On the History of the Formation and Processing of the Collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto Kept at the IOM, RAS

Abstract

The Tibetan manuscripts and block prints from Khara-Khoto that were passed to the Asiatic Museum with other texts brought by P.K. Kozlov from his Mongolia and Sichuan Expedition have been insufficiently studied. Their processing was initiated in the second half of the 1960s and continued in the Post-Soviet period. The collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto, according to our analysis, included a number of documents from other sources. Trying to understand why it took place, we looked for and found some archival documents that shed light on the history of the formation of this collection and, simultaneously, helped to clarify some general issues concerning the fate of texts brought by P.K. Kozlov from Khara-Khoto. This paper presents the results of our study of the documents found in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Archives of the IOM, RAS, the Russian Ethnographic Museum and the Russian Geographic Society. The description of the events is divided into two parts: the first one reconstructs the chronology of the process of transferring manuscripts and block prints of P.K. Kozlovs Expedition to the Asiatic Museum; the second one deals with the history of the processing of the Tibetan texts from Khara- Khoto starting from the 1920s and up to present, when the contents of the collection have been critically revised. The table that reflects the current state of the Collection of the Tibetan Texts from Khara-Khoto kept at the IOM, RAS is provided in the appendix.