Dunhuang

Today, Dunhuang is a small city in the northwest, with a population of around 200,000. It is now mostly known for the caves about 16 miles outside of the city. But two thousand years ago...

In 121 B.C., the Han Dynasty established a military outpost at Dunhuang. It gradually became a key point on the "Silk Road," linking China to the other great, expansive Asian civilization: India.

To get from China to India, imagine you start in the ancient capital that is today Xi'an. You can't go over the Himalayan Mountains. The sea route is possible, but not easy. Going through the Taklamakan desert is a suicide mission. (Hover over over the bookmarks for information).

But there were oasis kingdoms to the north and south of the Taklamakan, making passage around the desert and down to India possible. You can see little patches of green on this map above and below the desert. (You can zoom in on the map). Of course the distribution of water has changed over the centuries.

Dunhuang was on the way to and from Xi'an, just before travelers chose the southern or the northern route around the Taklamakan--this made it a key commercial center.

The story of the caves begins with Buddhism. Buddhism spread from India to China, arriving in China in the first century A.D. From the fourth century, monks began to inhabit some of these man-made caves, removed from the city of Dunhuang, but close enough to receive support from lay patrons.

They could live there undisturbed, and a cool, quiet cave is ideal for meditation.

In the late 400s, donors began to make caves in honor of their families. They hired artisans to carve out caves, plaster the walls and paint Buddhist images on them. These were no longer just simple caves for monks to meditate in; they were temples for local elite families (in some ways similar to the Memorial Church, a memorial to members of the Stanford family). In addition to the caves, Buddhist patrons built wooden monasteries near the caves. These wooden buildings do not survive.

From the fifth century to the fourteenth, artisans painted close to 500 of the caves.

There are paintings from different periods in different styles, but almost all treat Buddhist themes. Just how the caves were used is subject to scholarly debate. Did monks meditate in these painted caves? Were public rituals carried out in them? Or were they sealed up and only used from time to time by members of the family who made them?

In addition to paintings, the caves contain around 2,000 sculptures. This site remains one of the primary sources for art historians who study medieval Chinese art.

In 1227, Dunhuang was taken by the Mongols. Gradually, from that point on it lost its importance as a commercial hub.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Dunhuang was a backwater, a small remote city at the edge of the Qing empire. Some intrepid visitors still came to see the caves, but they had fallen into disrepair, and most of the Buddhist monasteries that had been built up around the caves had long since disappeared.

In 1900, an otherwise obscure Daoist priest, Abbot Wang, settled in the area, devoting himself to raising funds to repair the caves and the art they contained. You can get a sense of the state of the caves at that time in the next image.

Untrained in restoration, Abbot Wang did more damage than good in the pieces he tried to have restored, but in the process he made a remarkable discovery, now recognized as one of the great archaeological finds of the twentieth century.

Somehow, he detected that behind one of the walls in Cave 16 was a secret chamber that had been sealed up centuries before. Wang widened the opening and looked inside.

By the time this photograph was taken in the 1940s, the opening had been cut out to form a door and steps had been added. You can see that the opening was originally not only plastered over, but was also painted over with a mural.

There he found, stacked from floor to ceiling, thousands of medieval manuscripts, paintings and other artifacts that had been sealed in and forgotten close to a thousand years ago.

Because of the dry Gansu climate, most of the manuscripts were perfectly preserved.

This is a detail from a photograph taken eight years later, in 1908. By this time, Abbot Wang had removed some of the manuscripts.

Wang gave some of these documents to local figures who supported his efforts to restore the caves. They were mostly interested in the calligraphy, some of which is exquisite.

Abbot Wang did not try to profit from the manuscripts; he seems mostly to have been devoted to restoring the images of sacred figures in the caves.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian archaeologist, Aurel Stein (he eventually became a British citizen), was conducting archaeological expeditions with financial support from the British Indian government. A meticulous surveyor, Stein had studied ancient languages and was interested in the civilizations of Central Asia.

When he heard rumors of medieval manuscripts which seemed to be coming from outside the town of Dunhuang, he went to the caves, met Abbot Wang, and purchased a large cache of manuscripts which he loaded up and sent back to India.

From there, most were shipped to the British Museum in London.

Stein was especially interested in texts in Indic and Central Asian languages, but the batch he bought included many Chinese texts, paintings and other artefacts as well.

Today, many Chinese scholars fume at what they consider an illegal acquisition (he did not have a visa or official Chinese approval for entering the Qing empire from the northwest and leaving with a treasure trove of manuscripts). The bulk of the manuscripts he purchased from Abbot Wang are now in the British Museum.

Shortly thereafter, a young French sinologist named Paul Pelliot who was in Peking at the time, also heard rumors about medieval manuscripts and headed out to see what he could find. Here he is smoking a cigar in a photo taken with local officials in Hami (a four day walk from Dunhuang).

Pelliot too negotiated with Wang for manuscripts. Unlike Stein, Pelliot read and spoke Chinese. Here he is in a photo he posed for in the chamber/cave where Wang found the manuscripts (with a gas lamp--yikes!). The photograph gives a sense for the quantity of manuscripts discovered.

Pelliot shipped the manuscripts, paintings and other artifacts he bought from Abbot Wang back to Paris. Later, Japanese and Russian explorers came to buy more of the manuscripts, and eventually the Chinese government interceded to pick up what was left.

In the end, the manuscripts were dispersed to different parts of the world, including India, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, Peking, and Taipei. But the bulk of the most important ones are now in London and Paris.

The manuscripts are important for the history of paper, calligraphy, printing and the book. This is a detail from the oldest illustrated printed manuscript in the world.

This is an early example of a codex (a bound book with individual pages, in contrast to a scroll). This is the end of a copy of the Diamond Sutra. The colophon on the left is the vow of the farmer to paid for the book to be copied, dedicating the merit for copying the sutra to his recently deceased loyal plow ox).

The manuscripts are also important for their content, many of them helping scholars to rewrite the early history of Chan Buddhism and to reconstruct monastic and ritual life in Dunhuang during the 8th-10th centuries.

In addition to Buddhist texts, the manuscript collection (once belonging to medieval monastic libraries situated near the caves), includes Daoist texts, Confucian texts, works of literature, many Tibetan texts, and some in other languages, including this one, in Hebrew.

Also included are many intricate paintings on silk.

Whether the manuscripts belong in Europe or China remains a controversial topic. Some regard Stein and Pelliot as thieves, while others point out the care they took to preserve the manuscripts and that they did not profit personally from them.

The reason why the manuscripts were sealed up in that cave in the first place remains a mystery (though there are of course several theories).