Manuscript Cultures
Stories from rural China: The Serruys Collection is available online
23 July 2021, by Webmaster
Photo: CSMC
The collection is part of the bequest of Father Paul L-M. Serruys, C.I.C.M. (1912-1999) who is remembered as an eminent scholar and professor of early Chinese texts, language and linguistics, who spent thirteen years as a missionary in Northern China until 1949. During this period, he developed an interest in anthropology and ethnography. He tasked his students with writing down stories they had heard from relatives or friends. These pieces of ‘homework’ do not only provide sources for the study of folklore in a backward community, but are also of interest to students of Chinese manuscripts, since they represent the full range of writing supports and palaeographical features of the first half of the 20th century.
CSMC Special Collections: The Serruys Collection
The collection has been fully digitized and high-resolution images are available to download in the UHH Research Data Repository. So far, no research has been conducted on the collection. CSMC invites scholars to discover this potential treasure trove of rural cultural heritage. If you would like to see the collection in person, please contact the CSMC library at manuscript-cultures@uni-hamburg.de( manuscript-cultures"AT"uni-hamburg.de).