The Lady and Her Scribes: Dealing with the Multiple Dunhuang Copies of Wei Zhuang’s “Lament of the Lady of Qin”

Like medieval European literature, written poetry in Tang-dynasty .China was always produced, and almost always circulated and received, by means of handwritten manuscripts. Yet while scholars of medieval European literature have devoted considerable attention to the issues at stake when approaching texts produced before the age of print, research on Tang poetry, whether in Asia or the West, has paid little attention to these studies and what relevance they might have for the study of the production and circulation of poetic literature in the particular manuscript culture of the Tang. This state of affairs is understandable: as much European literature considered to be medieval was produced more recently than the Tang and was written not on paper but on the far more durable (if expensive and difficult to manufacture) media of parchment or velum, a good deal of it is still extant. China’s early invention and use of paper, a cheaper but also more fragile material, did mean that literacy and textual production were substantially more wide-spread and common among the upper classes in Tang dynasty China than they were within the same group in medieval Europe. Woodblock printing, which began in the Tang and