The month of November 2023 was devoted to a workshop on the history of calligraphy, a conference on research history and a meeting with Lou Vargas and Marc Bui, members of the ERC project Vietnamica, who shared their conceptual map with us and their thoughts on the use of digital tools in dealing with epigraphic corpora. Moreover, MA interns Paula Sumera and Francesca Berdin respectively headed a session on the construction of a historical map of the investigated mountainous sites, and the classification of variants: these will be reported upon in a separate post.

On November 15, historian of calligraphy Yolaine Escande joined us for a workshop on translating (and making sense of) comments made on the epigraphic œuvre of Zheng Daozhao by theoricians of calligraphy between the 18th and 20th centuries. Our attention went to the way they constructed Zheng Daozhao as representative of the Northern steles in reaction to Tang standards – not without political connotation under Qing rule. It appeared that this effort, beyond the recourse to a specialized and highly metaphorical vocabulary usual in calligraphic theory, also mobilized specific epigraphic models from early imperial to medieval times – steles, epitaphs, cliff engravings or votive inscriptions, which we might thinnk of integrating to some extent in the corpus, as links to existing repositories of reference rubbings. These “models” need to be assessed in terms of potential availability to Northern Wei viewers, but also in terms of relevance in purely visual terms (do they look as the commented style at all?). The comparison with the “Eulogy for burying a crane” 瘞鶴銘 appeared as a major case study to explore, as both cliff carvings (moya 摩崖) were produced in the 6th century and attributed to Taoist-related mindsets, and both display a rather loose approach to calligraphic style while having enjoyed radically different reception histories. Finally, a few cases of misinterpreted terms emerged from the way historical records are exploited and sometimes distorted to fit the portrait of ZDZ as a calligrapher.

On November 16, art historian Zhang Qiang, who has been invited by the project for a 25 days research stay in Paris, presented recent discoveries between the years 2015-2023, as well as the fieldtrips and “New epigraphic studies” conferences organized since 2021 around the epigraphy attributed to Zheng Daozhao and Seng’An Daoyi. Lia Wei presented an overview of later inscriptions – engraved after the 6^th century – in Zheng Daozhao’s four mountains, a summary of antiquarian sources on his oeuvre, and a comparison between two antiquarian accounts produced one year apart about the same site, in order to highlight major characteristics of the antiquarian gaze on inscribed landscapes. At the occasion of this first conference on research history, MA intern Kento Ashikari presented a first report on the monograph on Zheng Daozhao’s four inscribed mountains by SAKATA Gensho published in 1984 – the first monograph on this epigraphic oeuvre based on direct survey.

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