A 20-volume collection of research works on the Xixia Kingdom (1038-1227) published over the past 100 years will start to roll off the presses before the end of the year, according to Du Jianlu of the Xixia Kingdom Research Center of the Ningxia University in Yinchuan, capital city of northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

Entitled Compendium of Xixia Studies in China in a Century, the collection offers a comprehensive review of the Chinese scholars' achievement in the study of the ethnic kingdom, Du said in a telephone interview.

Xixia Kingdom, though lasting no more than two centuries, has remained a magnet of scholar interests, especially since in 1908, when Russian explorers stumbled across a tomb site belonging to the kingdom.

A Google search for "Xixia dynasty" in English will result in some 1,700 listings, while 11,000 listings turn out in a similar search for "Tangut."

Archaeologists have found the ethnic Dangxiang, or Tangut people, who founded and ruled Xixia Kingdom, left behind a distinctive history and culture intertwined with other ethnic peoples and cultures of the time.

They created the Xixia script, modelling it on the Chinese and Khitan scripts. Many of the manuscripts and printed documents were translation works of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and other languages.

"For a long time, we have believed the Russians have kept most of the known written manuscripts and records in Xixia script," Du said.

Rightly so. Russian explorers used 40 camels and carried away voluminous of Xixia documents from Heishui, a city in today's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

Scholars estimate hundreds of thousands of pages of script lie in the Institute of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg.

While trying to start a co-operative project with Russian scholars to further sort out the documents at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Du said he and his colleagues are also turning their attention to the scattered collections of the ancient Xixia documents across China.

"We hope we will be able to put together these documents along with the relics that historians and archaeologists have unearthed in China in recent years, because all will help further our studies," Du said.

At the same time, Du and his colleagues are proof-reading a collection of books on the ancient Xixia Kingdom and related papers. They are also working to reprint a Xixia-Chinese dictionary, an ancient work by the Dangxiang scholars that made it possible for the Dangxiang people to learn Chinese characters, and for the Chinese to study the Xixia script.

(China Daily December 21, 2004)