Overview
The Mogao Caves honeycomb a cliff near Dunhuang in Gansu, at the edge of the Gobi Desert where the Silk Road passed. According to tradition the first cave was dug in 366 by the monk Le Zun, and construction continued for about a thousand years, through the Northern dynasties, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Song, Western Xia and Yuan, until the 14th century.
Description
About 735 caves survive, containing roughly 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted clay sculptures. Of the roughly thousand years of construction, the Tang dynasty marks the artistic peak.
History and legacy
In 1900 the Daoist caretaker Wang Yuanlu discovered the sealed Library Cave (Cave 17), which held tens of thousands of manuscripts and paintings, among them the Diamond Sutra dated 868, the world’s earliest dated printed book. Large parts of the hoard were bought by foreign expeditions led by Stein and Pelliot and are now dispersed among museums worldwide. The site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.