INTERVIEW

You are now responsible for the Chinese, Japanese and Korean collections at the BnF. How does one approach such a vast responsibility?

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With a great deal of humility. These collections are extraordinarily rich and very different from one another. I had previously worked on the Maurice Courant Chinese collection, as well as on the Pelliot manuscripts from Mogao. But when you take responsibility for the Asian collections as a whole, you are confronted with thousands of documents spanning several centuries of linguistic, religious, and cultural history.

My first task was to familiarise myself with these corpora: opening boxes, consulting catalogues, and understanding the history of each document. Above all, however, it involves engaging with the researchers who study them. Through their work, they continually deepen our understanding of these collections. My primary aim is to make these materials accessible to scholars and to enhance their visibility through publications, seminars, scholarly activities, and exhibitions.

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Does your knowledge of Chinese, and your many years of experience in China, help you approach these collections?

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Yes, very much so. It helps me to engage with the collections under my care. While I do not yet fully speak or read Japanese or Korean, many early Japanese and Korean texts are written in Chinese characters, which allows me to read them graphically, even if their pronunciation differs. I have set myself the goal of learning Japanese first, and then Korean. After thirty years of studying Chinese, however, I am aware that I may not have thirty years for each language — so I hope my work will help me progress more quickly.

 

 

What are the main collections that make up this ensemble?

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For China, there are three major groups:

— the Pelliot collection, comprising manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan, Tangut, Sanskrit and other languages, brought back from Mogao (Dunhuang) in 1908;
— the Maurice Courant Chinese collection, which includes printed books and xylographs;
— the Smith-Lesouëf collection, assembled by a major nineteenth-century collector of Asian art.

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The Japanese collection consists largely of donations, notably that of Georges Marteau. It includes several thousand items, among them prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, as well as paintings that remain little known. Considerable research still needs to be done on the provenance of certain donations, such as the William de Sutler collection, formed by the son of a factory director on the Japanese island of Toshima in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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The Korean collection is largely based on the Collin de Plancy collection. Victor Collin de Plancy was France’s first plenipotentiary ambassador to Korea, arriving there in 1886, and he assembled maps, books, and documents that are now of great value to researchers. To this must be added the manuscripts seized by Admiral Roze on Ganghwa Island in 1866. These were returned to Korea in 2011 not permanently, but under a renewable long-term loan, and are now displayed at the National Museum of Korea.

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The Dunhuang manuscripts are widely consulted. What are the main challenges associated with these materials?

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They are extremely sensitive and much in demand, so conservation is a central concern. Most have been digitised in high definition, which sometimes allows us to limit physical consultation. The images are detailed enough to enable researchers to work under good conditions. When the condition of a document requires it, I may direct a reader to the digital version instead.

Each loan for exhibition also involves a review by the conservation workshop, and sometimes restoration. The process can take time: some documents are not available for consultation again for several months.

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You receive many researchers from abroad. How do these exchanges take place?

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Most come to consult very specific items on which they have been working for many years. Some have studied a manuscript for twenty years without ever having seen the original. The moment they finally encounter it is always very powerful. There is a genuine, personal emotion in coming face to face with an object that has accompanied one’s intellectual journey for so long.

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I also work with various French research centres and museums to promote the study of their collections, particularly manuscripts. For the moment, it is still too early to define major collaborative projects; my focus is primarily on the exchanges I have with the researchers I meet. We discuss themes, languages, and documents, and identify shared interests.

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I try to take an overall view of these interactions. Simply presenting myself as the person responsible for these collections often prompts further reflection among my interlocutors. Some later come back to me with research projects to which I can contribute, directly or indirectly. I am not seeking visibility for its own sake, but if a reference in a publication allows readers to discover that someone is working on these topics, it encourages dialogue and provides them with a point of contact when they come here.