"The Silk Road Project: Reuniting Turfan's Scattered Treasures" was a three-year project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation Inc. that brought together a team of twenty-five Chinese and American scholars working within the disciplines of archeology, history, art history, and religious studies.

During the first year of the project (1996), all the participants surveyed the important sites of the Turfan region. In June, 1997, the American participants met in New Haven to present draft versions of their papers; in July 1998, the Chinese and American project members presented final versions of those papers, and ten scholars not previously associated with the project also presented papers. These are now available in xeroxed form.

You can read the abstracts of these papers on this site which also give the name of the journal in which a given paper will appear.

During the second year (1997) four Chinese scholars (Deng Xiaonan, Rong Xinjiang, Wu Jianguo, and Zhang Guangda) compiled a Chinese-English database (using Microsoft Access 1997 and Twin Bridges software for Chinese) for the most important published materials from Turfan. The indexed materials concentrate on Chinese-language publications: they include the site reports of Huang Wenbi, the ten-volume set of documents Tulufan chutu wenshu (also available in four volumes with plates of the documents), the documents described in Klimkeit's Gnosis on the Silk Road, the Kodansha/Wenwu joint publication of the Xinjiang Museum's holdings, and the brief archeological site reports published since 1949. You may wish to consult the document types listed in the database. They will give you an idea of the headings which occur most frequently. You may also wish to consult the abbreviated table of government structure compiled by Professor Zhang Guangda.