The Cave Paintings of Dunhuang

Dunhuang is an oasis town in Gansu province, positioned where the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converge before entering China proper. In 366 CE, according to later inscriptions, a monk named Lè Zūn had a vision of a thousand Buddhas in golden light and began to carve meditation chambers into the cliff face east of the town. Other monks followed. Over the next thousand years, approximately five hundred caves were excavated, plastered, and painted.

The site was not a monastery in the usual sense. It functioned as a place of pilgrimage, a centre for copying and translating Buddhist texts, and a location where merchants, officials and aristocrats could sponsor the creation of a cave as an act of merit. The paintings served devotional and didactic purposes: they depicted episodes from the life of the Buddha, illustrations of sutras, mandalas, and protective deities. Styles shifted as dynasties changed and as artistic influences moved along the trade routes. The earliest surviving work dates to the fifth century and shows clear connections to the art of Gandhara and Central Asia. By the Tang dynasty the painting had become more distinctly Chinese in its treatment of space and line.

Construction continued until the fourteenth century, but the site's importance had already declined. The Silk Road trade routes shifted. Dunhuang became less central. At some point in the eleventh century, a chamber now called Cave 17 was filled with manuscripts, paintings on silk and paper, and other documents, then sealed behind a wall and painted over. Why this was done is not recorded. Suggestions include protection from an anticipated invasion, a respectful storage of worn-out sacred texts, or the closure of a monastic library no longer in use.

The wall stayed intact for eight hundred years. In 1900 a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, who had appointed himself caretaker of some of the abandoned caves, noticed a crack. He enlarged it and found a small room stacked floor to ceiling with scrolls and bundles. The chamber contained approximately fifty thousand manuscripts and printed documents, along with paintings and textiles. The texts were in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese, Uyghur and other languages. They included Buddhist sutras, Confucian and Taoist works, contracts, letters, calendars and music scores. The earliest dated document is from 406 CE; the latest from 1002 CE.

Word of the discovery spread slowly. Between 1907 and 1914, foreign expeditions arrived: the Hungarian-British explorer Aurel Stein, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot, the Russian scholar Sergei Oldenburg, and the Japanese expedition led by Ōtani Kōzui. Each removed large quantities of manuscripts and art. Stein took approximately seven thousand complete manuscripts to the British Museum. Pelliot selected another six thousand for the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The removals were conducted with Wang's cooperation, in exchange for modest payments, but without formal permission from Chinese authorities. By the time officials in Beijing learned the scale of what had been taken, much of the collection had already left the country.

The dispersal is now a longstanding point of contention. The largest collections are held in Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin. Scholars have argued both that the manuscripts would have been destroyed or lost had they remained in situ during the upheavals of early twentieth-century China, and that their removal constituted straightforward looting enabled by the weakness of the Qing state. Both positions have evidence. What is not disputed is that the manuscripts are now scattered across institutions on three continents, and that this complicates their study.

The International Dunhuang Project, established in 1994, maintains a digital archive to reunite the collection virtually. The caves themselves are managed by the Dunhuang Academy, which has capped visitor numbers to slow deterioration caused by humidity and carbon dioxide from breath.