Mogao Caves

Interesting facts

Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.

Paul Pelliot followed in 1908 and took around 10,000 documents for about £90.

The Library Cave, now numbered Cave 17, was originally a memorial shrine for the monk Hongbian, who died in 862.

Wang Yuanlu broke into the hidden chamber on 25 June 1900, and its documents span roughly six centuries, from 406 to 1002.

The oldest decorated caves still standing, numbers 268, 272 and 275, were cut under the Northern Liang between 419 and 439.

Cave 130 holds a second colossal Buddha 27 metres tall from the 8th century, and Cave 158 a reclining Buddha 15.6 metres long.

In 1924 the American Langdon Warner removed several murals and a statue from the caves.

The painter Zhang Daqian arrived in 1941 and spent about two and a half years copying the murals.

Between 1988 and 1995 archaeologists excavated 248 more caves in the northern section, plain cells largely without paintings.

In 1921 White Russian soldiers vandalised some of the paintings, and Kuomintang troops caused further harm in 1939.

Why it is worth it

The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan. Tradition credits the first cave, in 366, to a monk named Le Zun.

Today some 735 caves survive, of which about 490 in the southern section are decorated. Together they hold around 45,000 square metres of wall paintings and some 2,400 painted clay sculptures. The murals trace changes in style across the centuries, from early figures influenced by India and Central Asia to the lavish paradise scenes, musicians and flying apsaras of the Tang dynasty, when Mogao was at its height. The most famous landmark is the nine-storey wooden façade that shelters a seated Buddha 35.5 metres tall, carved in 695.

The caves also gave the world one of its greatest archival discoveries. In 1900 a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, found a sealed chamber — now called the Library Cave — packed with around 50,000 manuscripts, paintings and printed texts in many languages, walled up in the early eleventh century. Among them was a copy of the Diamond Sutra dated 868, the oldest dated printed book known. Much of the collection was taken abroad by Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others in the following years. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Only a rotating selection of caves is open on any given day, so every visit is slightly different.

Getting there

The caves lie about 25 km southeast of the centre of Dunhuang in Gansu province; Dunhuang Mogao International Airport (DNH) is about 14 km away. Visits begin at the Mogao Caves Digital Exhibition Centre on the edge of Dunhuang, where films introduce the site before a shuttle bus takes visitors on to the caves.

From the encyclopaedia

The Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, form a system of 500 temples 25 km (16 mi) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China. The caves may also be known as the Dunhuang Caves; however, this term is also used as a collective term to include other Buddhist cave sites in and around the Dunhuang area, such as the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, Eastern Thousand Buddha Caves, Yulin Caves, and Five Temple Caves. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 1,000 years.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Mogao Caves

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia