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The British Library's Stein collection contains about 14,000 scrolls, fragments and booklets in Chinese from a cave in the Buddhist Mogao Caves complex near Dunhuang in north-west China. This article describes storage and access solutions for the collection in the context of a busy research library and the currently ongoing Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation project. The article presents the various technical and organisational challenges that its rehousing presents to the library conservators. Restricted by the existing storage facilities, budget limitations and tight project deadlines, the conservators must provide housing that is adequate for the scroll format, is practical and prevents dissociation, but is also cost- and time-effective. With the best storage practice in mind, they have developed original solutions, balancing the specific housing requirements and constraints. These storage solutions allow the conservators to ensure the long-term safety and accessibility of the collection while laying down a foundation of standardisation that will ensure a homogeneity of approaches for future projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 1,000 years prior to the 'print revolution', a massive media transformation took place in the Middle East, namely, the introduction of paper during the eighth century. Accompanied by several further technological changes, the new writing surface—purportedly brought to Central Asia by Chinese prisoners of war—led to an increasing availability of written sources, an 'explosion of books'. In this paper, I examine the details of this early media transformation, survey how literary and historical sources discussed this development and give insight into the developments it entailed in just a few centuries. The main part of the paper deals with sources from the Mamluk period (1250–1517) that witnessed a thorough literarization of all parts of communal and personal life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its central location the Chaghadaid ulus played a key role in the interregional diplomatic connections in the Mongol period. Unfortunately, comparing to the other three ulus es of the Mongol Empire we have a very limited number of written sources concerning the Chaghadaid realm. The aim of the present paper is to show how the new results of the philological study of the Old Uyghur and Middle Mongolian documents can throw new light upon our knowledge about the diplomatic practices in the Chaghadaid ulus. The paper concentrates on the two most important institutions which facilitated diplomatic relations: the chancelleries and the postal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]