CrossAsia Talk: Thies Staack (Universität Hamburg) „The Provenance of the Chinese Medical Manuscripts in the Unschuld Collection: New Evidence from an Unpublished Acquisition Notebook“
20. Feb. 2025, 6pm CET, online
Thiess Staack (University of Hamburg) will present his finds concerning the question of provenance of the Chinese medical manuscripts of the Unschuld collection housed to a large extent at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Germany. His results shed light on the on the origins and movements of these books within China as well as on regional peculiarities of medical knowledge and healing practices.
Abstract:
The provenance of the Chinese medical manuscripts collected by Paul Ulrich Unschuld has long remained an open question. Even the catalogue of the collection, published in 2012, offers very little information in this respect. The present lecture introduces a new source of provenance information: an unpublished acquisition notebook in which Unschuld recorded the date and place of purchase for nearly 800 manuscripts he acquired between 1996 and 2006. By synthesising the data contained in the notebook and in the documents kept in the archives of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Berlin State Library, it has been possible to obtain provenance information on 490 manuscript volumes, which are now listed under 471 separate shelf marks in the “Unschuld collection” of the Berlin State Library. In addition to the year and month of acquisition, the city of origin could be determined for 371 of these manuscripts, and for a total of 67 even the specific location within that city. The lecture will present the results of this provenance research and describe how it was possible to match notebook entries with actual manuscripts in the Berlin State Library collection. In addition, it will further probe into the provenance of a sub-group of manuscripts that all went through the hands of the same book collector from Shanghai. Finally, the presentation will demonstrate the benefits of provenance data for research into regional peculiarities of medical knowledge and healing practices.
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The lecture will be held in English and streamed via Webex*. You can take part in the lecture using your browser without having to install a special software. Please click on the link “To the lecture” below, then follow the link “join via browser” (“über Browser teilnehmen”), and enter your name.
For any questions please contact us: ostasienabt@sbb.spk-berlin.de.
To the lecture:
https://spk-berlin.webex.com/spk-berlin/j.php?MTID=mda1aabbfff4db7e388b446edfa0d3853
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