Paul Pelliot in the context of "Tibetan Empire"

Paul Jules Antoine Meillet (French: [ɑ̃twan mɛjɛ]; 11 November 1866 – 21 September 1936) was one of the most important French linguists of the early 20th century. He began his studies at the Sorbonne University, where he was influenced by Michel Bréal, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and the members of the L'Année sociologique. In 1890 he was part of a research trip to the Caucasus, where he studied the Armenian language. After his return, de Saussure had gone back to Geneva, so Meillet continued the series of lectures on comparative linguistics that de Saussure had given.

In 1897 Meillet completed his doctorate, Research on the Use of the Genitive-Accusative in Old Slavonic. In 1902 he took a chair in Armenian at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales and took under his wing Hrachia Adjarian, who would become the founder of modern Armenian dialectology. In 1905 Meillet was elected to the Collège de France, where he taught on the history and structure of Indo-European languages. One of his most-quoted statements is that "anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant." He worked closely with linguists Paul Pelliot and Robert Gauthiot.

Robert Edmond Gauthiot (13 June 1876, Paris – 11 September 1916, Paris) was a French Orientalist, linguist and explorer. Born in Paris, he became, in 1909, a member of the Société Asiatique and met Paul Pelliot. Together, they translated the Sogdian manuscript Vessantara Jataka, found by Pelliot among the Dunhuang manuscripts in Mogao Cave 17.

Gauthiot interrupted his exploration of the Pamir Mountains in July 1914 to return home to serve as a captain in the infantry during World War I. Gauthiot received the Croix de Guerre before he was wounded at the Second Battle of Artois in spring 1915. He died from injuries at Val de Grâce Hospital.

The Dunhuang manuscripts are a large and varied collection of religious and secular texts, consisting mainly of handwritten manuscripts on materials such as hemp, silk, and paper, along with some woodblock-printed items. Composed in a range of languages including Chinese, Tibetan and others, these manuscripts were discovered in 1900 at the Mogao Caves near Sachu in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, by the itinerant Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu. After taking over the caves, Wang sold the manuscripts to Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot for a modest sum. Knowing the philological value of the Dunhuang manuscripts, Stein and Pelliot bought them from Wang and took them from China to Europe.

Most of the manuscripts originate from a cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries. These were sealed in what is now known as the Library Cave (Cave 17) sometime in the early 11th century. The site at Sachu (modern-day Dunhuang) was an important regional centre for manuscript production during this period and had also served as an official printing office during the 8th and 9th centuries when the area was under Tibetan rule and formed part of the Silk Road network.

Papercutting or paper cutting is the art of paper designs that has evolved all over the world to adapt to different cultural styles. One traditional distinction most styles share is that the designs are cut from a single sheet of paper as opposed to multiple adjoining sheets as in collage.