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3 unusual facts about Thomas Franklin Carter


Thomas Franklin Carter

Pelliot took an immediate interest in the subject, bringing from his desk drawer a box full of movable type in Chinese characters, hundreds of years older than Gutenberg's, which he had found on a cave floor.

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In 1921, while reading a book on a train to Shandong, where he was travelling to assist with famine relief, Carter came across a passage about the four great Chinese inventions of the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing, which seized his imagination.

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From Berlin, Carter's researches led him to Paris, where he introduced himself to Paul Pelliot of the École française d'Extrême-Orient, the archeologist and sinologist who had collected hundreds of rare manuscripts from the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Chinese Turkestan.



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