Thousand Buddha Grottoes and the Library Cave in Dunhuang China

Age of Decline?

Mogao Cave 217

Wang Yuanlu was a Taoist priest of the Mogao Caves during the early 20th century. He is credited with the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts in 1900 in the Library Cave at the Thousand Buddha Grottoes. The cave had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century.

50,000 manuscripts, scrolls, booklets and paintings on silk, hemp and paper were found literally stuffed into it.

One of the manuscripts was the Diamond Sutra, the world's earliest dated, printed book (868).¹

The Mogao Caves², near Dunhuang China are a world heritage site³ which consists of 492 caves containing over 45,000 murals, 2,415 painted sculptures, and more than 4,000 Apsaras statues that reflect the cultural interchange within the oriental areas via the Silk Road from the 4th to the 14th century.⁴ The caves have great historical, scientific, and artistic value for the study of ancient China, central Asian history, and Buddhism.

There are many theories as to why the Library Cave was sealed. One was to save the manuscripts from a coming “Age of Decline.”⁵

The Digital Dunhuang project was undertaken by Dunhuang Research Academy with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Mogao Cave Panorama Digital Library is one of the first end-user facing products in the Digital Dunhuang project that makes digital images of Dunhuang heritage accessible online.⁶

A panoramic view of the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang and the surrounding landscape.

1. Diamond Sūtra. British Museum.

2. Whitfield, Roderick., Susan Whitfield, Neville Agnew, and Susan. Whitfield. Cave Temples of Mogao : Art and History on the Silk Road . Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Getty Museum, 2000.

3. Mogao Caves.UNESCO World Heritage Site.

4. Lu, D., & Pan, Y.H. (2011). Digital preservation for heritages: Technologies and applications. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media.

5. Rong Xinjiang (1999). "The Nature of the Dunhuang Library Cave and the Reasons for its Sealing". Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie. 11: 247–275.

6. Hu, Xiao, Eric M. Y Ho, and Chen Qiao. “Digitizing Dunhuang Cultural Heritage: A User Evaluation of Mogao Cave Panorama Digital Library.” Journal of Data and Information Science (Warsaw, Poland) 2, no. 3 (2017): 49–67.