2009年9月，研究所接受的美国富布莱特学者印第安纳大学邝蓝岚结束一年的学习后回国，富布赖特发表了有关邝蓝岚在兰州大学敦煌学研究所学习的新闻短讯，内容如下：
Studying Magical Tales and Expressive Arts Along the Silk Road
by Lanlan Kuang, 2008-2009, China
China’s Northwest has been an important region where the exchange between Eastern and Western cultures has taken place for thousands of years. Unsurprisingly, this land is full of magical tales from the different ethnic groups that dwell on the rich, abundant soil including China’s autonomous regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. Some were passed down orally through a few people, found only in historical texts or at occasional story-telling events. Others were enriched by the region's archeological findings that became world-renowned over the years: the 3,800-year-old female mummy (circa 1600 BCE) from Loulan, one of the oldest mummies in the world, or the bronze statue hidden in a brick tomb during the late period of the East-Han Dynasty (A.D.25-220) named, literally, “A Galloping Horse's Hoof Stepped on a Flying Swallow” - now an iconic national treasure. This land is where the most ancient and advanced technological Chinese cultures assembled and presented: it is where the earliest iron-making technology from West Xia dynasty was founded; it is also where the recently piloted space shuttle launched from China’s Jiuquan Space Center. Today, some of these tales are recreated and staged in different forms of expressive culture, such as dance dramas, for audiences in China and around the globe.
Lanlan Kuang, 2008-2009, China (right in red scarf), working with a colleagueto film a performance
In September 2008, I traveled on my Fulbright grant along the ancient Silk Road with colleagues from Lanzhou University’s Dunhuang Institute and two professors from Beijing and Shannxi Province. The focus of my ethnomusicological investigation is the Dunhuang yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances historically derived from and located in Northwest China. As a graduate researcher who would like to devote her career to studying and presenting the expressive arts from East Asia, I offered suggestions to local museum directors and to staff at relic conservation sites. At Minqin, a county where the Chinese diplomat named Su-wu, a famous historical figure, herded flocks of goats and sheep, we looked at how the county official invests money and manpower into environmental protection. Sand is blanketing the farmable land in Minqin and now the county government is employing experts from around the globe and other parts of China to try to solve this problem. This land, which is full of magical tales for a folklorist to learn and rich cultures for an ethnomusicologist to study, is also in great need of regional development, economically, socially, and culturally.
The ancient Silk Road is not merely a long corridor in which uncountable historical stories took place and where historical relics have been discovered; when situated within the context of contemporary China, the Road is a long corridor in which countless stories are waiting to be told, history is waiting to be made and monuments to be built. It is a stage waiting for exciting new plots and daring characters.
http://newsletter.fulbrightonline.org/newsletter/index.php?id=155
