Asian Art and Cultural History, Silk Road, China

Aila Pullinen. 2015. Mangghuer Embroidery: A Vanishing Tradition  IN Gerald Roche and CK Stuart (eds) Asian Highlands Perspectives 36: Mapping the Monguor, 189-238, 301-332.

ABSTRACT
Visits were undertaken in the years 2001 and 2002 to Minhe Hui and Mangghuer (Tu) Autonomous County, Haidong Municipality, Qinghai Province, China to research and document Mangghuer embroidery. This research is summarized in terms of the history of Mangghuer embroidery, tools and materials, embroidery techniques, embroidered items, and embroidery's significance in Mangghuer women's lives. The materials are illustrated with numerous photographs.

KEYWORDS
embroidery, Mangghuer, Minhe, Monguor, Qinghai, Tu

It is a paper published in the proceedings of 2015 International Conference on the Kizil Cave Paintings at China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. This paper handles with different repertoires of the textile patterns, which are specifically represented in the First or the Second Indo-Iranian style paintings in Kucha. This study is still in a provisional stage and I would be very grateful for feedbacks from experts.

This paper is about an analysis of whom will be the next Global Power country. The content is explaining about the differences of hard and soft power of the United States and China. At the end, there will be an analysis of who will be the next Global Power.

First volume of the new series, Inner and Central Asian Art and Archaeology:

How Objects Tell Stories. Essays in Honor of Emma C. Bunker, eds. Katheryn M. Linduff and Karen S. Rubinson

Series edited by Judith A. Lerner and Annette L. Juliano

The collecting of art and artefacts from East Asia has been in vogue in the Western world for hundreds of years with the forced opening of China, Japan and Korea from the mid-19 th century onwards, creating a market boom that resulted in thousands of objects entering collections worldwide. China in particular, during the first three decades of the 20 th century, became subject to the most intensive spate of collecting on the part of museum institutions and private collectors. In the past 20 years, the movement of these objects and the circumstances of their translocation have been increasingly the focus of curators and scholars investigating purchases related to the politics and market mechanisms under the Nazi regime. Despite research and numerous projects, we still do not know enough about the destiny of significant private collections dispersed between 1933 and 1945, the acquisition policies of museums at this time and the key actors and institutions involved in the art market for East Asian art in the first half of the 20 th century. The current international debates around the handling of objects that found their way into museum collections in connection with the colonial period present new challenges for collecting history and provenance research. This includes the revaluation of historical contexts, the reconstruction of looted and displaced collections in East Asia and the layout of a legal or ethical framework to address these issues. S

Since the Arab-Islamic conquest of Eastern Iran, the lands beyond the Oxus became the main suppliers of both the manpower and the money of the early Islamic empire. Slaves, porcelain, silk, textile, paper all came through theTransoxianan frontier. In addition to their trading position, the Islamised local population, together with other Eastern Iranians, were also among the first Muslim scribes, translators, religious scholars, and intellectuals, but is it possible to quantify and visualise their contribution based on written historical sources in Arabic? This paper proposes a computational reading of a large corpus of classical Arabic texts, the Open ITI Corpus (currently comprising 3,450 unique titles and nearly 450 million words for the period prior to 911/1506), to answer this question. The primary aim of this study is, by using distant reading methods, to quantify and visualise the presence of the ahl al-Khurāsān (also called the ʿajamīs or fārisīs) in the Islamic textual heritage in the early Islamic period.
Since the publication of Richard Bulliet’s ground-breaking quantitative work on conversion to Islam (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, 1979), few people have attempted to quantify conversion and by extension the
contribution of the converted people. However, the rapid development of computational technology in the past two decades has made it increasingly easy to peruse and analyse an astonishing amount of material instantly.
Thus, this paper will be able to offer a “bird’s eye view” of the people of Khurāsān and Transoxiana in ArabIslamic texts, including histories, biographical dictionaries and hadith collections, employing distant reading,
(i.e. computational method to read and extract information) from thousands of written sources. Finally, the paper will focus on a couple of case studies to demonstrate the merits and shortcomings of the method in answering historical questions.

Sophia G. Vashalomidze (Halle/ Saale) beleuchtet in ihrem Artikel „Georgien, kulturelle Schwelle zwischen Asien und Europa am Beispiel der Barlaam-Legende“ die Verbreitung derselben und die diesbezügliche Vermittlerrolle Georgiens. Die christianisierte Form der Buddhalegende sei über georgische und griechische Übertragungen in den Westen bis nach Irland, Spanien und Island gelangt. Der indische Bodhisattva hielt über sogdisch/ persisch Bōdīsaf und arabisch Būdāsaf als Joasaph Einzug in die christliche Ökumene.