Painted on Stone, Scattered Abroad: The Fate of China’s Ancient Cave Murals

Today, we’ll talk about how China’s ancient cave murals were cut from desert walls, scattered across the world, and painstakingly reunited through scholarship, art, and digital restoration.

Transcript

Painted on Stone, Scattered Abroad: The Fate of China’s Ancient Cave Murals

Today, we’ll talk about how China’s ancient cave murals were cut from desert walls, scattered across the world, and painstakingly reunited through scholarship, art, and digital restoration.

From Kuqa to Baicheng in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the road winds through mountains and stretches of desert. After crossing a high mountain pass, the landscape suddenly opens up. The Weigan River flows through this land, nourishing a small oasis. On the river’s southern bank rises a mountain known as Que’ertag. After rainfall, its cliffs glow with a deep reddish hue. In the Uyghur language, “red” is kizil. 

It is among these red rock walls that one finds the Kizil Caves, honeycomb-like chambers carved into the cliff face and extending for several kilometers. They form the earliest, longest continuously developed and the westernmost large-scale Buddhist cave complex in China. It predates the famous Mogao Caves in Dunhuang by more than a century.

The true essence of the Kizil Caves lies in their murals. Celebrated for their extraordinary beauty, rich subject matter and distinctive style, they are often described as an “ocean of stories”. Of particular importance are the murals depicting Jataka tales, stories of the Buddha’s previous lives. In sheer number, these exceed the combined total found at Dunhuang, Longmen, and Yungang. Nowhere else in the world offers such an extensive visual narrative of early Buddhist storytelling.

Zhao Li, a researcher at the Kizil Caves Research Institute, still vividly remembers her first encounter with these murals in early 1992. She and her colleagues had been chatting as they walked, but the moment they stepped into one of the caves, everyone fell silent. 

“You feel an immediate sense of reverence,” she recalled. “This is a great achievement of humanity. It is overwhelming.” Yet the shock quickly gave way to pain. Many murals were riddled with damage, and some caves had been stripped almost entirely bare. Beyond the slow erosion of time and the upheavals of history, a major cause was the systematic removal of murals by foreign expeditions in the early twentieth century. In total, nearly 500 square meters of Kizil murals were cut from the cave walls and taken overseas.

Among all Chinese cave sites, Kizil suffered the most severe losses. From the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth, as China struggled in a period of decline, Western explorers arrived, treading through desert sands and initiating a massive outflow of cultural heritage. 

The finest examples of Chinese wall painting, found in temples and caves, became prime targets. Figures such as Hungarian-British archeologist Aurel Stein, French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, German Indologist Albert Grünwedel, his wine merchant compatriot Albert von Le Coq, Russian Orientalist Sergei Oldenburg, and Japanese explorer Otani Kozui ventured along the Hexi Corridor and deep into Xinjiang. Meanwhile, art dealers like Zhejiang native C. T. Loo were active in China’s heartland. 

As a result, Chinese murals were broken apart and the fragments cast to every corner of the globe. Murals from Xinjiang largely ended up in Europe and Japan, while those from Shanxi traveled to the United States and Canada.

Yet, there were always people unwilling to accept this loss. They dedicated their lives to tracking these dispersed works, hoping to bring them back home in some form.

Every time Zhao enters Cave 178 at Kizil, she feels a chill run through her body. The murals that once covered the main wall, side walls and vaulted ceiling have been completely removed, leaving the cave almost naked. “It feels as if the skin has been stripped from my own body,” she explained.

Zhao has spent more than three decades working at Kizil. When she first arrived in 1992, she was assigned to the Qiuci Culture Research Office under the guidance of renowned scholar Huo Xuchu. Her days were spent studying murals inside the caves, and her nights reading Buddhist scriptures. The following day, she would return to the caves to compare the texts with the images. Since the murals were painted based on Buddhist sutras, understanding them required identifying their scriptural sources and matching text to image. Only through such painstaking work, she believed, could one truly grasp the world contained within the murals.

Kizil murals are known for their distinctive diamond-grid compositions. Within each diamond, often no larger than a handspan, an entire Buddhist story unfolds. Spread across nearly 4,000 sq m, the murals depict Jataka tales, stories of karmic causation, narratives from the Buddha’s life and episodes related to Shakyamuni. Together, they form an invaluable visual archive for studying the history and culture of the Western Regions.

The earliest known foreign visitor to Kizil was Russian. On the west wall of Cave 213, lines of Russian text written in pencil remain, dated January 15, 1879. In the early twentieth century, Japanese, German and French expeditions followed in quick succession, rarely leaving empty-handed. The German expeditions were especially prolific. Visiting Kizil multiple times, they stayed for months in 1906 and 1913 alone, removing nearly 400 crates of artifacts.

At roughly the same time, a similar wave of exploration swept through Dunhuang. Stein obtained large numbers of priceless manuscripts and silk paintings from the guardian of the Library Cave at a negligible price. Later, when art historian and archeologist Langdon Warner arrived from the US, the cave had been mostly emptied. He turned instead to the walls, using cloth coated with adhesive to peel murals directly from the cave surfaces. These millennia-old Tang Dynasty masterpieces were eventually taken to the US and are now held by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Harvard Art Museum. Fortunately, Warner’s actions were soon discovered and stopped by local authorities, sparing Dunhuang from suffering the same devastation as Kizil.

According to Zhao’s surveys, nearly 500 sq m of murals were removed from Kizil, affecting close to 60 caves. Since only about 80 caves originally contained murals, almost every accessible painted cave was damaged. Today, fragments from Kizil are scattered across more than twenty museums and galleries in eight countries and regions. Ironically, these displaced murals sparked an unexpected connection for Wang Yansong, an artist who would later devote himself to reproducing the lost wall paintings.

In 1996, while studying in Japan, he visited an exhibition titled “Great Art of the Silk Road” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. China was not a participant, yet the exhibition featured many exquisite Chinese murals, including several from Kizil. Wang had never visited Kizil before. His first encounter with its murals was on foreign soil. “The more closely I looked, the more painful it felt,” he recalled, adding that “Without going abroad, we would never have the chance to see what originally belonged to China.”

At that moment, he conceived a bold idea. If the originals could not yet be brought home, perhaps they could be repainted. Through faithful reproduction, these lost murals might return to Chinese audiences. From then on, Wang began collecting materials and copying the murals that were scattered overseas.

Within China, scholars were equally concerned. Buddhist caves were integrated artistic systems, combining architecture, murals and sculpture. Every figure and image was carefully arranged to serve a religious function. The removal of murals not only caused irreparable damage to the caves themselves, but also made scholarly interpretation far more difficult.

In 1998, the Kucha Research Institute of Caves designated the study of lost Kizil murals as a key research project. Under Huo’s leadership, Zhao began systematically investigating their whereabouts. In 2002, she and Huo traveled to Berlin for an academic conference. The Museum of Asian Art in Berlin houses the largest overseas collection of Kizil murals. Seeing them in person for the first time, Zhao was overwhelmed. After the conference, she spent a week working in the storage rooms, surrounded by murals that made her feel as if she had stepped back into Kizil itself.

At the time, without digital cameras, they relied on film. Due to technical difficulties, none of the photographs were successfully developed. That failure haunted Zhao. “I vowed to learn German and return,” she said.

A decade later, she did. In 2012, Zhao returned to Berlin and stayed for 18 months. She measured every Xinjiang mural in the museum’s collection by hand, built detailed records and corrected numerous catalog errors. Working daily in climate-controlled storage, she photographed even the smallest fragments, sometimes no larger than a fingernail. “These are like children lost from our family,” she said. “After a hundred years, I had to know exactly who was missing.”

From 2002 to 2016, Zhao traveled to museums in Germany, the US, Japan, Korea, Russia and France, tracing the dispersal of Kizil murals. Some had been destroyed during World War II. Others vanished into private collections. Ultimately, she gathered images of 486 murals from more than twenty institutions.

Her goal, however, extended beyond documentation. She envisioned digitally returning these murals to their original caves, reconstructing missing sections, and restoring the visual integrity of Kizil. This task proved extraordinarily difficult. Many murals had been cut into pieces, wrongly reassembled, or mixed with fragments from other caves. Edges were damaged, pieces missing. Reassembly required an intimate understanding of the cave layouts, dimensions and artistic styles.

Zhao spent countless hours sitting in cold, dim caves, comparing images on her computer, dismantling incorrect combinations and reconstructing them piece by piece. “I do not store the images in my computer,” she explained. “I store them in my mind.” The process resembled detective work, demanding absolute precision. Sometimes entire reconstructions had to be discarded and redone.

Over time, Zhao mastered digital restoration tools, relying on archival photographs when originals no longer existed. Through relentless effort, she successfully identified the original locations of most of the overseas Kizil murals. In 2020, her findings were published in a major volume containing over 1,200 images, offering the most comprehensive visual record of Kizil murals to date.

Meanwhile, in a studio in Jiangsu Province, Wang continues to paint late into the night. Since returning from Japan, he has focused on reproducing lost murals, particularly those from Shanxi. His work, often requiring years of meticulous labor, aims not to reinterpret, but to faithfully recreate, using original materials, techniques and dimensions. “I must suppress my own artistic ego,” he said. “My task is to reveal the spirit of the ancient painters.”

Some murals he reproduces no longer exist at all. One example is the “Vow Scene” from the Bezeklik Caves in Turpan, destroyed during World War II. Using early twentieth-century publications, Wang reconstructed the mural so that at least its memory might survive.

Today, digital reconstructions based on Zhao’s research have already been applied at Kizil, including three-dimensional restorations of selected caves open to visitors. A digital exhibition center is under construction, promising a future where the splendor of Kizil’s murals can once again be experienced in their original context.

For Zhao, digital restoration is not merely visual. It restores meaning. Through reassembled imagery, long-standing academic questions can finally be answered, revealing the Buddhist traditions once practiced at Kizil. Her work continues, extending to other cave sites, driven by a conviction captured in an ancient line by the famed poet Qu Yuan: “The road ahead is long and difficult, but the search must go on.”

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 Li Jing, translator Wang Zhiwei, 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.