Tangutology or Tangut studies is the study of the culture, history, art and language of the ancient Tangut people, especially as seen through the study of contemporaneous documents written by the Tangut people themselves. As the Tangut language was written in a unique and complex script and the spoken language became extinct, the cornerstone of Tangut studies has been the study of the Tangut language and the decipherment of the Tangut script.
The Tangut people founded the Western Xia dynasty (1038–1227) in northwestern China, which was eventually overthrown by the Mongols. The Tangut script, which was devised in 1036, was widely used in printed books and on monumental inscriptions during the Western Xia period, as well as during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), but the language became extinct sometime during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The latest known examples of Tangut writing are Buddhist inscriptions dated 1502 on two dharani pillars from a temple in Baoding, Hebei. By the Qing dynasty (1636–1912) all knowledge of the Tangut language and script had been lost, and no examples or descriptions of the Tangut script had been preserved in any surviving Chinese books from the Song, Yuan or Ming dynasties. It was not until the 19th century that the Tangut language and script were rediscovered.
The birth of Tangut studies
Earliest identification of Tangut
The earliest modern identification of the Tangut script occurred in 1804, when a Chinese scholar called Zhang Shu (, 1781–1847) observed that the Chinese text of a Chinese-Tangut bilingual inscription on a stele known as the Liangzhou Stele at the Huguo Temple () in Wuwei, Gansu, had a Western Xia era name, and so concluded that the corresponding inscription in an unknown script must be the native Western Xia script; and hence the unknown writing in the same style on the Cloud Platform at Juyongguan at the Great Wall of China north of Beijing must also be the Tangut script.
However, Zhang's identification of the Tangut script was not widely known, and more than a half a century later scholars were still debating what the unknown script at the Cloud Platform was. The Cloud Platform, which had been built in 1343–1345 as the base for a pagoda, was inscribed with Buddhist texts in six different scripts (Chinese, Sanskrit, ʼPhags-pa, Tibetan, Old Uyghur and Tangut), but only the first five of these six were known to Chinese and Western scholars at the time. In 1870 Alexander Wylie (1815–1887) wrote an influential paper entitled "An ancient Buddhist inscription at Keu-yung Kwan" in which he asserted that the unknown script was Jurchen, and it was not until 1899 that Stephen Wootton Bushell (1844–1908) published a paper demonstrating conclusively that the unknown script was in fact Tangut.
Tentative decipherments of Tangut
Bushell, a physician at the British Legation in Beijing from 1868 to 1900, was a keen numismatist, and had collected a number of coins issued by the Western Xia state with inscriptions in the Tangut script. In order to read the inscriptions on these coins he attempted to decipher as many Tangut characters as possible by comparing the Chinese and Tangut texts on a bilingual stele from Liangzhou. In 1896 he published a list of thirty-seven Tangut characters with their corresponding meaning in Chinese, and using this key he was able to decipher the four-character inscription on one of his Western Xia coins as meaning "Precious Coin of the Da'an period [1076–1085]" (corresponding to the Chinese Dà'ān Bǎoqián ). This was the first time that an unknown Tangut text, albeit only four characters in length, had been translated.
At about the same time as Bushell was working on Tangut numismatic inscriptions, Gabriel Devéria (1844–1899), a diplomat at the French Legation in Beijing, was studying the bilingual Tangut-Chinese Liangzhou Stele, and in 1898, a year before his death, he published two important articles on the Tangut script and the Liangzhou Stele.
The third European in China to undertake the study of Tangut was Georges Morisse (d. 1910), an interpreter at the French Legation in Beijing, who made progress in deciphering the Tangut script by comparing the text of the Chinese version of the Lotus Sutra (Sanskrit: ) with that of three volumes of a manuscript of the Tangut version which had been discovered in Beijing in 1900 during the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. By comparing the Tangut version of the sutra with the corresponding Chinese version of the sutra, Morisse was able to identify some 200 Tangut characters, and deduce some grammatical rules for Tangut, which he published in 1904.
The development of Tangut studies (1908 to the 1930s)