Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia Matteo Nicolini-Zani Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia. Edited by Dietmar W. Winkler and Li Tang. [Orientalia—patristica—oecumenica,Vol. 1.] (Münster–Vienna: Lit Verlag. 2009. Pp. iv, 395. €39,90 paperback. ISBN 978-3-643-50045-8.) In the last twenty years, research on the commonly mistermed “Nestorian” Christianity in central and eastern Asia has grown in Eastern and Western academic circles. New publications have resulted in a new approach that is based more on sources and a broader philological foundation, which can be truly regarded as a turning point in the history of research on East Syrian Christianity in Asia. The volume under review is the outcome of the second conference on “Research on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia” in 2006. It contains papers written by scholars from disciplines such as church history, [End Page 616] philology (Syriac, Turkic, Iranic, and Chinese), archaeology, and theology. It explores the subject of East Syrian Christianity from various perspectives. The volume is organized in four parts. The first part, on “Inscriptions” (pp. 13–132), contains current research on texts carved in stone from various geographical areas (Central Asia, Inner Mongolia, China). Particularly relevant in this section are essays on Syriac and Syro-Turkic inscriptions by Mark Dickens, Wassilios Klein, Kuvatbek Tabaldiev, Li Chonglin, and Niu Ruji. They give the original text, transliteration, translation, and a commentary of Christian gravestones found in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzistan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang (China), all dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Also worth mentioning is Li Tang’s preliminary study (text analysis, commentary, and translation) on the Chinese Christian inscription found in Luoyang in 2006 and dating from the ninth century. The second part deals briefly with “Manuscripts and Texts” (pp. 135–80). Among the three articles in this section, Max Deeg’s provocative essay invites scholars to consider the proper and improper ways to proceed in placing in their context the Chinese Christian documents of the Tang period (618–907). The third part, on “History” (pp. 183–334), is the richest and presents the evaluation and interpretation of various sources such as inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and texts coming from different regions of central and eastern Asia and dating back to various historical periods. Among the eleven essays contained in this section five concern Syriac Christianity in China and Korea during the first centuries of the second millennium: Pierre Marsone writes on the time when the Temple of the Cross at Fangshan was a “Christian Temple”; Maurizio Paolillo about King George, the thirteenth-century Christian chief of the Öngüt tribe; Li Tang on Christians of the Mongol (or, better, Mongolised Turkish) Naiman tribe and one of their princes, Küchlüg khan, as referred to in medieval sources; Yin Xiaoping on Christians in the Chinese region of Jiangnan during the Yuan dynasty (1272–1368); Alexander Toepel about Christians in Korea at the end of the thirteenth century. In addition, Matteo Nicolini-Zani shows how Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to Tang Christianity in their writings to further their own mission, and Chen Huaiyu investigates the textual and artistic encounter between East Syrian Christianity and Tantric Buddhism in medieval China and Tibet. The last part is devoted to “Liturgy and Arts” (pp. 337–92), with three articles exploring the fields of liturgical music and religious arts. Yan Xiaojing’s article, in particular, shows the interaction between Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist artistic patterns. Photographs of historical relics are inserted in some of the contributions. Regrettably, the volume is rather carelessly edited. The two editors note in their introduction that they were aware of the challenging work of editing [End Page 617] such a collection of diverse interdisciplinary scholarship. Nevertheless, the book is a unique collection of “hidden treasures” for all those who wish to know more about those fascinating and mostly neglected interreligious and intercultural exchanges in which Christianity was involved in its diffusion along the Silk Road for about one thousand years. Matteo Nicolini-Zani Monastero di Bose Magnano...