The article discusses a unique monument of rock-art on the territory of Xinjiang - namely the petroglyphs of Kangjiashimenzi (Hutubi County). The person who began scientific investigation of this site in 1987 was Professor Wang Binghua. From that time, the issues of Hutubi petroglyphs became among the most popular topics in Chinese archaeological literature but only in a few publications in other countries and only one - in Russia. This article aims to fill this gap. The Kangjiashimenzi rock-art panel comprises 292 images of different size composed as a whole ensemble depicted using a counter-relief technique, with some grinding after. The images were given in quite stylized (dancing) poses. The male figures are often presented with an erect phallus. The picture also includes several coitus scenes. We supposed this ensemble in general served as a pictorial reflection of ancient mystery-plays connected with genus or tribal worships and with sacred wedding rituals. The main part of the petroglyphs dates to the Middle Bronze Age (circa first half of II millennium BC). On the territory of Xinjiang this period was presented by Xiaohe Culture. Within these rock-art engravings, two groups of petroglyphs, most likely, with later dates can be distinguished though they were very precisely incorporated into the ensemble. Images of ‘tigers’ one could connect with activity of nomad tribes of Saka (circa first half of I millennium BC), and antithetical figures of two horses - with some other nomad tribe of Yuezhi (circa II century BC). In any case, the monument with rock engravings has been created and used over quite a long time. It is very probable that Kangjiashimenzi was a functioning sanctuary, at least for the whole region.

The paper analyzes images of dogs in rock art of China. According to the semantics of compositions the following groups can be distinguished: hunting dogs, herding dogs, guard dogs, using of dogs in rituals, mythological and folklore motifs and other images. According to the distribution of different thematic groups of images, two big areas - northern and south-western - can be seen. In northern regions of China (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, Gansu Province) the scenes of practical use of dogs (hunting, grazing, guarding herds and dwellings) prevail, which can be explained by the characteristics of the economic structure of the nomadic peoples who inhabited these territories. The images of a horseman followed by a dog and a bird of prey seen in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia can be interpreted as depictions of some motifs of heroic epos of Central Asian nomadic peoples. Other compositions in northern regions have been found to depict not only “realistic”, but “mytho-ritual” interpretations as well. In south-western regions (Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Yunnan Province, Sichuan Province) the images of dogs in ritual and/or a mythological context are more common. It is likely connected with the less practical importance of dogs in the agricultural economy and the higher status of this animal in the spiritual culture of the peoples of Southern China. Rock paintings in Cangyuan County, Yunnan Province, is an exception that combines the images belonging to both traditions, namely a picture of a hunting dog and a dog as a sacrificial animal. Some images cannot yet be deciphered unequivocally.

Six horsemen and one standing man carved at the Wujiachuan rock-art site in the Gansu Province of China are wearing headdresses resembling a crown with three ‘horns’. The standing figure from Wujiachuan can also be perceived as a seated one if its very long, downward ‘arms’ are to be considered as the outline of a wide-brimmed robe, and the carved lines within it are the ‘real’ arms folded on the chest or on the stomach. This interpretation corresponds with ancient Turkic images of Gorny Altai and other regions. In the Kudyrge burial ground in Altai, a boulder was excavated, on which the so-called ‘knee bending scene’ was engraved. A seated woman in a three-horned headdress with a child is depicted, before whom three much smaller in size dismounted horsemen are bowing. The middle horseman is also wearing a three-horned headdress. Engraved images of women in three-horned headdresses were also met on rocks and bone artefacts from Kirgizia, Kazakhstan and Khakassia. P. P. Azbelev interprets the ‘knee bending scene’ from Kudyrge as a reflection of the Christian (Nestorian) narrative of worship of the Magi. It can be assumed that the horsemen in horned headdresses depicted at Wujiachuan, grouped in threes are rushing to worship the standing (or rather sitting) figure to their left also in a three-horned headdress. This personage, just like on the Kudyrge boulder, surpasses both riders and even their horses in height. Rock carvings of riders in three-horned headdresses have also been found in the Badain Jaran Desert in the west of Inner Mongolia and in Zhongwei County of the Ningxia Province. Wherever met, they mark the Ancient Turkic period.

A translation and commentary on the spell in the tomb of Neha at el-Qatta previously discussed by H. D. Schneider (1977) and T. J. Allen (2013). The spell was believed to provide Neha, after his death, with magical powers over representations (possibly statuettes) of his “workers-kAwtyw” designed to serve him in the next world. However, as an indispensable condition for the effectiveness of the spell was considered to be the faultlessness of the acquisition of the representations, the latter was asserted in passages resembling an ideal autobiography. The expression mr(y) t(=f) Ds=f “his own household people” in l. 22 is the Middle Kingdom colloquial equivalent of the mr(y) t=fn(y)tDt=f, which has survived in nomarch Nehery’s tomb at el-Bersheh and on the pedestal of a sculptural group of four figurines from the mastaba of Shepi at Dahshur (CG 512). The latter parallel is of special significance, since in the selection and arrangement of other spells Neha’s burial chamber is also comparable to certain tombs in the Dahshur-Lisht region. Neha was most likely influenced by one of the magical traditions of this metropolitan area. If Neha, like Shepi, had a sculptural group of four “household people”, this could explain his words about acquiring “the fourth one (fdnw)” to serve very early and late extra meals (ll. 23 24). The noun nDs in l. 17 and the use of the word Ds with the meaning “own” in connection with people date the composition to no later than the reign of Senusret I.

The capture on 23rd June 1954 of the Soviet oil tanker “Tuapse” by the Republic of China (ROC) Navy became one of the most dramatic episodes in Cold War history. The Soviet vessel heading from Odessa to Shanghai was transporting, as indicated in the Bill of Lading, lighting kerosene. In the neutral waters of the Luzon Strait, north of the Philippines, the tanker was shelled, detained, and the crew were arrested, then escorted to the port of Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan. This event which was developing into an international sensation almost provoked an armed clash between the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The aggravated confrontation over-flowed onto the pages of the press, concentrating in diplomatic debates at the United Nations (UN) meetings during which the accusation raised respectively against Taiwan of “violating freedom of navigation on the high seas,” and to the USA of aiding to piracy. The detention of the tanker “Tuapse” in 1954 became a pretext for fierce debates and conflicts between Taiwan and the USSR at the UN. Thirty years later, in the second half of the 1980s, the discussion about the consequences of this incident resumed the fragile political contacts between Taiwan and the USSR, which became a noticeable sign of a thaw in their relations, though no one had yet imagined at that time how far the process of rapprochement could go. Based on recently declassified documents from the archive of the ROC Ministry of Defense, especially the reports of Navy officers who performed the operation to their commanders, this paper reveals the chronology of how the interception of the “Tuapse” Soviet oil tanker was implemented.

The paper presents an attempt to analyze Hu Shi's “Reading the Verses of Chu” which is considered one of the basic theoretic works for the “discussion on rejecting the historicity of Qu Yuan”. It spread in the first decades following the formation of the Republic of China (1911-1945) and gave birth to the to the estimation that the famous chuci (verses of Chu) poetic tradition, was firmly considered in the course of the previous centuries to be originated by the creative activities of Qu Yuan (4th - 3rd century BC), a stateman of the ancient Chinese Chu Kingdom (11th - 3rd century BC), derived in fact from an ancient anonymous cantos. It is widely considered nowadays that it was precisely Hu Shi who first stated the fictionality of Qu Yuan. However, close reading of the work shows that its content is not limited to discussing this issue. Recognizing the possibility of the existence of such a Chu poet and his authorship of a number of poetic pieces attributed to him, Hu Shi called for the abandonment of the formulaic interpretations of Qu Yuan’s image and the chuci poetry, which arouse on the basis of further legends about Chu and being under the influence of Confucian views on literary activities and personally on Qu Yuan. Thus, Hu Shi outlined a fundamentally new methodological approach to the study of the verses of Chu, which was based on examining the texts as well as their historical and cultural context. This is his true theoretical contribution to the Chinese humanities of the 20th century

The article is devoted to the study of the impact of Western literature translations on the development of the detective genre in China. Active introduction of China to the Western tradition in the late 19th - early 20th century led to the emergence of a large amount of translated literature. Writers of the first half of the 20th century were innovators, they borrowed in many respects from the form of Western detective stories, which was a rather natural phenomenon considering the necessity to accumulate experience for the creation of a distinct style. A new private detective hero appeared - Huo Sang in Cheng Xiaoqing’s novellas, Li Fei in Lu Tan’an’s stories, Song Wuqi in Zhang Biwu’s stories, as well as the ‘anti-detective’ gentleman thief Lu Ping in Sun Liaohong’s works. Although the names of these writers are not very well known, precisely their works lay the foundation for further development of the detective genre in Chinese literature.

The paper presents an attempt to explore the problem of mediality in Chinese poetry of the last thirty years. New Chinese poetry is particularly susceptible to the influence of the latest concepts of modern art and now more than ever needs a clear contextualization in relation to other forms of culture and avant-garde practice. This can be achieved through applying an analysis paradigm for performative word art developed by Dr. Tomáš Glanc in the context of Czech and Russian neo-avant-garde. It perceives experimental poetry as a form that fulfills a shift of the word thus making it labile. Examples of this phenomena can be found in Chinese poetry in the works of Ouyang Jianghe, Yang Xiaobin, Ouyang Yu, Xia Yu, Chen Li, Xu Bing, Wuqing and many more experimental artists. Their creative use of word shift principles shows how performative strategies are adapted in contemporary Chinese poetry keeping in mind the specific hanzi (character) medium that it is based upon. It seems both a continuation of a long-existing tradition and a radical exploration of the ‘iconic turn’ in the field of language.

This article gives a brief overview of the genesis of the development of incense culture in Japan through the determining function of aromatic wood in Buddhism, as well as the significance of Japanese classifications of agarwood (aquilaria) species which were developed in the 16th - 17th centuries. Japanese masters invented ways of coding fragrances of aromatic wood through their characteristics of tastes and place of growth, as well as using metaphorical and figurative-symbolic meaning of each name. These techniques played a key role in the history of the traditional art of koudou (‘way of fragrance’) and in the development of female education during the Edo period (1603-1867). Based on the analysis of written sources and museum collections, two classifications were studied, which are still used in Japan when assessing the quality of aromatic wood and wood products: a list of ‘61 kinds of aromatic wood’, developed using associations of odours with significant phenomena in Japanese society as its foundation - calendar holidays, religious concepts, political and literary characters, as well as the system of ‘Six Countries - Five Flavours’, which was based on geographical factors and the principle of reliance on taste and olfactory receptors.

The concept of literacy has undergone changes from the simple possession of writing and reading skills to functional literacy, which includes many aspects (informational, financial, etc.). All together, this can be called the concept of “new literacy”, or the “concept of competencies”. In Japan, modern Japanese writing presents a significant problem, combining several writing scripts. The basis of functional literacy is the ability to use approximately 2,000 characters. However, the discriminated sections of the population, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, foreigners and “new migrants” do not reach the required level of literacy. Under these conditions, a “new literacy” strategy has emerged that offers to recognize that there are different levels of literacy. The concept of “Plain Japanese Language” was created as a means of access to information and socialization for all segments of the population of Japan. People with disabilities need to be provided opportunities for basic access to information and participation in public life. The theory of alternative literacy also sets a certain bar, only lowers it much lower, covering practically all segments of the Japanese population. Japanese writing acts as a cultural tool for the daily life of the Japanese. Mastering all aspects of functional literacy is a difficult and inevitable burden for young people in Japan. From this perspective, literacy in Japan is a cultural resource that can lead to social exclusion and discrimination. Considering literacy in the context of publicly available information, changing the existing paradigm of “violence by literacy,” is a new and welcome approach. There is an increase in academic interest in socially-driven diverse language communities in Japan and beyond. This led to changes in the language policy of Japan, called the “New Wave”.

In this article, the author proposes a method for the consistent acquaintance of Russian students studying the Japanese language by way of zoonymes and zoomorphic metaphors based on the example of the transcription of Aesop’s fable “The Dragonfly and the Ant”. In the Japanese transcription, instead of the zoonyme “dragonfly”, another zoonyme “grasshopper” is used. In addition, in Japanese linguistic culture, there are two versions of the fable. In one version, the ants refuse to help the grasshopper, and he dies. In another version, the ants help the grasshopper, and he lives through the winter with the ants and plays the violin. A type of entertainment that has existed for a long time in traditional Japanese culture is to listen to the sounds of insects. In modern-day Japan, there is a subculture of kirigirisu, the culture of street musicians, which entertain listeners. Besides, some even choose cosplay costumes in order to dress up as a grasshopper. The teaching method consists of several stages: - Introduction of a zoonyme (its meanings and spelling options); - Explanation of its significance in Japanese linguistic culture; - Descriptions of associations connected with this zoonyme in Japanese linguistic culture; - The use of the zoonyme in its direct meaning; - The use of the zoonyme as a metaphor in phrases, sentences and proverbs. The teaching of zoonymes and zoomorphic metaphors has both an applied and theoretical significance. In applied terms, it will help students who study Japanese learn more about Japanese linguistic culture; to get acquainted with the legends and traditions connected with these insects; to understand the associations that exist in Japanese society in connection with these insects; to learn the use of zoonymes in direct and figurative meanings in phrases and sentences, as well as to understand idioms in which the names of the insects are used. In theoretical terms, learning zoonymes will help students to understand Japanese linguistic culture and the essence of metaphorical meanings on the basis of examples of a non-native language. The proposed method can be used to get acquainted with any zoonymes and zoo-morphic metaphors.

A report on the International Scientific Conference “JAPAN XXI NOVA: Era and Century” held at the Faculty of Asian and African Studies of St. Petersburg State University on 9-10 October 2020. Brief descriptions of the presented papers are given.

This article commemorates the 100th year anniversary since the birth of the prominent Soviet scholar and professor of Japanese and Korean History - L. V. Zenina (1920-2018). The article describes the landmarks of her lifetime activities and academic career. The significance of the traditions and its continuity in Russian oriental studies is depicted by Zenina’s tutorial talents and by means of the human factor.

Gai Shanlin (盖山林), of Manchu origin, was a native of Xingtang County, Hebei Province in China. He was born on 10 September 1935, and received higher education in Lanzhou city in 1960. Since 1962, Gai Shanlin was employed at the Inner Mongolian Archaeology of Cultural Heritage Research Institute. He was a prominent rock art researcher, considered to be No. 1 in China. Gai Shanlin was the first who discovered, described and published materials of the rock art sites of Inner Mongolia in the Yinshan mountains, the Wulanchabu grassland and the Badain Jaran Desert. During his life, he wrote about a dozen books and several hundred articles on the subject. Since 1988, Gai Shanlin was also a member of the China Association for Promoting Democracy. He was elected Vice-Chairman of the 9th CPPCC Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regional Committee in 2003 and held that post until 2008. Gai Shanlin aged 85 passed away on 9 February 2020, in Hoh-hot city.