It situates Dunhuang studies within the wider field of Oriental studies and analyzes the distinct ways in which these communities positioned “the East” through their engagements with Dunhuang materials. The paper argues that each community’s conceptualization of the East reflected its own projections of the Self and the Other. It further explains why Britain, despite being a leading Orientalist power and the sponsor of the first European expedition that uncovered Dunhuang, did not become the most advanced center of Dunhuang scholarship; why Germany and Russia were not particularly motivated to engage Chinese scholars; why France and Japan came to be regarded by Chinese intellectuals as the two preeminent powers in Chinese studies; and why Chinese scholars understood the study of their own country as a form of Orientology.
Kevin Chang (b. 1968) works on a variety of subjects: science and medicine in early modern Europe, the history of media and publication, comparative studies of the humanities (philology and linguistics in particular) and global history of higher education. He received his PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has since been working at the Institute of History and Philology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s national academy. He co-edited World Philology (Harvard University Press, 2015) with Sheldon Pollock and Benjamin Elman, Impagination: Layout and Materiality of Writing and Publication (de Gruyter, 2021) with Anthony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, and A Global History of Education: Disciplines, Institutions, and Nations, 1840-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2021) with Alan Rocke.
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