Dunhuang,
a small city in Gansu Province, is located near the crossroads of the
ancient Silk Road. It is made famous largely by the Buddhist Grottoes,
known as the Mogao Grottoes, which are one of the
World’s
most important sites of ancient Buddhist culture. The
grottoes, also known as Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,
preserve nearly a thousand years of Buddhist cave-temple
architecture, clay sculpture, mural paintings, and manuscripts, dating
from the 5th to the 14th centuries.
The
rediscovery of the caves and their treasures in 1900 opened a new field
of study that uses the monuments and documents found at Dunhuang to
illuminate the complex cultural interactions of ancient Central Asia.
The Dunhuang finds reflect periods of Chinese, Tibetan, and Uygur
control, and the images and texts reveal the impact of many other Asian
regional styles and languages. The intermixture of Indian, West Asian,
Central Asian, and Chinese elements reveal a dynamic, eclectic, and
thoroughly multicultural context that had a profound impact on the later
development of narrative literary forms as well as on Buddhist
image-making. This early internationalism has an echo in the
contemporary distribution of Dunhuang material and Dunhuang studies
around the world. The discovery of a sealed-up library of manuscripts
and painted scrolls at the Mogao Grottoes led to the acquisition of
significant collections of such portable items by museums and libraries
in London, Paris, St. Petersburg (Leningrad), and New Delhi.
|
1,000-year
old mural in Mogao Grottos of Dunhuang |
The
Mogao Grottoes are carved into desert cliffs overlooking a river valley
about 25 km southwest of Dunhuang. The caves vary enormously in size,
from tiny single-room cells that served as living quarters for
individual monks to huge, cavernous worship halls housing monumental
sculptures and mural cycles. The caves honeycomb a 1,600-meter-long
cliff face running north and south, and contain some 2,000 clay
sculptures and more than 45,000 square
meters (484,000 sq. ft) of mural paintings. The soft stone in the
region is unsuitably brittle for carving, so the sculptures are
primarily made of clay, coated with a kind of plaster surface that
allowed finishing details to be painted on or engraved.
Of
the 1,000 or so caves cut between the foundation of the site in 366 AD
and the last efforts in the 14th century Yuan period, 492 are still more
or less well preserved. All have been subjected to some degree of
various kinds of damage or indignities, from the long term erosion of
wind and water, to the smoke from fires built by bivouacked troops.
The damages have also stemmed from the modern perils of mass
tourism, where the moisture from the breath of crowds of visitors can
damage delicate murals that have survived for centuries in the dry
desert climate. Ongoing restoration efforts are underway to preserve the
caves and their contents. The Dunhuang Research and Exhibition Center,
as part of that effort, has constructed replicas of some
of the most important and representative of the Mogao Caves. Visitors
can study full-scale replicas of the caves and their sculptural and
painted contents close-up and under excellent lighting conditions,
without danger of adding to the deterioration of the originals.
