Shih-shan Susan Huang: "Buddhist Book Roads: The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture in China and Beyond"

Abstract: 

This lecture investigates the "Buddhist Book Roads," exploring the dynamic transnational spread of Buddhist print culture through a wealth of illustrated books discovered in archaeological sites, statues, and museums. Moving beyond viewing Buddhist woodcuts as static relics, this talk examines their holistic impact within multicultural contexts and as objects transmitted across vast networks both within and beyond Asia. Examples highlight this journey: 

• The 868 Diamond Sutra from Dunhuang, the world's earliest dated printed book. 
• Twelfth-to-fourteenth century Lotus Sutra art from Hangzhou, extensively circulated throughout Japan, Korea, and Central Asia. 
• Printed fragments from Turfan, illuminating elite Uighur migration to Mongol-Yuan China. 
• The popular 15th-century Beijing Dharani Sutra, sought by female donors for its protective and healing properties. 

Moreover, the lecture will demonstrate how Buddhist woodblock images transcended Asian borders, reaching European audiences by the seventeenth century. Four copperplate etchings in a 1670 Dutch travel book, directly copied from Avatamsaka Sutra frontispieces, serve as a prime example. These illustrations mimicked traditional Chinese woodblock prints and calligraphic brushstrokes, shaping European perceptions of Chinese art, religion, and culture.

Bio:

Shih-shan Susan Huang 黃士珊 is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University. Her research explores the intersections of art, religion, and transnational networks in Asia. Her first book, Picturing the True Form: Daoist Visual Culture in Traditional China (Harvard Asia Center, 2012; Chinese translation, Zhejiang University Press, 2022), examines the visual culture of Daoism. Her recent monograph, The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture: Mapping Buddhist Book Roads in China and Its Neighbors (Brill, 2024; Chinese edition, forthcoming, Zhejiang University Press), traces how Buddhist texts and images traveled across Asia as dynamic, mobile artifacts. A collection of her scholarly essays, translated into Chinese, is forthcoming from Zhejiang University Press under the title Between Daoism and Buddhism (Daoshi zhijian 道释之间; Zhejiang University Press, forthcoming). 

Professor Huang also co-edited Visual and Material Cultures of Middle Period China (Brill, 2017) with the Chinese historian Patricia Ebrey. More recently, she collaborated with the Buddhist scholar Stephen F. Teiser as guest editor of the special issue Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions in the Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies (2025). 

She is currently pursuing two new projects: one on the Ten Kings of Hell in Ming–Qing painting and print, and another on the fabrication and reception of Buddhist and Daoist imagery in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European travel books. Professor Huang held the Hulsewé-Wazniewski Visiting Professorship at Leiden University (the Netherlands) in Spring 2024 and served as Directrice d’études invitée at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, in Spring 2026.