Yongjia Yuan 袁永甲

I am a Digital Humanities researcher and Research Software Engineer working where ancient manuscripts meet modern computation. My doctoral research (SOAS, 2026) examined the religious identity of “Si 寺” sites in the Turfan area between the 7th and 9th centuries — Buddhist or Church of the East? — and that question of Christianity's eastern journeys shapes everything I build.

The other half of my work is software. I design and build OCR/HTR pipelines for multilingual manuscripts, verifiable citation infrastructure that removes LLM hallucination from scholarly workflows, and morphological-analysis platforms for Greek, Syriac, Latin, and Coptic. Alongside this runs a long translation practice: more than 350,000 words of patristic texts carried from Syriac and Greek into Chinese.

I founded GCDFL (光从东方来, “Light from the East”) in 2021 — a lecture programme that has hosted twenty invited scholars and a hundred-plus public lectures — and I maintain its entire digital publication stack, from transcription to bilingual-subtitle upload.