On December 1, we celebrated the official launching of our project, with a full day of meetings along three lines: the structure of the project and division of tasks within it, research history on the epigraphy of Zheng Daozhao, and the definition of graphic variation and calligraphic style. Zhang Qiang, Manuel Sassmann and Laurent Van Cutsem joined us from Chongqing, Heidelberg and Gent, all project interns were present – Francesca Berdin, Killian Cahier, Anna Le Menach, Paula Sumera, Tchou-tchou Tophoven, Kento Ashikari – and several of our Parisian project members were also present – Michela Bussotti, Lyce Jankowski and Olivier Venture – as well as a few guests from the field of sinology and beyond.

Session 1 – Corpus 数据库    

This session focused on reflecting on the structure of the corpus, and the way its interface could reflect research questions, which digital tools should the project explore and how useful have they been to other projects. Shared documents for this session included a presentation of the project (conceptual map of the project, google sheets of entities and authorities), and one example of text with highlighted phenomena of interest. Alessio Sopracasa, active member of Epidoc and creator of Sigidoc, as well as Marc Bui and Lou Vargas from the Vietnamica team, joined us for a discussion on project structure.

After a presentation of the project by Lia Wei, Manuel Sassmann reflected upon the initial discussions surrounding the structure and planned outputs of the Stonesutras.org project back in 2005, which determined the way information was gathered, processed and organized. Lou Vargas and Marc Bui prepared two interventions that reflected similar interrogations faced by the Vietnamica team since 2018, shared their elaborate conceptual map with us – where the stele, the agents that take part in its production and reception, and its various descriptive dimensions are represented in great detail – and presented tools that could be experimented with by our project, such as eScriptorium, which would assist us in the transcription and in rendering the layout of the inscriptions.

Zhang Qiang presented the upcoming seven-volumes publication on the epigraphy attributed to Seng’An Daoyi by Qingdao chubanshe (2024), which 5000+ images will be integrated in Altegraphy’s digital corpus.

To conclude the session two presentations were given by Paula Sumera on the making of historical maps, with an assessment of the kind of spatial data to be integrated (physiography, toponymy, ancient and modern administrative geography, archaeological sites and finds of the area, etc), and by Anna Le Menach and Killian Cahier, on issues faced when re-using images planned for a paper publication, or producing and processing new images of rubbings.

Session 2 – Research history 研究史

The second session addressed the historiography of the study of medieval inscribed landscape in antiquarian sources, and in modern times China and Japan. This session was the occasion to list the different types of sources explored in the project’s first phase (histories/gazetteers/archaeological data/treatises/religious/literary), the way they will appear in the project’s outputs (publications, transcriptions, translations, citations)  and how they should be referenced.

Special attention was devoted in Lia Wei’s presentation to the attitude to the field/sites/inscriptions witnessed by antiquarian sources, and the importance of rubbings as source material: their circulation and impact. She also gave a short report on stylistic discussions surrounding the epigraphy – “perceived as calligraphy” – attributed to Zheng Daozhao and Seng’An Daoyi. Kento Ashikari retraced the first steps of epigraphic studies in Japan, pointing at the imput of Chinese scholars such as Yang Shoujing and looking at the type of publications triggered by this early stage of reception, down to the first fieldtrips by Japanese scholars in China in the 1980s. Zhang Qiang provided us with an update on his recent field survey, tracking the “Seng’An Daoyi style” beyond cliff carvings, including steles and epitaphs stored in museums or from recent digs, as well as fragments of inscribed cave temple walls circulating on the art market.

This session was the occasion to look at a few rubbings together, in the pleasant environment of the Salle de Sacy at 2 Rue de Lille… before we had to run to BULAC to finish our launching day, due to a power cut (!).

Session 3 – Graphic variation 异体字     

The third and last session of the day was centered on the definition of variants. Shared documents included a table of variants in the epigraphy of Zheng Daozhao and in the Tang Yong stele compiled by Francesca Berdin, based both on published tables and on her own selection. Ways of tagging the variants and of hierarchizing the various types of variants were explored when compiling this first table.

The presentation by Francesca proposed to distinguish between structural and stylistic variants, and questions raised about the materiality and function/context of the documents, as well as the important proportion of variants found in the samples (about a third of the characters!). In his response, Laurent Van Cutsem went back to the existing terminology of variants, insisting on the importance of selecting a relevant standard form when identifying variants. He suggested that for our project, “getting rid of the noise” produced by common practice, errors in writing, misprints, etc.. would bring us closer to identify the stylistic aspects we are interested in, be they intentional, characteristic of a regional, group or individual identity or defined a posteriori as individual style. Olivier Venture joined the discussion, and advised us to look at well-documented modern attempts in the standardisation of writing for comparative purposes.

Zhang Qiang concluded the day with a visual itinerary through the epigraphy attributed to Seng’an Daoyi, looking for stylistic consistency, in particular in the use, revival or re-imagination of archaic script, basing himself on medieval attempts at categorizing script – with extensive lists of script types named after animals, plants, meteorological phenomena, etc – , and illustrating them directly with character snippets from the Altergraphy corpus.

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