Several topics on this year’s EASL programme caught our attention. Before heading to Heidelberg, we decided to try a small experiment: asking UDP’s Lumen follow-up questions in natural language — in Chinese, English, and German. The results brought some unexpected surprises.
“What role have the Uyghurs played in China’s historical and cultural development?”
Meeting a 60-Year-Old Answer
Lumen did not keep us within today’s term “Uyghur.” Following the literature back in time, we came across a 1964 article in The Continent Magazine (《大陸雜誌》): “Printing among the Wei-wu-er Turks” (〈畏吾兒突厥人的印刷術〉).
Today’s “Uyghur” appeared in the literature more than sixty years ago as “Wei-wu-er” (畏吾兒). And what began as a question about ethnic history unexpectedly opened another door: the history of printing and the transmission of writing.
We then asked the question in German — and another path appeared. A 1972 article in Shih-huo Monthly (《食貨月刊》), “Turkic Culture and Its Influence on the Tang Dynasty” (〈突厥文化及其對唐朝之影響〉), carried the question into a broader historical world connecting Turkic culture, Tang China, and Central Asia.
We had asked just one question. Yet scholars writing more than half a century ago seemed to be leading us toward the next one.
Then we turned to another topic on the EASL programme: The Naxi (Mo-so) manuscript in the British Library. If we start with today’s “Naxi” and travel back through more than seventy years of scholarship, whom might we meet? The answer surprised us even more.
Around the Corner: Three Masters of Chinese Studies
One was Li Lin-tsan (李霖燦). During fieldwork in Lijiang in the 1930s and 1940s, he collected more than a thousand volumes of Mo-so texts, learned the language and writing system, and later compiled the Dictionary of Mo-so Pictographic Writing (《麼些象形文字字典》). Into the 1950s, he continued to ask: Where did this writing system come from? How did it evolve? What was its relationship with Chinese characters?
Following this trail, we encountered Tung Tso-pin (董作賓), one of the great pioneers of oracle-bone studies. In 1951, their intellectual paths crossed in Dalu Zazhi, where Tung published “Looking at Oracle-Bone Script through Mo-so Writing” (〈從麼些文看甲骨文〉).
Why would an oracle-bone scholar turn to an ethnic minority writing system in Southwest China to rethink a script more than three thousand years old?
Following the trail further, we encountered a third major figure, Li Chi (李濟) — and from there, Li Lin-tsan’s later scholarship at the National Palace Museum, and decades of oracle-bone and writing-system research associated with Tung Tso-pin and the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica.
Reconnecting Old and New Scholarship
A question asked in 2026 about a Naxi manuscript had unexpectedly reconnected scholars, journals, institutions, and research across generations. These publications had never disappeared. Some had simply been sitting quietly in databases for more than seventy years.
Today, when we approach them with new questions — and in different languages — old and new scholarship can illuminate each other, and knowledge separated by decades can become connected again. These are the moments that have surprised us most while exploring TAC with Lumen’s multilingual AI search.
But there is one question we cannot answer in this email:
