Two Inseparable Names, Dunhuang and Paul Pelliot

Nathalie Monnet

Paul Pelliot—A Meticulous Philologist and CourageousExplorerT

he name of the great scholar Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) is foreverlinked to the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang in northwestern China,
and, more generally, to Far Eastern Studies. His legacy, consisting of
more than eight hundred scholarly articles published in the first half ofthe 20th century, remains fundamental in many areas for the history ofIndochina, Mongolia, China, Central Asia, and Iran.
Pelliot was a meticulous philologist blessed with an infinite curiosityand a prodigious memory. He not only had a perfect knowledge ofancient and modern Chinese, but also mastered Turkish, Uyghur,Mongolian, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and other rare ancient languages. He was
as effective at collecting works of art and books as he was at identifying
inscriptions and manuscripts that, thanks to his efforts, had beenacquired for French cultural institutes.
Far from being a scholar confined to his study, Pelliot was a peerless
explorer and a courageous man of action; in 1900, he distinguished himself during the siege of the Foreign Legations by the Boxers in Beijingand was awarded the National Order of the Legion of Honour at the ageof twenty-two. He later received the Military Cross at Gallipoli, where
he served in 1914.
During his expedition to Central Asia, he did not hesitate at times toleave the convoy to scout along forgotten mountain paths and hunt for
epigraphic inscriptions in remote areas. Shortly after his return toFrance, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France, filling theChair of “Language, History and Archaeology of Central Asia” createdfor him in 1911. Only the war and his travels temporarily interrupted alife devoted to teaching and research which he conducted until his deathin 1945.
Paul Pelliot graduated from both the National School for OrientalLanguages and the School of Political Science. He also held a57

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two inseparable names, dunhuang and paul pelliot

Bachelor’s degree in English. He was heading for a career in diplomacy
when he came to the attention of the most renowned Orientalists of histime, the sinologist Édouard Chavannes and the Indianist Sylvain Lévi,
who convinced him to pursue his studies of ancient Asia. He began hiscareer as a teacher in the newly founded French School of the Far Eastin Hanoi, and, from 1900 onwards, was regularly sent to Beijing by theSchool to acquire Chinese books and artifacts for its new museum andlibrary.
Like the other major European powers, Germany, England andRussia, the French government launched an expedition to Central Asia,
an area which at that time was one of the least known regions on earth.
Appointed as the head of this major expedition, Paul Pelliot crossed
these vast expanses of land between 1906 and 1908, then continuing hisjourney on to China where he acquired thousands of Chinese books thatenabled French sinologists to have access to the essential tools needed
for the study of Chinese culture. While in Beijing, he became acquainted with the community of Chinese scholars and informed them of the
exceptional discovery of the thousands of medieval manuscripts fromDunhuang.

Contribution to Study of Chinese Buddhism
Pelliot’s invaluable contribution to the study of Chinese Buddhism israrely acknowledged. He addressed this topic as early as 1903. He wasmore interested in the historical development of the Buddhist religion
than in the doctrine itself and wrote that: “Philosophies and religions areborn, evolve and perish in certain conditions of time and environment,
and it is these conditions that must be discovered.” He strove to determine with the utmost accuracy the paths that allowed Buddhism topenetrate into China and analyse the stories of the monks who moved
along the Silk Road.
He likewise explored the relationship between Taoism, an authentically Chinese system of thought, and the early phases of the spread ofBuddhism into China. He wrote on the way the two doctrines borrowed
concepts and vocabularies from each other. He also studied this syncretism as it appears in a folk tale entitled Huhuajing (The Conversion ofthe Barbarians). As the story goes, Laozi, the holy founder of Taoism,
disappeared one day in the western borders of the Chinese territory andhis doctrine reappeared centuries later precisely from the West to spreadto the Chinese empire under the new name of Buddhism.
Pelliot was interested in the linguistic aspects of Indian, Sogdian,

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Chinese, and other languages, and produced comparative studies
between various forms of Buddhism. More than one hundred articles
were devoted to points pertaining to Buddhism. His most striking contribution is however linked to his expedition to Central Asia where he wasable to explore unknown Buddhist sites, many in the Kucha region andespecially later at Dunhuang.
He spent months in the Chinese oasis of Mogaoku, the “Caves ofUnparalleled Height” near the city of Dunhuang on the edge of the Gobiand Taklamakan Desert. There, he explored several hundred decorated
caves dating from the second half of the first millennium. In his detailed
survey, he recorded their interior decorations and deciphered every
inscription. All the major wall paintings and clay sculptures were photographed under his supervision. Back in France, despite a series ofsetbacks, he managed to publish these unique photographs.
His scientific survey of the Dunhuang caves is the earliest descriptionof the site and stands as a reference for modern historians of SinoBuddhist art. One of the smallest caves, cave number 17, offered aPelliot examining documents in the Library Cave (1908)

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two inseparable names, dunhuang and paul pelliot

literary treasure of over 65,000 manuscripts from the 5th to the early
11th centuries, in Chinese, Tibetan and many extinct languages. InMarch 1908, Pelliot spent three weeks in a row huddled in this small
recess in the cliff unrolling and selecting more than 4,000 Chinese manuscripts, almost as many in Tibetan and a few others in Sogdian,
Uyghur, Sanskrit, Kuchean, and Khotanese—he even found a small
prayer written in Hebrew. The linguistic diversity found in the cave testifies to Dunhuang having been for centuries a lively Buddhist centre at
the crossroads of numerous cultures.
After negotiating with the guardian monk of the site, the documents
Pelliot selected reached Paris at the end of 1909. The manuscripts weresent to the National Library while the artifacts and silk paintings went to
the Louvre where they were immediately displayed. They were subsequently transferred to the Guimet Museum in Paris. The Buddhist
paintings and banners from Dunhuang are the oldest known specimensfrom China, as no other site has preserved similar documents from thatperiod. The free access by several generations of scholars from all over
the world to Pelliot’s collection of manuscripts, sutras, various texts andarchive documents, has necessarily fostered a better understanding of
early Chinese Buddhism.
Author Biography
Nathalie Monnet is a Chief Curator, in charge of the Dunhuang manuscripts andChinese funds in the Oriental Service of the Manuscript Department at the National
Library of France.