On The Units Of Capacity In The Region Of Turfan From The Third Century To The Eighth Century

Since the ancient times, Turfan is a region where multi-nationalities have lived in compact communities, and where nationalities have had wide and close interactions and exerted profound influence on their own's politics, economy, and culture, etc. Research on the weights and measures just reflects the above-mentioned point. In the Chinese documents unearthed from Turfan there are a great deal of data on weights and measures, which scatter in all sorts of contracts, documents, prescriptions and the List of Burial of Object and other articles of daily use. Those are the fundamental and immediate materials in research of the ancient nationalities in Kao-ch'an. It is a better way to understand the economic relation between Turfan and inland, and also a prerequisite to study further the history of their economy and their relationship among nationalities in the region of Turfan. Taking the units of capatiy for example, in the course of collecting and analying the relative materials in The Unearthed Documents of Turfan, the author tries to probe into the development of the units of capacity and their influence on social and economic life of local minority nationalities. Moreover, the author makes an attempt to enrich the research on the history of weights and measures in China and pave the way for the further research.The article is divided into five parts:The first part is about the reason of subject, research significence, current situation and methods of research. The subject plays an important role in research of social and economic documents unearthed in Turfan because at present research on this is relatively weak. Then, the author summarizes the current situation on the subject and relative field. At last, the methods of research is introduced from the macro and micro aspects, that is, textual research and illustration.In the second part, as to hu(斛), dan(石), dou(斗), sheng(升), ge(合), shao(勺) and xing(姓) in the region of Turfan between the third century and the eighth century, the author examines their names of units and their interchangeability of words, their relation of carry, objects of measure, utenil of measure, etc. Many interchangeabilities of units of capacity which prevailed in Turfan were rarely or never used inland, but six units derived...