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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.

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.

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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