Dunhuang

The oasis

Dunhuang lies where the desert routes round the north and south of the Tarim basin meet before entering China proper. The Han dynasty established a garrison there in the late second century BCE, at the end of its line of watchtowers along the Great Wall, and it became a commandery and a trading town. Merchants, pilgrims, soldiers and monks passed through it in both directions, and its population included Chinese, Sogdians, Tibetans, Uyghurs and others.

The Mogao caves

About twenty-five kilometres south-east of the town, a cliff along a dry river is honeycombed with caves. According to an inscription of the seventh century, the first was cut in 366 by a monk named Lezun, who saw a vision of a thousand buddhas. Over the next thousand years donors of every rank, from emperors' governors to local families, had caves cut and decorated. About 490 decorated caves survive, with some 45,000 square metres of wall painting and more than two thousand painted clay sculptures. The paintings show the changing styles of Buddhist art from the Northern Wei to the Yuan dynasties: jataka tales and the life of the Buddha in the early caves, and vast paradise scenes of the buddha Amitabha in the Tang caves, with donors and their families painted at the edges.

Tibetan Dunhuang

In the late eighth century, during the expansion of the Tibetan empire, Tibetan forces took Dunhuang, probably in 786. Under Tibetan rule, which lasted until about 848, Tibetan became an administrative language, and many Tibetan Buddhist texts were copied there. In 848 a local leader, Zhang Yichao, expelled the Tibetan garrison and pledged allegiance to the Tang, and his family and their successors ruled Dunhuang as a semi-independent territory for more than a century.

The library cave

Around the year 1000 a small chamber off one of the caves, now Cave 17, was filled with manuscripts, paintings and printed documents and walled up. Why it was sealed is not known. In 1900 a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, who looked after the caves, discovered it. The British explorer Aurel Stein acquired a large part of its contents in 1907, and the French scholar Paul Pelliot another large part in 1908; other expeditions followed, and much of the remainder went to Beijing. The finds, now in London, Paris, Beijing, St Petersburg and elsewhere, include texts in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Khotanese, Sogdian, Uyghur and Hebrew, among them a printed copy of the Diamond Sutra dated 868, the oldest dated printed book known. Their removal remains a source of grievance in China, and the International Dunhuang Project has digitised much of the material.