Dunhuang Grottoes: Multicultural Oasis on the Silk Road

Today, we’ll talk about the mysterious beginnings of the famed Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang, their unique place in Chinese history, and how an international cast of dubious characters spirited away crates and crates of priceless relics at garage-sale prices in the waning years of the Qing.

On May 4th of this year, renowned archaeologist Fan Jinshi donated 10 million yuan, about US$1.45 million, to Peking University to promote its Dunhuang studies. An education fund named after Fan was established to support the study of manuscripts and an array of art treasures discovered in the millennium-old Mogao Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Dunhuang of northwest China’s Gansu Province.

Fan is the honorary president of Dunhuang Academy and is known within that circle as the “Daughter of Dunhuang”. Born in 1938, Fan graduated from the History Department of Peking University, majoring in archaeology. She began working in Dunhuang in 1963 and made it her lifelong mission to protect and study the cultural relics of the Mogao Grottoes. She was awarded the Lui Che Woo Prize in 2019 and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Scientific and Technological Achievements in 2020.

And it’s no surprise that Fan could remain captivated by Dunhuang for six decades. After all, despite its seemingly isolated location, for more than a thousand years, it served as the crossroads for a continent. And it was not merely a market for buying and selling goods: in that pre-modern age, it was a major hub where ideas and technology were spread, and religions and cultures mingled.   

Now, if you’re not completely familiar with its location, I’ll try to draw a mental image for you. The Gansu Province cities of Dunhuang and Lanzhou – the provincial capital – are about 1,200 kilometers apart. It’s the same distance between Beijing and Shanghai! Lying at the far western fringe of Gansu Province at the very end of what is known as the Hexi Corridor, Dunhuang was an important historic trade route in Northwest China and part of the ancient Silk Road. As an oasis in the vast desert, it was the gateway through which people entered the regions to the west of Central China. 

Ever since it was opened up in 138 BC by Zhang Qian, the famous diplomat and explorer during the Han Dynasty, which lasted from 206 BC to AD 220, the city played a significant role in international trade along the Silk Road. Merchants traveled from metropolises, such as Chang’an or Luoyang, going through the Hexi Corridor to Dunhuang, from which they would travel to what is today’s Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. As the major transportation hub linking East and West, Dunhuang prospered tremendously over the course of 1,600 years, from the Western Han Dynasty to the Ming Dynasty. 

Cultural exchanges flourished along with commercial prosperity, particularly during the chaotic period of Wei, Jin, Southern, and Northern Dynasties, lasting from the year 220 to 589 when a great number of noble families, officials, and scholars migrated westward seeking shelter from war-torn central China. As their major place of refuge, Dunhuang underwent a cultural boom, which included the adoption of Buddhism. 

It’s said that, in the year 366, during a sojourn in Dunhuang, a monk named Lezun suddenly glimpsed peculiar golden rays glittering on the east side of Mingsha Mountain, as if thousands of golden Buddha statues were reflecting a brilliant light. Astonished by what he believed was a celestial miracle, Lezun halted his journey and dug out a grotto on the mountain for himself to practice Buddhist rites. Not long after, another monk, named Faliang, followed suit. 

This is supposedly how the earliest two grottoes in Dunhuang came into being. This account was carved on a stone tablet in front of Grotto No.332; however, how much truth there is behind the tale remains unknown as archaeologists are unable to pinpoint the exact location of the first two grottoes. 

It was during the Northern Liang Dynasty, which lasted from 502 to 557, that a number of grottoes decorated with murals and statues began to appear at the site. Later, over the course of 1,000 years, a great many grottoes were dug out. So far, 735 have been preserved, of which 492 are home to more than 2,000 colored statues and about 4,500 square meters of murals. 

In the earliest grottoes, one can see strong foreign artistic influences, particularly Indian elements. It was not until the Tang Dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, that a distinctly Chinese style started to gain prominence among the murals at Dunhuang. 

After the Northern Song Dynasty, which lasted from 960 to 1279, as the political and economic center of the nation moved southward, the Maritime Silk Road gradually replaced the ancient northwesterly route as the major conduit for international trade. In 1372, the Ming government built the Jiayuguan Pass in today’s Gansu Province as the frontier fortress at the western end of the Ming Dynasty Great Wall, a buttress against fierce invasions from the Northeastern tribes. Dunhuang, located outside the Pass, was gradually abandoned and the grottoes became increasingly desolate. Ignored for centuries, the mouths of the caves were buried by dust and rock.

It remained this way for 500 years until the late Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644 to 1911. It was the accidental discovery of a small cave in 1900 by travelling Taoist Wang Yuanlu that forever changed the fate of the Mogao Grottoes. Abbot Wang was not only responsible for rediscovering the grottoes, but he was instrumental, for good or bad, in helping European archaeologists and explorers take many of the grottoes’ treasures overseas. 

In 1889, Abbot Wang travelled to Dunhuang and found a dilapidated Buddhist temple. He planned to stay there to transform it into a Taoist temple. Wang hired several young men to clean it as well as some abandoned caves nearby. On June 25, 1900, while sweeping out the dust from one cave, one of the workers found a crack on a mural on the wall through which a secret chamber could be seen. The story goes that in the middle of the night by candlelight, Wang and several men dug out the mural behind which they saw bundles of cloth bags piled up from floor to ceiling. In each cloth bag were dozens of precious Buddhist scriptures. This cave, initially created during the late Tang Dynasty, became known as “the Library Cave” and is the basis of Dunhuang studies, an international academic field also known as Dunhuangology. 

There were about 50,000 manuscripts and artworks in the Library Cave, mostly Buddhist sutras in Chinese and Tibetan languages and Buddhist paintings. There were also some historic materials written in Sanskrit, Khotanese, Uighur, and Sogdian, as well as some silk paintings. The most recent documents found were dated 1002, and it is believed that the Library Cave was sealed shut after that, but the reason why remains a mystery. 

The only remaining photograph of Abbot Wang, which shows a rather small and skinny man wearing Taoist robes and grinning widely, was taken by the Hungarian-born British archaeologist Aurel Stein.

Stein was the first foreigner to arrive following the discovery of the Library Cave. In 1907, he and Abbot Wang exchanged 29 boxes of relics for four shoe-shaped silver ingots, amounting to around 10 kilograms of silver. The treasures Stein obtained included 270 cloth bags of Chinese and Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, manuscripts and artworks. Less than a year later, the French explorer and Sinologist Paul Pelliot arrived, purchasing more than 6,000 precious manuscripts from Wang for just 25 kilograms of silver. 

The academic society of the Qing Dynasty was either unaware of, or not interested in, the loss of the Dunhuang relics. In August of 1908, during his short visit to Beijing, Pelliot told Miu Qunsun, the then director of the National Library of Beiping, that a number of Tang Dynasty manuscripts had been discovered in the Mogao Grottoes, including The County Annuals of Shazhou. Nevertheless, Miu paid little interest to this significant information, merely writing a few lines in his diary on that day, which included “what an interesting anecdote.” 

The next year, when he returned to Beijing, Peilliot took about 50 manuscripts he had acquired from the Library Cave with him and showed them to several well-known Chinese scholars, such as the renowned archeologist and paleographer Luo Zhenyu. Only then did Chinese scholars learn of the existence of the Dunhuang manuscripts. 

The Chinese scholars petitioned the Qing government to secure the remaining relics in Dunhuang to avoid more losses. To its credit, the central government approved a grant of 6,000 taels of silver, about 300 kilograms, ordering the provincial government of Gansu to collect the relics. However, the Gansu government appropriated nearly all of the money and only gave Abbot Wang 300 taels, about 15 kilograms. Extremely dissatisfied with the reward, Wang secretly kept many treasures and, several years later, sold them to Japanese and Russian scholars and explorers, as well as Stein when he paid a second visit to Dunhuang.

Rong Xinjiang, the director of the Chinese Association of Dunhuang and Turfan Studies, and chair of the Department of History at Peking University, said: “Most Chinese scholars during the late Qing Dynasty buried themselves in the old classics and turned a blind eye to the latest studies. Compared with Stein and Peilliot, they were extremely lacking in sensitivity towards the newest academic trends and findings. They also hadn’t received any formal training in archaeology. Therefore, the loss of the Dunhuang treasures was an inevitable consequence of their limitations at the time.” 

The Dunhuang relics and the photographs of the caves that Stein and Pelliot took back to Europe created a stir within European academic and art circles. In 1920, Pelliot published the six-volume Les Grottoes de Touen-houang, which contains more than 300 photographs he took while visiting the grottoes. The research concerning Dunhuang began to gain traction in Europe. 

In 1931, the eminent historian and linguist Chen Yinke first coined the term “Dunhuangology” in his preface to the article Catalogue of Manuscripts from Dunhuang Remaining after the Theft, published in issue no. 4 of the Journal of the Central Academy of History and Linguistics in which he states: “Dunhuangology is a new trend in the international academic field.”  

Chang Shuhong, a later renowned Dunhuangologist, first learned of the existence of the Mogao Grottoes in 1935, when he was an art student at Beaux-Arts de Paris. One day, he came across Pelliot’s publications at an old bookstall by the Seine. Tremendously astonished by the pictures, Chang was from then on determined to weave his own fate with Dunhuang. Eight years later, he organized a team of six scholars to do a long-term field trip there. Life in the desert was unbearable, and research was conducted under extremely harsh conditions. In Chang’s own words, it was like “serving a prison sentence”. Nevertheless, he was willing to make the sacrifice.

In 1944, Chang and several other scholars founded the National Dunhuang Art Institute, and Chang became its first director. It is due to the efforts of those scholars in the 1940s that the remaining murals and colored statues in the grottoes are preserved so well today. 

Rong Xinjiang stressed that “Dunhuangology has been an internationally popular subject since its very beginning.” He believes that, much like the multicultural nature of the ancient trading hub,  the development of Dunhuang studies has taken on a somewhat cosmopolitan tradition, from the early interaction between Luo Zhenyu and Pelliot during the late Qing Dynasty, to the international seminars held in recent years. Dunhuangology has provided a close, cross-cultural bond between the East and the West. 

Rong stresses that, scholars in the field, and Chinese scholars in particular, need to have a wide, international mindset instead of harboring a narrow-minded nationalistic bias. 

Another academic keen on Dunhuang art, Japanese scholar Hirayama Ikuo, former president of the Tokyo University of the Arts, has expended great effort in promoting the protection of the Mogao Grottoes. He persuaded Japanese enterprises to fund a long-term program to help the Dunhuang Arts Research Institute train a number of professionals in archeology, relic preservation and art studies. Since 1985, nearly 60 scholars at the Dunhuang Arts Research Institute have been funded by the program. 

Hirayama also got the Japanese government to provide a fund of one billion Japanese yen to build an exhibition center for Dunhuang relic preservation just opposite the grottoes. The renowned scholar believes it’s worth protecting because the charm of Dunhuang transcends time, nationality, and individual values.

Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Ni Wei, translator Yi Ziyi, and copy editor James McCarthy. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.