Among studies of the intellectual history of modern China, few scholars have touched upon the philological perspectives found within Prof. Tschen Yin Koh (1890-1969,also known as Chen Yinke)’s corpus of scholarly output. What Tshen Yin Koh retained from his Western academic background was his research focus on Central Asian and Buddhist philology. His philological approaches to the Dunhuang texts and Buddhist scriptures opened the doors of modern textual criticism in China; furthermore, his application of comparative philology to Chinese literature through a multilingual perspective was a pioneering work of modern Tibetan and Mongol-Yuan studies, and served to extend traditional Sinology to historical studies on the vast western regions of China.
