Lives of Sogdians in Medieval China.

• Author: Dien, Albert E.

Lives of Sogdians in Medieval China. By MORITZ HUBER. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2020. Pp. xvi + 350.

The subject of Sogdians in Central Asia and in China has attracted the attention of scholars for well over a hundred years. According to the extensive bibliography in this volume under review, it seems that the earliest specific reference to Sogdians in the secondary sources is by Remusat in the 1830s, by Wilhelm Tomaschek in 1877, followed by Paul Pelliot in 1903 and again in 1916. The numbers thereafter steadily increased, to some twenty in the third quarter of the twentieth century to about fifty in its last quarter and over a hundred thus far in this century. The detailed survey of the full breadth of this scholarly activity as brought together here is timely and certainly will be welcomed by those interested in the fascinating account of Sogdian history. Unfortunately there are some editorial drawbacks which mar an excellent presentation. The nature of this work as a record of a complicated set of materials, rather than one of analysis and discussion, makes it difficult to summarize, and most of my comments will focus on details.

The attention to detail in the Style Sheet (pp. xiii-xvi) rises far beyond anything I have heretofore seen. The style of the Chinese characters, romanizations, capitalizations, and toponyms are explained. The types of official ranks (regular, honorary, and noble) are distinguished, and for the conversion of the traditional lunisolar dating transcription and conversion to the Gregorian calendar, the author cites the Academia Sinica Department of Information Technology Services. Other details include that the term [phrase omitted] "cattle" may refer to various animals of the subfamily Bovinae, and that the style of the Chinese characters (traditional or simplified) for names and titles in the bibliography correspond to that of the publications. The use of punctuation in the format of cited Chinese texts is explained in detail, one that might well provide an exemplar for future publications. Finally, the three chapters that make up most of the volume are divided into a grid numbering system that allows the contents of the volume to be broken down into its constituent parts, following the prototype of such works as the Chicago Manual of Style, facilitating the analysis of and reference to its contents.

In view of this assiduous care for detail it is a disappointment that in the first footnote of the introduction, the reference to page 240 of the text is an error for page 220. In fact, almost all citations in the notes to other pages in the volume are in error. On page 269 there is a reference to "this paper" when one would expect the term "study" or "volume." It would seem that in the editing process from the original manuscript to the volume care was not taken to adjust the page numbers or other details. Where the citation includes the grid number together with the incorrect page number, these references can be easily located, but without that grid number the...