Primers and other didactic texts are an important genre among the surviving collections of medieval manuscripts and prints. The Mengqiu 蒙求, a primer attributed to Li Han 李瀚 (d. u.) of the Tang dynasty, is one of these. Although following the Song period the text fell into disuse, early copies survived in Japan, where it remained in continuous use all the way through modern times. During the twentieth century several copies of the text were discovered in regions which were at the margins of Chinese civilization, notably among the texts excavated from the sealed off library cave near Dunhuang 敦煌; the ruins of the forgotten Tangut city of Khara-khoto (Heishuicheng 黑水城); and the Liao 遼 period wooden pagoda in Ying county 應縣. Most interestingly, all of these sites belonged to border regimes which at the time were not part of China proper, and thus the finds attest to the popularity of this text among the inhabitants of these states. This paper examines the handwritten and printed versions of the Mengqiu discovered at these sites in an attempt to draw attention to the text’s significance in Chinese-language education beyond the borders of the Chinese states.
