20th Anniversary of the Turfan Studies Institute & 7th International Symposium on Turfan Studies

The symposium (吐魯番學研究院成立二十周年暨第七屆吐魯番學國際學術研討會), held on 18 Oct 2025, marked the 20th anniversary of the Turfan Studies Institute, hosted at the Shuangcheng Hotel of Turfan. Organized by the China Dunhuang–Turfan Society with regional cultural and heritage authorities, it gathered scholars working across archaeology, philology, religious history, art history, and conservation.

Panels showed how excavated texts, burials, and inscriptions, read with transmitted sources, rebuild local histories, with a focus on rigorous text–artifact corroboration. A companion track used multilingual materials to follow institutions and ideas across Tang–Yuan–Ming, addressing dating and genre issues. Sessions on religion, language, and art mapped a plural sacred landscape, while conservation panels reported advances in analysis and preventive care for organic and paper materials. The day ended with syntheses and plans for data sharing and joint publications.

Jingjiao (the Church of the East) featured at two notable points. A historical-documents paper examined the “co-existent model of Buddhism and Christianity in Gaochang from the Tang to the Yuan,” arguing—through a combination of multilingual textual witnesses and material remains—that Christian communities adapted to and interacted with Buddhist environments rather than operating in isolation. Complementing this, an archaeological-documents report on crosses recovered from a western Turfan burial zone provided direct material evidence for Christian presence, extending the evidentiary base beyond texts to mortuary practice and ornament typologies. Together, these contributions strengthened a dual-track method for Jingjiao studies in Turfan: pairing multilingual philology with contexted artifact analysis.

Overall, the program underscored Turfan’s value as a laboratory for integrated scholarship—where documentary cultures, sacred art, and conservation science intersect. For Jingjiao specifically, the proceedings advanced a clearer picture of Christian life in Gaochang, not as an anomalous strand but as one thread in a multi-religious fabric. The combination of textual and archaeological findings invites follow-up work on typologies of Christian objects, cross-lingual concordances for key terms, and tighter coordination between museum holdings and field reports to build a shared, updateable corpus for the region.

Related: