ELTE Roman World and the Far East Research Group

Between August 16, 2024, and January 16, 2025, one of the members of our research group, Peter Boros, has had the opportunity to conduct five months of research at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa library in Honolulu, thanks to the Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher grant. This research proved to be indispensable to the work of our research group regarding Chinese sources on Daqin, since the university’s collection is home to books rarely found in other libraries globally. These include the 1888 Shanghai version of the Gezhi jingyuan 格致鏡原, the 1896 Hangzhou version of the Tongdian 通典, and a full copy of the Taiping yulan 太平御覽 printed in 1935, in Shanghai. Through the analysis of these and other books, Peter could realize that the reliable printed versions of these texts contain numerous places differing from the online versions of the texts, which are widely used by the scholarly community work-ing on these questions. Therefore, the article of our research group published on the topic can highlight the problems present in the current usage of these texts, and the provided originals and translations can act as a reliable foundation even for further research.