Tsinghua University Delegation Visits CSMC

24 April 2025

Photo: CSMC

Members of the Tsinghua University Delegation, members of the CSMC and UHH Vice-President Natalia Filatkina during the meeting at the CSMC.

Last week, the CSMC welcomed a delegation from the Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts (RCCUT) at Tsinghua University, Beijing, one of the leading research hubs in East Asia for the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts.

The three-member delegation was led by Professor Peng Gang, Vice-President of Tsinghua University for Studies and Teaching. He was accompanied by Professors Liu Guozhong and Cheng Hao, both leading experts in the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts from the Warring States period (481–221 BCE).

Professor Natalia Filatkina, Vice-President of the University of Hamburg for Studies and Teaching, opened the visit with a welcome address. She introduced the University of Hamburg and its international collaborations, underlining the importance of academic exchange in advancing global knowledge and cultural understanding. She also expressed hopes for a continued dialogue between the CSMC and RCCUT, which were echoed in Professor Peng’s response.

Following a presentation on RCCUT’s history and ongoing work by Professor Liu Guozhong, Professor Michael Friedrich, founding director of the CSMC and former spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence UWA, introduced the history and research agenda of both the CSMC and UWA, with a particular emphasis on their overarching vision. Other participants from the CSMC included Sinologists Thies Staack and Ondřej Škrabal, as well as Małgorzata Grzelec and Ivan Shevchuk, who provided a detailed overview of the CSMC Mobile Lab. The visit concluded with a discussion of potential avenues for future collaboration.

Founded in 1911, Tsinghua University is widely regarded as China’s foremost institution for science and engineering, and one of the country’s top two universities overall. In 2008, Tsinghua University received a collection of bamboo-slip manuscripts dating to the fourth century BCE, believed to have been looted from a tomb in southern China and later acquired at an antique market in Hong Kong. To preserve, curate, and study these manuscripts, the university established the Research and Conservation Center for Unearthed Texts.

Often likened to the Dead Sea Scrolls, this manuscript cache not only offers vital insights into early Chinese history and thought – it also yields unprecedented information about ancient Chinese manuscript practices. Fourteen volumes of annotated editions of the Tsinghua manuscripts have so far been published in Chinese, with two more in preparation. An international collaborative project, ‘Tsinghua University Warring States Bamboo Manuscripts: Studies and Translations’, is currently underway to produce new annotated editions, English translations, and studies of the collection. Among the project members is CSMC researcher Ondřej Škrabal.

Since its founding, RCCUT has made groundbreaking contributions to manuscript studies in China, becoming one of the leading research hubs in East Asia for the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts. Importantly, it has also played a key role in fostering a new generation of scholars in this rapidly growing field, spurred by a wave of new manuscript discoveries over the past three decades.

During the visit, Vice-President Peng Gang presented the CSMC with a faithful reproduction of one of the most remarkable manuscripts in the Tsinghua collection: the world’s oldest known decimal multiplication table, entitled *Calculation Table (*Suan biao) by the editors. This manuscript, comprising of 21 bamboo slips with ingenious navigation threads, exemplifies the scholarly and historical value of the Tsinghua collection.