The Notes of the Jade Box (玉匣記 Yu Xia Ji) is a highly popular astro-divination almanac, different versions of which have spread widely across the entirety of Inner Asia, including China. It comprises a calendar of the birthdays of various Buddhist and Taoist deities, lists of favourable and unfavourable days for performing all kinds of actions such as building houses, producing medicines, creating deity images, or marrying off women; explanations of how the nine planets influence men and women of different ages, how the twenty-eight constellations influence particular days of the year and how to interpret various weather conditions when they occur on particular days of the year; and manuals on divination using coins, candle snuff and other tools. Being strictly utilitarian in nature and intended for practical everyday usage, the almanac became very popular in Mongolia and was transmitted in various manuscript and xylographic versions.
Referring to the “Translocation” thematic domain of the ASTRA research group, this project examines a number of Mongolian and Tibetan copies of The Notes of the Jade Box regarding their form, content and translation version, the personalities of the translators and sponsors, and the time of production and circulation area in order to describe the peculiarities of its spread and recreation at different spatial-temporal points and to provide the most comprehensive historical contextualisation of the texts’ movement and transformation possible.
Referring to the “Transmission” thematic domain, the project studies the linguistic and archaeological features of the texts in comparison with each other, and in a broader inter-textual juxtaposition with thematically similar treatises and relevant lexicographical reference books, the project will reveal how the specific knowledge conveyed by the text became transmitted into another language and introduced into another culture.
