China Opened a College for the Subjects Nobody Studies Any More

China has established its first university college for what it calls “endangered disciplines” — fields of study with very few practitioners left. It opened on 6 November at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, alongside a national alliance of 82 institutions.

The scope is largely epigraphy: a dozen or so historical scripts, including Turkic, Tangut, Khitan, Jurchen, Manchu, Old Tibetan, Old Yi, Phags-pa, Naxi Dongba and the square Zhuang script. Oracle bone inscriptions and bamboo-and-silk manuscripts are included, as is classical studies.

Why these matter is easy to state and hard to overstate. A script that nobody alive can read is a locked archive: law, poetry, medicine, tax records, the ordinary correspondence of a society — all present and inaccessible. Every generation that fails to train a reader loses part of it permanently, because the knowledge is not stored anywhere else.

The college is organised into four teaching and research departments — oracle bone and manuscript studies, northern minority scripts, south-western minority scripts, and classical civilisations — with a digital humanities laboratory attached and a new journal. It runs an undergraduate class and a continuous bachelor-to-doctoral track.

The faculty numbers about 140, led by eight members of the academy's academic divisions and more than 30 first-class professors. That concentration of senior scholars is the point: these are fields in which a single expert may be the only person able to read a corpus.

The alliance brings in 82 universities and research bodies, among them Tsinghua, Renmin, Fudan, Nanjing, Sichuan and Nankai, plus archives and regional academies in Xinjiang, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia — the places where the documents, and the remaining readers, actually are.

The Chinese phrase for these subjects, “lengmen juexue”, literally means “cold-gate, cut-off learning”: studies nobody queues for, on the edge of disappearing. Institutionalising them is a bet that some knowledge is worth keeping before it becomes useful — which is close to the opposite of how research funding usually works.