Int'l Experts Discuss Ancient Chinese Writing

Chinese and foreign scholars recently congregated at the Yuelu Academy, known as the country's oldest university, in central China's Hunan Province, to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the discovery of ancient writings with Chinese ink on bamboo slips and silk.

Sources with the meeting, which attracted more than 150 experts, said that over the past century, some 260,000 relics of bamboo and silk writings have been unearthed in China. The biggest find of 170,000 items dating back nearly 2,000 years came in this provincial capital of Hunan in 1996.

Xie Guihua, director of the Bamboo and Silk Writing Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that these relics provide first-hand documents for the study of the history of politics, economy, literature, archivistics, archeology and linguistics.

However, like the study of inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty (16th11th century B.C.), for which archaeologists have spent the past century uncovering a fraction of the material believed available, deciphering the extensive store of documents written on bamboo slips and silk would require international research power and another century of work, Xie said.

Renowned professors from China's mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Britain, Japan and Switzerland gave lectures at Yuelu to exchange their latest research on bamboo and silk writings.

People's Daily Online --- http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/