The Life Cycle of Manuscripts

23 October 2024

Photo: Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts, Tsinghua University

An international conference in Beijing addressed ‘The Life Cycle of Manuscripts: The Ethics and Practice of Acquiring, Preserving, and Accessing Global Heritage’. Among the invited experts from the UK, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine, Hungary, and other countries was Markus Fischer from the CSMC.

The preservation of and scholarly engagement with handwritten artefacts are not the purview of any one academic discipline, but rather a cross-cutting area in which researchers with diverse backgrounds work together. The aim of a two-day conference on 21 and 22 September in Beijing was to provide a forum for exchanging ideas, promoting intercultural and interdisciplinary exchange, discussing theories and techniques, comparing case studies, and sharing experiences. The conference consisted of four parts: The first group of speakers discussed measures to protect cultural artefacts and the importance of their ‘second life’ in digital form. The second group dealt with the historical and cultural value of written documents. The third group discussed the reuse of artefacts and the reproduction of texts. Finally, the fourth group focused on modern interpretation methods.

In the first of these four blocks, Markus Fischer, professor at the Hamburg School of Food Science and head of ‘Artefact Profiling’ (Research Field A) at the CSMC, spoke about the potential of chemical and digital analyses of cultural artefacts and current challenges in these areas. Imre Galambos, professor at the University of Cambridge and former Petra Kappert Fellow at the CSMC, was also among the speakers. In the third part of the conference, he talked about scrolls from north western China whose versos were written on – not to recycle the material, but to enter into a dialogue with the text or to supplement it.

The Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts at Tsinghua University, which hosted the conference, is committed to interdisciplinary research into historical manuscripts from different cultures and works with scholars from around the world.