Conference, at Maison de l’Asie at 7:30 PM, by Alexis Lycas, Senior Lecturer at the École pratique des hautes études (EPHE – PSL Member of the Research Centre on the Civilizations of East Asia (UMR 8155).

While the numerous religious, literary, and economic documents discovered at Dunhuang at the turn of the 20th century are now well known, the nine local geography manuscripts they contain are less so and deserve to be analyzed from a social and cultural history perspective. In this presentation, we will seek to understand what this small corpus reveals about geographical practices in the western reaches of the Chinese empire between the 7th and 10th centuries. These documents demonstrate both an advanced codification and a rich typology of local geographical knowledge. They thus foreshadow, at the dawn of the Song dynasty (960-1279), the rise of a genre that flourished during the second millennium of the imperial era: that of local monographs.