Oirat Collection of the Fund of Ancient Manuscripts of Xinjiang Ethnic Minorities

Abstract

Until recently, the Oirat manuscripts from Xinjiang remained inaccessible to researchers due to a number of circumstances. Most of the manuscripts are kept in private collections. According to some data, in the Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Province alone, the Olets living there have more than 300 personal collections, in which, according to rough estimates, there are more than two thousand manuscripts. The Fund of Ancient Manuscripts of National Minorities of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the PRC, created in the second half of the 1970s, is a large repository of texts in the ‘Clear Script’ of the Oirats. The basis for its creation was manuscripts and xylographs from private collections, which were preserved during the years of the Cultural Revolution thanks to the personal courage of ordinary lovers of book antiquity. The Oirat collection of Xinjiang contains 398 manuscripts and xylographs of various contents: Buddhist texts of the canonical content (sutras, sastras, devotional texts), works of popular Buddhist literature (jatakas, teachings, didactic instructions and sayings, framed novels, etc.), astrological, ritual folklore texts.