Writing and Material Culture in East Asia

29 April 2024

Photo: CSMC

Researchers of the CSMC recently visited Taiwan again to attend the latest edition of a series of jointly organised workshops. This time, they were joined by colleagues from the École française d’Extrême-Orient to discuss ‘Writing and Material Culture in East Asia’.

Since 2021, scholars from the Department of Chinese Literature of National Taiwan University (NTU) and the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) have been co-organising a series of conferences on central aspects of written artefact research. As a follow-up to the two conferences devoted to the topics ‘Variants/Variance – Text, Form and Material’ (October 2021, online) and ‘Standardisation of Written Artefacts in East Asia’ (August 2022, Hamburg), the third instalment of this collaboration, devoted to ‘Writing and Material Culture in East Asia’, took place in Taipeh. On 12 and 13 April, scholars from the École française d’Extrême-Orient and Université PSL (Paris Sciences & Lettres) in Paris joined hands with NTU and CSMC for the organisation.

At this conference, twenty-five scholars from Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, France, Switzerland, Australia, and Germany convened at National Taiwan University and presented their latest research on written artefacts. The contributions addressed Chinese, Japanese, Korean, as well as Vietnamese manuscript cultures, covering written artefacts produced from materials such as shell and bone, bronze, stone, bamboo and paper, thereby spanning a period from the second millennium BCE right up to the 20th century. The presentations initiated lively discussions and the conference was also well attended, indicating that this kind of cross-cultural and diachronic approach to the study of written artefacts garners considerable interest. The planning of a follow-up to this year’s conference, to be held in Paris in two years’ time, has already begun.