Mogao Caves

The Mogao Caves, also called the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, are some five hundred Buddhist cave temples cut into a cliff about 25 kilometres south-east of the oasis town of Dunhuang in Gansu province, China. Monks began carving them in the fourth century CE, and new caves were still being made a thousand years later. Their murals and painted sculptures form one of the largest bodies of Buddhist art in the world, and a sealed side chamber, opened in 1900, yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts that transformed the study of medieval Asia.

Dunhuang began as a frontier garrison founded by Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty in 111 BCE to guard against the Xiongnu, and it grew into a gateway on the Silk Road where merchants, pilgrims and religions met. According to a text written in the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, a monk named Le Zun saw a vision of a thousand Buddhas in golden light at the cliff in 366 and cut the first cave there; another document gives 353. A second monk, Faliang, joined him, and a small community of meditating hermits grew into a cluster of monasteries.

The oldest decorated caves to survive, numbered 268, 272 and 275, belong to the Northern Liang period, from 419 to 439. Members of the ruling houses of the Northern Wei and Northern Zhou then sponsored many more, and building flourished under the short-lived Sui. Patrons ranged from emperors, clergy and local governors to merchants, officers and women's associations, and the paintings aided meditation and taught Buddhist stories to those who could not read.

Under the Tang dynasty Dunhuang became a major hub of trade and religion, and the number of caves passed a thousand. The larger of the site's two colossal Buddha statues was made in 695, after Wu Zetian had ordered giant statues to be raised across the empire the year before. From 787 to 848 Dunhuang was ruled by the Tibetan Empire, which is why the caves escaped the Tang emperor Wuzong's persecution of Buddhism in 845.

After the Tang, activity slowly fell away, and no new caves were begun after the Yuan dynasty. As sea routes replaced the overland road and Islam spread through Central Asia, Dunhuang lost its importance; under the Ming the route was officially abandoned and the region depopulated, though local people still worshipped at the caves.

A small chamber, now called the Library Cave or Cave 17, was walled up, probably early in the eleventh century. It had been built as a memorial to the monk Hongbian, who died in 862, and it came to hold scrolls dated from 406 to 1002. Why it was sealed is unknown. Aurel Stein thought it a store for worn sacred texts; Paul Pelliot suggested the monks hid their library before an attack, perhaps by the Western Xia in 1035; others link the sealing to the fall of Buddhist Khotan to the Karakhanids in 1006.

Around 1900 a Taoist priest, Wang Yuanlu, appointed himself caretaker of the caves and began clearing sand. On 25 June 1900 he found the walled-up chamber, packed with perhaps 50,000 documents, mostly Buddhist but also Confucian, Taoist, Christian and secular, in Chinese, Tibetan, Sogdian, Khotanese and other languages. Among them was a printed Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book. In 1907 Stein, leading a British and Indian expedition, obtained thousands of manuscripts and paintings in return for a donation to Wang's restoration work, and Pelliot took almost 10,000 documents in 1908. Japanese and Russian expeditions followed, and in 1910 Chinese scholars had the remainder sent to Beijing, though some went missing. The largest collections are now in Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin.

Further harm followed: White Russian soldiers housed in the caves in 1921 caused damage, the American Langdon Warner removed murals and a statue in 1924, and Nationalist troops caused damage in 1939. The painter Zhang Daqian spent two and a half years copying murals from 1941, and a research institute, later the Dunhuang Academy, was set up at the site in 1944. The state declared the caves a specially protected monument in 1961, and they escaped serious harm in the Cultural Revolution. UNESCO listed them as a World Heritage Site in 1987. A further 248 caves were found to the north between 1988 and 1995, and visitor numbers are now capped.