic traditions, often unnecessarily separate compound words into their constituents. Although few specialists of pre-modern China today would subscribe to the much-criticized one-character-one-word model, translations still often treat the two components of disyllabic words as separate entities, even when the context makes it clear that they probably stand for a single word. More interestingly, this phenomenon sheds light on the development of the core vocabulary of sinology, revealing its cumulative and often highly conservative trajectory.

For a more accurate interpretation of the Yenisei Inscriptions, Uyghur texts are as important a source of reference as the Khaganate Inscriptions. Especially in the analysis of words that do not appear in the inscriptions or are rare, the vocabulary of Uyghur can be a determining factor. For instance, in this article, I will focus on the word M𐌗Le el2d2m, which occurs in the E-45 Köžeelig-Xovu inscription but has been interpreted in different ways since its first publication. In order to read and interpret the word correctly, it will be reconsidered together with its examples in Old Uyghur texts.

Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅 details the legal activities in Ming society with exceptional vividness. In other pre modern Chinese literary narratives, the ending usually featured poetic justice. However, Jin Ping Mei is a novel with unique realism in Chinese fiction in that it does not have a happy ending. More importantly, the novel depicts the normal condition and rationale of life based on guanxi 关系, an informal institution that was ubiquitous in Chinese society. Guanxi is a concrete embodiment of métis in the novel. This article sets out to demonstrate the métis in Jin Ping Mei through the analysis of guanxi in two cases. It argues that Jin Ping Mei depicts guanxi as the rationale of legal activities. Through guanxi, which is achieved through the manipulation of li 禮, ganqing 感情, renqing 人情, and mianzi 面子, gifts, banquets, and intermediaries, the culprits can easily find their way out of the unfavorable condition. The blend of rationality and emotion which is embodied in guanxi is the cultural root of the manipulation in the legal activities. The narrative of legal activities in Jin Ping Mei focuses on the métis based on guanxi in microlevel society and thus achieves unprecedented realism in premodern Chinese fiction narrative.

This paper addresses several important aspects of the historical spread of the Huayan and Chan Buddhist teachings in the Tangut state, and traces local developments of Chan and Huayan thought among the Tang-uts. These developments, as they emerge from the received texts, indicate not only local developments in Xixia, but also provide broader implications for the study of Sinitic Buddhism in Northern China and Central Asia during 11th–13th centuries. The core of the paper concerns Tangut Huayan commentaries, the Huayan lineage composed by Yixing Huijue, Tangut recensions of texts authored by Guifeng Zongmi and the Tangut texts of Hongzhou Chan Buddhism.

The article deals with the origin of palatalisation in the plural paradigm of the Khotanese i-declension. According to the common view, palatalisation resulted from regular sound change only in the nominative-accusative plural, with the etymological form of the endings remaining not-palatalised in the rest of the plural inflection. Subsequently, there emerged a tendency for the palatalised allomorph to become generalised and extend across the paradigm. However, a thorough examination of older and later Old Khotanese manuscripts challenges this perspective, revealing no evidence of original allomorphy between the palatalised and non-palatalised stem variants in the plural. This study demonstrates that palatalisation did not originate from analogical levellings but rather arose from regular sound change. Additionally, the article draws a comparison between the i-declension plural paradigm and the inflection of most numerals greater than ‘three’, which exhibit palatalisation in all case forms except for the nominative-accusative.