Médicine, religion et société dans la Chine médiévale: Étude de manuscrits Chinois de Dunhuang et de Turfan (review)

margin. Perhaps Brill can consider publishing volume 1 in paperback as a service to the community of researchers not only in Chinese Studies, but also in the disciplinary fields of social history, comparative religion, ritual studies, and human geography.9 ADAM YUET CHAU University of Cambridge Médicine, religion et société dans la Chine médiévale: Étude de manuscrits Chinois de Dunhuang et de Turfan. Sous la direction de CATHERINE DESPEUX, avec la collaboration de ISABELLE ANG. Paris: Collège de France, Institute des Hautes Études Chinoises, 2010. 3 vols. 1386 pp. J140 (pb). ISBN 978-2-85757-068-6 In the first decade of the 20th century, Sir Aurel Stein first brought back over 10,000 manuscripts to the British Library, and Paul Pelliot, shortly afterwards and during the same years (1906–1908), sent over 6000 manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turfan to the Bibliothèque nationale. One could argue that a century of intermittent effort has gone into this volume from that beginning with their discoveries to the opening of the twenty-first century, when the international research group on the Dunhuang medical manuscripts collaborated (2001–2007) and published this magnum opus in 2010. The chief-editor Catherine Despeux’s introduction provides an illuminating overview of all the people, institutions, libraries, and places across the globe that have been involved in the remarkable story of these rare Chinese medical manuscripts over the past century. The 438 Chinese manuscripts discussed and indexed from every angle in these three volumes, dating from the seventh to the eleventh centuries, came from Dunhuang 敦煌 and Turfan 吐魯番 and deal with a range of health-related issues. They are scattered across sixteen libraries in six countries—China, Japan, England, France, Germany, and Russia. The first two volumes contain a total of fourteen chapters by nine scholars of specific manuscripts that reveal various dimensions of medicine, religion, and society in medieval China and which add much complexity to our understanding of the period and northwest China. The following list gives a sense of not only the range of themes these authors have explored but also of the richness of the 438 manuscripts they have explicated: medical institutions and therapies, medical recipes, life hygiene and longevity practices, and magico-religious Buddhist practices (Catherine Despeux); fragments of the Shanghan lun 傷寒論 and Wuzang lun 五藏論 and the literature on sexuality (Donald Harper); pulse diagnosis (Elisabeth Hsu); pharmacopoeias (Ute Engelhardt); moxibustion 9 If one is interested in reading more on scholarship related to these two volumes one can start with Kenneth Dean’s Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China; Zheng Zhenman’s book Family and Lineage Organization and Social Change in Ming-Qing Fujian, translated and introduced by Michael Szonyi (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2001); and Hugh R. Clark’s Portrait of a Community: Society, Culture, and the Structures of Kinship in the Mulan River Valley (Fujian) from the Late Tang through the Song (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2007). 112 BOOK REVIEWS (Vivienne Lo); medicine and hemerology in calendars (Alain Arrault); Chinese-Hu [i.e. ‘‘barbarian’’] medical interactions and childhood illnesses and Buddhist demonology (Chen Ming 陳明); medical products, aromatics, and tinctures from the march to Turfan in 743 (Éric Trombert); and apocryphal sutras and illnesses (Fang Ling 方玲). The nine authors (including Despeux) and five collaborators have together produced the most important synthesis of Dunhuang and Turfan manuscripts since Marc Kalinowski’s Divination et societié dans la Chine médiévale (2003) and Christopher Cullen and Vivienne Lo’s Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts (2005).1 Developing further upon their predecessors’ scholarship, they collectively weave throughout the fourteen wide-ranging and in-depth articles the three thematic threads of medicine, religion, and society. Readers of the Journal of Chinese Religions will be most interested in the second of these thematic threads, on religion, which for the most part concentrates on what these manuscripts reveal about Buddhist institutions, practitioners, patrons, practices, and influences related to illness and healing in the Dunhuang and Turfan regions. This dimension of the primary sources and their analysis in these volumes makes an important contribution to the historical study of Chinese...