Reconstructing a medieval library? The contents of the manuscript bundles in the Dunhuang Library Cave

Various theories have been offered for the original purpose of the cache of manuscripts, paintings and other material discovered in July 1900 at Dunhuang, a Silk Road town on the long-time border between the states of the Yellow River plains in east Asia and those of eastern central Asia. The original order of the cache was not documented but, as several curators and scholars have observed, the documentary evidence made by Aurel Stein, seven years after the discovery, might provide some clues. Despite the potential importance of this for our understanding of this unique find and, more broadly, for life in Dunhuang at this time, to date there has been no systematic attempt to collate the data and test this.
In this paper we attempt to review all known evidence concerning the original deposition of the contents of the Dunhuang library cave, looking to distinguish between Stein’s different documentary systems and to explain their rationale through study of the Stein’s extensive published and unpublished writings. We conclude that there is strong evidence to show that Stein’s documentation can be used to reconstruct the contents of some of the bundles in the cave as he found them, although not the order of the bundles in the cave itself. The purpose of this paper is to provide the data for other scholars to use, not to propose any new theory. We apply this system to a subset of material to show the potential of this for future research