“I am happy to share with you my recent discovery of Uyghur manuscripts”: S.E. Malov’s letters to Academician V.V. Radlov from Chinese Turkestan (1910–1915)

Abstract

S.E. Malov was an outstanding teacher of Turkology and a prominent expert on ancient Turkic runic and Uyghur monuments, as well as on the history, language, and culture of Turkic-speaking peoples. The year 2025 marks the 145th anniversary of his birth and the 110th anniversary of the completion of his Turkestan expedition. S.E. Malov’s life and rich scholarly legacy are closely linked to two major research journeys to Western China in 1909–1911 and 1913–1915, respectively. The contribution of these expeditions to the subsequent studies on the geopolitical and historical-cultural spaces of Central Asia in the late 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries is invaluable. Among the most important outcomes was his discovery and publication, in collaboration with Academician V.V. Radlov, of the Uyghur translation of the Golden Light Sutra, an influential Mahayana Buddhist sacred text, which has become a turning point for the development of Turkology and Uyghur studies in Russia and abroad during the contemporary era. The present article focuses on S.E. Malov’s epistolary legacy. In particular, five letters to Academician V.V. Radlov, all taken from the S.E. Malov Collection in the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are briefly reviewed. Four of them were written while on the expedition across Qing China, and one was sent from Kazan on January 17, 1917. The first two letters from China and the letter from Kazan are provided as supplementary material.