Gentlemanly Landscapes, the End of Empire, and the Chinese-Inner Asian Borderlands, 1907–97

Orientalist philology - the critical study of old texts in Asian languages -  is a core cultural product in industrial empire. It has been indicted by critics for its close relationship to the machinery of imperial domination.  Less often acknowledged is the status of Orientalist philology as a form of cultivated relaxation, a pleasurable past-time for educated men.  Two kinds of gentlemanly landscape are involved in Orientalist philology: the landscapes of text procurement – often an imperial border region – and the landscapes of text manipulation – the study, library, or lecture theater, often in a metropolitan center.  This paper examines the relationship between gentlemanly space, philological history, and imperial ends in the case of the manuscripts from the oasis of Dunhuang in the Chinese-Inner Asian borderlands.  It traces the fate of these manuscripts and their connections with gentlemanly space and gentlemanly culture through a series of imperial ends – starting from the end of the Qing empire in 1911 and extending to the end of the Japanese, French and British empires in Asia after World War II.  A political analysis of the acquisition of these texts and their incorporation into the structures of philological historical scholarship is linked with an attempt to map landscapes of gentlemanly leisure, imperial and post-imperial.  The defence of gentlemanly space is understood as a goal shared by imperial and non-imperial systems of scholarly power.