| DUNHUANG |
| The oasis town of Dunhuang lay at a crucial junction of the Silk Road, that ancient braid of caravan trails stretching for more than 7,000 kilometres from China to the Mediterranean, which served as a highway not just for merchandise, but also for ideas - religious, cultural and artistic. By the 4th century AD, the Silk Road had brought Dunhuang both commercial prosperity and a growing Buddhist community. Some 25 kilometres to its south-east, at the edge of the Mingsha Shan or Dunes of the Singing Sands, lay a river bed bordered by a long cliff. It was here, in the year 366 AD, that a local monk set about carving out a cave for solitary meditation. Over the next thousand years, hundreds of similar caves were cut into the same rock face - to become not bare monastic cells but richly endowed and adorned shrines. The site began to decline in the 12th century, and slipped into virtual obscurity until the early years of the 20th century. Some 492 decorated caves remain to this day. |
| THE CAVE TEMPLES
The Mogao cave temples near the town of Dunhuang, at the edge of the Gobi desert in north-west China, are filled with one of the most extensive and exquisite collections of Buddhist paintings and sculptures in the world. Every surface of the walls and ceilings is covered with painted clay stucco, some 45,000 square metres in all: graceful acrobats of the sky scatter flowers and garlands, while dancers and musicians celebrate the beauties of the Buddhist Pure Lands; row upon row of miniature images of the Buddha, subtly varied in colouring or dress, adorn virtually every cave, and give the site its popular name of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. The Dunhuang caves remain one of the most perfectly preserved of the world's great religious sanctuaries. |
| Mogao Caves
The Mogao Caves, 25km southeast of Dunhuang, are one of the great archeological discovery stories of the East. The first-known Buddhist temples within the boundaries of the Chinese empire, supposedly established in 366 AD by a monk called Lie Zun, they were a centre of culture on the Silk Road right up until the fourteenth century, and today contain religious artworks spanning a thousand years of history. Chinese Buddhism radiated out to the whole Han empire from these wild desert cliffs, and with it – gradually adapting to a Chinese context – came the artistic influences of Central Asia, India, Persia and the West. Of the original thousand or more caves, over six hundred survive in recognizable form, but many are off-limits, either considered no longer of significant interest or else containing Tantric murals which the Chinese reckon are too sexually explicit for visitors. Of the thirty main caves open to the public, you are likely to manage only around fifteen in a single day. The Mogao Caves, also known as the Mogao Grottoes or the Caves of A Thousand Buddhas, are set into a cliff wall of Echoing Sand Mountain about 25km southeast of Dunhuang, the oasis city in the Gobi desert. This honeycomb of caves was constructed over a millennium, from the 4th to the 14th centuries, and represents the height of Buddhist art and the world's richest treasure house of Buddhist sutras, murals and sculptures. During its heyday, the cave complex had thousands of caves, and today, a total of 492 grottoes, 45,000 square-metres of murals, 2,400 painted statues and over 250 residential caves remains. Almost every grotto contains a group of colorful paintings of Buddha and Bodhisattvas and other religious paintings, or social activities of different dynasties. The caves carved on the cliff wall provide voluminous research material for the study of all aspects of Chinese medieval society, in areas such as religion, art, politics, economics, military affairs, culture, literature, language, music, dance, architecture and medical science. The rich culture and art unearthed in the caves has even given birth to a new field of study, called "Dunhuangology"! |
The mural paintings in existence today can be divided into seven categories, including the jataka stories depicting beneficence of Sakyamuni in his previous incarnations, sutra stories depicting suffering and transmigration, traditional Chinese mythology and so on. Although the religious scriptures are primarily Buddhist, written in Chinese, Uygur, Tibetan, Turkic and other languages, Taoist, Manichean and Confucian scrolls are also part of the collection. (Unfortunately, due to the corrupt and impotent governments after the later Qing dynasties, many of the treasures of the Mogao Caves were plundered by heinous thieves like Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Langdon Warner and Albert von Le Coq, mainly by theft but also through unfair transactions. These treasures can now be found in places like Britain and Germany.) According to historical records, in the year 336, a monk called Le Zun came near the Echoing Sand Mountain and suddenly had a vision of golden rays of light shining upon him like thousands Buddhas. He started to carve the first grotto to memorize the accident and show his respect to the Buddha. Other pilgrims and travelers followed for the next thousand years. |
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