EACS-2016. Book of Abstracts

Section 7 21st Biennial Conference of the European Association for Chinese Studies 85 that despite what the vast majority of scholars say, it isn't clear whether Sogdian people dwelling in China during VI and VII century were Zoroastrians. Actually, some elements seem to point to other explanations. Nebon-Carle Valentine (Institute of Transtextual and Transcultural Studies) Disneyfication of Russian Material Heritage in Northeast China Key words: material heritage, Russian Empire, Manchuria In 1896, Serge Witte, the Russian Minister of Finance, concluded with Li Hongzhang a secret treaty by which the Russians had the right to build the Chinese Eastern Railway. This railway was the continuation of the Trans-Siberian across north-east China.Aresult of this treaty was that Manchuria, including the Liaodong Peninsula, became a Russian sphere of influence. Harbin was the main station, and Dalian the terminus. This city would become the principal port for Russian troops. The Russians stayed in Northern Manchuria until the 1930s; they left Southern Manchuria to the Japanese in 1905, when they lost the Russo-Japanese War. The Russians occupied Harbin for fifty years and Dalian for ten. Although constituted a brief period of time, we can still see Russian influence today, especially in the neo-classical monuments they built in these cities. Through architecture, they tried to make these territories Russian. The European style of monuments in both these cities, redolent of the architecture in Paris or in Saint Petersburg. Since the 1980s many local historians have tried to reinvent the past of Harbin. Nowadays local his- torians disagree over the date of foundation of the city. Some, mainly Europeans historians, state that it was built by Russians in 1898 and others, mainly Chinese, contest that actually there was a Chinese city in the very same place before the Russians’ arrival(1). However, Russian monuments attest to the Russian identity or Russians origins of the city, and have thus discredited this hypothesis. For that reason, Russian material heritage and the Russian past of Harbin and Dalian are not “objectively” preserved. Indeed, they disremember this Russian past by neglecting or “disneyfying” Russian material heritage. (1) Soren Closen and Stig Thogersen compare these hypotheses in The Making of a Chinese City, History and Histori- ography in Harbin, New York, M. E. Sharpe, 1995. Panova Olga (Russian State University for the Humanities) The Itinerant Monk from the Library Cave and Issues of Reproduction Key words: Dunhuang, Library Cave, Buddhist art, itinerant monk, reproduction An image showing an itinerant monk with a tiger in the collection of the Hermitage Museum in St.Petersburg, like other ten similar images on paper and silk dispersed through museum collections across Europe and Asia, originally came from the library of Cave 17 in the Dunhuang cave complex. Scholars have dedicated considerable attention to the iconography and interpretation of these images, identifying the main figure either as Xuanzang, as a nameless itinerant monk from Central Asia, or as the personifica- tion of Buddha Ratnasapbhava, etc. My paper hopes to shed additional light on this debate by studying the function, production and reduplication of these images. Although these painting were sealed in the library cave in the first half of the 11th c., they had a long subsequent life outside Dunhuang, and even outside China. The same pictorial pattern of an itinerant monk was reproduced in different media, including murals, silk paintings, stone engravings and ceramic reliefs. First, I will discuss the format of these paintings and suggest their original function. Then I will address how these similarly-drawn images were reproduced, and will describe how this pictorial pattern traveled across media and time. My research to date indicates that the main figure represented in all images is the subject of worship. As with many Buddhist deities, he is associated with a specific iconography which preserves the unity of the images and make the image in each case recognizable. Most of the images on paper found in the Library Cave are low-quality executions, and probably served as mass-produced paintings for local worshipers. The high degree of similarity between paintings, including in some cases mirror-image reproductions, raises the question of what techniques were used to produce these images, and whether there is an original master copy.