Generally speaking, written Chinese before the 20 th century used no punctuation; readers parsed the text based on context, relying on an array of grammatical and modal particles. Another important aid was the often parallel structure of sen-tences, its organic symmetry and rhythm. Western style punctuation was intro-duced in 1920 and has been successfully employed ever since.² Although for most of its history Chinese writing was fully functional without punctuation, a number of marks had also been used before the modern era. Their presence, however, was sporadic and often limited to educational and commentarial literature.³ Naturally, transmitted texts are of little use for the study of punctuation marks in earlier periods because such notation was generally not part of the text proper and, consequently, remained excluded from transmission. Scribal notations were closely tied to manuscript culture and therefore the best method to study them today is to examine the manuscripts, whenever available. In this respect, the Dunhuang manuscripts represent an ideal body of texts for the period of the 5 th –10 th centuries.⁴ They are especially relevant for the early medieval and medi-eval periods because they comprise, along with material excavated at other sites in Western China (most notably Turfan and Khara-Khoto), the absolute majority of extant manuscripts. Consequently, even though this corpus comes from the 1 I am grateful to Matthias Richter of the University of Colorado, Boulder for his suggestions and remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 The document titled " Proposal for the promulgation of new-style punctuation marks " was sub-mitted by the eminent Chinese writer Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) and several other scholars in November 1919, in response to which in February 1920 the Ministry of Education issued the " Directive on the implementation of new style punctuation marks " (Li Xingjian et al. 2001, 268). Hu Shi's own book Zhongguo zhexueshi dagang (1919) was the first book written in vernacular Chinese and published with modern punctuation. 3 For a general treatment of punctuation in Chinese writing in the West, see Harbsmeier (1998), Führer and Behr (2005), and Drège (1991). The first person to discuss punctuation marks in Chi-nese texts was the Russian missionary-sinologist Nikita Bichurin (1777–1853), more commonly known in the West by his monastic name Father Iakinf (Hyacinth). In his book on Chinese gram-mar (Bichurin 1838, 20–31), he described the marks used in contemporary printed texts. 4 Based on the colophons of dated texts, it is generally believed that the manuscripts had been