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Everyone who once had the opportunity to visit the St. Petersburg Branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies and to work with the local collection of Manchurian manuscripts and block­ prints will certainly agree with the author of these lines that the local Manchu holdings are among the most important and rarest in the world. Due to the efforts of Tatyana A. Pang, a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies and an internationally renowned expert for Manchu studies, a descriptive catalogue of that collection is now available which is not only the most complete description of these holdings ever published, but also the first one which is written in English and therefore much easier to use for the majority of Manchu scholars than the formerly published catalogues of the same collection compiled by Maya P. Volkova (Opisanie man 'chzhurskich rukopisei Instituta narodov Azii AN SSSR, Moscow 1965, and Opisanie man 'chzhurskich ksilografov Instituta vostokovedeniya AN SSSR, vyp. 1, priloz­ heniya sostavila T. A. Pan, Moscow 1988). Speaking of the latter, Pang points out in the in­ troduction to her book (pp. XV-XVIII) that both of Volkova's catalogues can hardly be con­ sidered complete descriptions of the St. Petersburg collection, a fact that Martin Gimm had already shown for the manuscript catalogue in a paper entitled "Zu den mandjurischen Sammlungen der Sowjetunion, 1. Nachträge zum Handschriftenkatalog von M. P. Volkova" and published in T'oung Pao 54, 1968, pp. 288-309. But especially the second of Volkova's catalogues, i.e. the one devoted to the blockprints, has suffered from the fact that due to its author's retirement neither the relative completeness nor the descriptive accuracy of the pre­ vious one was achieved, and thus a line reading "vypusk l" ('issue 1') was added to its title in order to point out that it was intended to be supplemented by a second issue in the future.1 This task has now been fulfilled by Tatyana A. Pang, who has not only corrected and com­ pleted Volkova's previous descriptions, but also included a number of new and previously unmentioned Manchu holdings which where added to institute's collection due to various international reorganizations in the course of the last 13 years (see pp. XVII-XVIII for de­ tails).

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