Kyoko Hori
Care of Prof Iwao Kobori, UNU, Tokyo, Japan
The time is 33 B.C., and the place is China. The Western Han emperor, in order to secure a treaty with the Huns, sent one of his many wives, a beauty named Wang Chao-chun (also known as Ming Fei), to the Hun leader, Hu Han-yeh (r. 49-33 B.C.). She is known to late generations as a great beauty who was a tragic victim of the times. Her legend is popular not only in China, but also in Japan. In 1983, the author was able to do visit and conduct research in the Dunhuang caves, where the variations in the narrative cave paintings could be observed, and an enormous amount of material could be collected.
I was especially fortunate for the opportunity to be able to work in Cave No. 17. Later, searching for more information, the author traveled to examine the Dunhuang documents in the Pelliot Collection of the National Library of France (Paris) and the Stein Collection of the British Library (London) for research. Based upon this intensive study, the author wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Narrative Cave Painting of Dunhuang: Research Related to the “Legend of Ming Fei. A portion of that work was presented at the Eighth International Conference on Dryland Development as one example to introduce the concept of “the image of the desert” in Chinese literature.
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© International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), 2006
