To: ……
Subject: New reading of the ink inscription in the article "Mapping the Great Mongolian Road"

Dear Drs. ……,

I find it interesting to read and decipher the Chinese characters in Table 3 "Chinese inscription from khurdent cave with English translation" of your article "Mapping the Great Mongolian Road: The gaihōzu maps as records of Inner Asian trade networks" published in "Journal of Historical Geography" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0305748825001446). I believe we can make improvement over your reading and translation, i.e.,

"前輩諸公皆英雄 All the predecessors and gentlemen are heroes
北番遼走永洞 Traveling far to the northern borderlands, forever in caves
只因生意三倍求 Only because of seeking triple profits in business
還步山州路途逍 Still walking through mountain provinces, the journey is long."

The following is a summary of re-reading and English translation proposed by fellow Chinese readers on Weibo (https://weibo.com/1938059975/Qq3Sf3KLA), where I initiated a group discussion.

Line 1: 前辈诸公皆英豪 (All the predecessor gentlemen are heroes). The last character, though illegible, must be 豪, not 雄, for reasons I'll explain later. I'd like to change your English translation "predecessors and gentlemen" to "predecessor gentlemen", where "predecessor" is used attributively. (Think of "pencil box", where the noun "pencil" serves the purpose of an adjective.) The phrase 前辈诸公 does not refer to two groups of people.

Line 2: 北番逩走永□□ (Traveling to the northern borderlands, forever ...). The 3rd character is unlikely 遼, as *遼走 is unattested in literature. While the proposed character 逩 is rare, it at least fits in meaning and we can find such character combination in literature (see https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=gb&char=%E9%80%A9&remap=gb). The 6th character is very difficult. Other Weibo readers proposed 濶 (i.e. 闊) and 週, but neither makes sense. Some suggest that the latter (週) is an alternative writing of 迢, which would be perfect, but I find no occurrence of such alternative writing in Chinese classics. Your reading omits the last (7th) character, even though the poem is clearly 7 characters long on each line. This character may be an iteration mark (叠字符) 々, which would be perfect if the 5th was 迢. In short, I think it's wise to leave the last two characters undeciphered for now. Note I removed "far" (遼) and "in caves" (洞) from your English translation as I don't believe they are correct.

Line 3: 只因生意三倍(求/利) (Only because of seeking triple profits in business). The English translation is good. The last character could be either 求 or 利. The Weibo users proposing 利 say that 利, not 求, in cursive script is written like the Japanese hirakana わ or お, which is what we see here, and that the tone of 利 better fits the 平仄 rhyming pattern than 求.

Line 4: 逺(远)涉山川路𡒎(途)逍 (Traveling far to mountains and rivers, the journey is long). Your reading of the first two characters as 還步 and the 4th as 州 is incorrect. The only questionable reading, for both of us, is the last character. It looks remarkably like 逍, but interpreting it as meaning "far" seems to be unattested in literature. As the meaning of "far" here fits so well, it's tempting to think of the character as either an unattested alternative writing, or a mis-writing, of 遥, which does mean "far" and can follow 逍; i.e. frequent proximity of 逍 and 遥 may contribute to their mixup on the part of the writer, even though we find no such occurrence in literature. Furthermore, since this character is clearly 逍, we can argue that the last character of Line 1 must be 豪 not 雄, because of the rhyme shared by 豪 and 逍 (or 遥 if the writer made a writing error), while 雄 is pronounced rather differently. Note the new, proposed English translation is quite different in the participial phrase from your "Still walking through mountain provinces".

After the four lines of poem, the writer left a signature, which your article did not record or translate. It is

靈山居士一遊至此 (Lay Buddhist Lingchuan visiting this place)

I believe this signature and the words "visiting this place" are meaningful to your research as it offers more information about this text. Since the handwriting of the poem and the signature text looks like from the same person, we may conclude that the poem was written by someone that passed by, specifically a travelling lay buddhist, not by a merchant, and so the statement in your article "The merchant states his motivation ..." is misleading or incorrect.

Overall, the changes I propose here (again, thanks to the team work on Weibo) would by no means alter your excellent research on this difficult subject in any significant way. But since the article is published in a well-reputed academic journal, I thought it would be good to make corrections even on non-essential matters.

Sincerely,

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