VPHC53H3 - Silk Routes - Fall 2021

We wish to archive now the huge amount of cultural resources that have been collected and studied from the ancient to the current in a form without deterioration, and inherit those resources for the future. We wish to improve accessibility to those cultural resources for many people to actually see and use those resources.

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Silk Road, the trade routes which spanned Asia for over a thousand years, carrying Buddhism to China and paper-making and gunpowder westwards.

Neil MacGregor presents an omnibus edition of five more items in his history of humanity, exploring the world along and beyond the Silk Road in the 7th century AD.

The Silkroad Foundation is a non-profit organization, established in 1996, to promote the study and preservation of cultures and art on Inner Asia and the Silk Road. The Silkroad Foundation provides resources, information, and interactive exchange toward the pursuit of educating the Bay Area community about Inner Asia and the Silk Road. The Silkroad Foundation operates from private funding and donations and has its headquarters in Saratoga, California.

Various maps provided through the above research project.

Silk Road Seattle is an ongoing public education project using the "Silk Road" theme to explore cultural interaction across Eurasia from the beginning of the Common Era (A. D.) to the Seventeenth Century. The principal goal of the project is to provide via the Internet materials for learning and teaching about the Silk Road. Much is available here already: historical texts, well illustrated web pages on historic cities and architecture and on traditional culture of the Central Asian nomads, extensive annotated bibliographies of resources, an electronic atlas, and a stunning virtual art exhibit drawing on museum collections from around the world.

The Buddhist eLibrary is an initiative of Buddhanet.net, run by the Buddha Dharma Education Association Inc. (BDEA), which is located at the Bodhi Tree Forest Monastery, NSW Australia, currently in partnership with Mahachulalongkorn University, International Buddhist College (IBC), and the Buddhist Maha Vihara (BMV).
Primarily, the eLibrary is a Digital Resource Library of Buddhist study material that can be freely downloaded via the World Wide Web. Further, as it expands, it aims to develop a web-based interactive learning environment to disseminate the Teachings of the Buddha Dharma.

This digitization project was jointly sponsored by National Taiwan University and the Chung-hwa Institute for Buddhist Studies. Samuel Beal's translation of the Datang xiyu ji 大唐西域記 (T.2087) was digitized, marked-up in TEI, and published online first in 2001-2002. The digital edition was slightly revised in 2005. It contains references to the Taishō edition of the 大唐西域記, and a (gentle) normalizations of Beal's transliteration of Indian and Chinese names. Details are in the TEI header. The zip archive below contains a no-frills HTML version, the TEI (P4) source, and a DTD. The data was made available under the GNU General Public License 2.0.

In order to better coordinate research effort among Buddhism scholars in Taiwan, Ven. Shih Hen-ching and other faculty members of the Department of Philosophy of the National Taiwan University founded the Center for Buddhist Studies of NTU in 1995. Among the center’s first projects was the creation of the Buddhist Studies Internet Database, which acts as a repository for Buddhism research materials that could be accessed by scholars and researchers around the world.

Silk Road Seattle is an ongoing public education project using the "Silk Road" theme to explore cultural interaction across Eurasia from the beginning of the Common Era (A. D.) to the Seventeenth Century.

Launched in 2009, the World Digital Library (WDL) was a project of the U.S. Library of Congress, with the support of UNESCO, and contributions from libraries, archives, museums, educational institutions, and international organizations around the world. The WDL sought to preserve and share some of the world’s most important cultural objects, increasing access to cultural treasures and significant historical documents to enable discovery, scholarship, and use.