There are, however, further holdings at libraries and museums throughout East Asia and Europe and several items are kept in private collections. Petersburg, and Ryūkoku University Library in Kyoto. As a result of these activities the largest collections of Dunhuang manuscripts and printed documents, well over 40,000 in total, belong to the National Library of China and Beijing University Library, the British Library in London, Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, the Institute for Oriental Studies in St. The Chinese authorities decided to secure the remaining manuscripts in 1909-10, but several hundred items were obtained at the cave by members of the first Japanese Central Asian expedition mounted by Ōtani Kozui in 1911 and the Russian expedition led by Sergei Oldenburg in 1914. Thousands of the manuscripts stored in this cave, Cave 17 (the “library cave”) were obtained and carted away by the British-Hungarian explorer Marc Aurel Stein, who arrived at Mogao in March 1907, and by the French Sinologist Paul Pelliot, who visited the site in February-March of the following year. and the last in the 14th, a period in which Dunhuang was under the control of, not only the Chinese, but also, among others, Tibetans, Uighurs, Tanguts, and Mongols.The discovery, in the late 1890s, of a sealed-up cave crammed with manuscripts, printed documents, and paintings on silk and paper attracted archeologists to Mogao. The first cave was hewn in the 4th century C.E. Dunhuang’s situation–at the point where the northern and southern silk routes, which skirted the Tarim Basin in the Taklamakan Desert, merged at the Hexi Corridor leading to Chang’an–made it particularly important to monks and merchants traveling to and from China. The high concentration of caves at Mogao and Yulin and their exceptional contents chronicle centuries of artistic styles, shifts in Buddhist doctrine, and patterns of political and private patronage-providing an endless source of material for future work.Ĭontributors include Neville Agnew, Dora Ching, Jun Hu, Annette Juliano, Richard Kent, Wei-Cheng Lin, Cary Liu, Maria Menshikova, Jerome Silbergeld, Roderick Whitfield, and Zhao Shengliang.The Mogao Caves (Mogaoku) or Caves of One Thousand Buddhas (Qianfodong) are located some 25 km from Dunhuang at the edge of the Dunes of the Singing Sands (Mingshashan) of the Gobi desert, these cave-shrines, more than 730 in total (of which almost 500 belong to the better preserved southern section) and containing more than 45,000 square meters of predominantly Buddhist murals and more than 2,000 Buddhist painted stucco sculptures, testify to the importance of the site as a major center for Buddhist pilgrims over a period of approximately one millennium. Diverse as they are in their subjects and methodologies, the essays represent only a fraction of what can be researched about Dunhuang. Leading experts across three continents examine a wealth of topics, including expeditionary photography and cave architecture, to demonstrate the intellectual richness of Dunhuang.
Lavishly illustrated with selected Lo Archive and modern photographs, the essays address three main areas-Dunhuang as historical record, as site, and as art and art history. Visualizing Dunhuang: Seeing, Studying, and Conserving the Caves is a paperback edition of the ninth volume of the magnificent nine-volume hardback set, and examines how the Lo Archive, a vast collection of photographs taken in the 1940s of the Mogao and Yulin Caves, inspires a broad range of scholarship. From its earliest construction to the present, this location has been visualized by many individuals, from the architects, builders, and artists who built the caves to twentieth-century explorers, photographers, and conservators, as well as contemporary artists.
The sculptures, murals, portable paintings, and manuscripts found in the Mogao and Yulin Caves at Dunhuang represent every aspect of Buddhism. Situated at the crossroads of the northern and southern routes of the ancient silk routes in western China, Dunhuang is one of the richest Buddhist sites in the world, with more than 500 richly decorated cave temples constructed between the fourth and fourteenth centuries.