As a material medium of writing, slips and tablets (jiandu, 简牍) possess a materiality that is not to be overlooked. Their materiality is closely related to the texts recorded on the slips and tablets, while independently conveying information that the texts do not contain. Therefore, the value of slips and tablets extends beyond their textual content, and their materiality deserves significant attention. Focusing on the materiality of slips and tablets allows for a comprehensive exploration and extraction of the information they convey on a concrete level. On an abstract level, it provides insights into the cultural significance of their materiality within the contexts of cultural history and social history. Based on this premise, this study examines and reflects on four aspects, including the production and crafting of slips and tablets, their appearance and forms, their use and reading practices, and their abandonment and burial. This study advocates for treating slips and tablets as archaeological relics and investigating their materiality through various perspectives, methods, and scholarly concerns drawn from history, archaeology, paleography, codicology, and related fields.

The bulk of the Dunhuang Library Cave documents consists of Chinese Buddhist documents, and the majority of these Chinese Buddhist documents were produced through sutra transcription projects organized by temples and other institutions during the Tubo and Guiyi Army periods. By examining the various stages of sutra transcription, such as sutra transcription records, rejected drafts, and entry into circulation, it is possible to roughly reconstruct the design of the sutra transcription system at that time, as well as how this system actually operated. The system featured a clear division of labor and evolved into a fairly sophisticated, assembly-line workflow. In the course of its operation, it also involved multifaceted interactions and tensions among organizers, scribes, inspectors, and mounters. Close scrutiny of a large number of Buddhist sutra manuscripts enables a relatively thorough understanding of these historical details, thereby deepening our overall comprehension of the Dunhuang Library Cave documents.

During the ninth to 13th centuries, multiple polities flourished along the Silk Road, and despite political boundaries, the flow of people, goods, and even books continued unabated. Dunhuang manuscripts recovered from the Library Cave record the exchange of books between Dunhuang and the Central Plains, India, and Khotan. Manuscripts excavated from Turpan reflect the travels of books between Xizhou Uyghur and Dunhuang, Sogdiana and other places, and some of the Turpan manuscripts are proven to have been brought from the West. Manichaean and Nestorian manuscripts found in Turpan are mostly codices, which are different from traditional books written in Chinese language. It is certain that the codex, as a book form, originated from the West.

With the development of codicology and the history of books in the second half of the 20th century, Western manuscript researchers proposed the notion of the “stratigraphy of the manuscript,” a methodology that utilizes the “strata” of archaeological sites as a metaphor for the historical layers of a given manuscript. This study takes several codices discovered in the Dunhuang Library Cave as examples and examines their internal strata using the methods of Western codicology in an attempt to offer additional insights into the collation and cataloging of Dunhuang manuscripts.