Dunhuang - Southwest Gansu Province   translated from Chinese sources

The silk road passed through Dunhuang. It was the last important town before the border.  Beyond the town the ancient silk road that leads to the West begins.  It was also the gate that Western merchants had to pass through to enter China.  The most important feature of this area is the Dunhuang Grottoes.  The world-famous art museum tells the history of the integration of different cultures that took place at the border, which was the motivation for creating a hybrid civilization that communicated between Chinese and foreign cultures.  This was the miracle of the silk road.

Mogao Cave is representative of the Dunhuang Grottoes.  It was built 25km southeast of Dunhuang City at the cliffs of Ningsha Mountain.  Construction started in 366 CE.  In the thousand years after that, numerous caves were excavated.  They are lined up row by row.  They are located in the steep cliffs fro m15 to 30 feet off the ground, forming a group of grottoes 1680 meters long.  There are now 735 grottoes.  Mogao Grotto is divided into south and north.  There are 492 caves in the south area.  This is the place for religious activities.  There are over 2000 statues and frescoes within an area of more than 45,000 square meters. There were five wooden roofs over the entrances to the different levels of caves.  The 243 caves in the south in the south area was the space for shamans to live and sit in meditation.  There are no statues or frescoes there. 

At the Dunhuang Grottoes the spiritual leaders always actively embraced cultures from outside of China so as to bring about miracles in painting and sculpting. Chinese painting reached its zenith during this period. They developed a unique technique using the outlines of the classical Chinese painting style. They then used western style color filling to finish, and the results were vivid figures with unique realism.

The art of the Dunhuang Grottoes is comprehensive art that integrates architecture with colorful painting, sculpture, and frescos of flying Buddhas.  These works combine Buddhist art concepts from India with a distinctly Chinese appearance.  There are also female divinities depicted, and they are uniquely secular Chinese as opposed to Buddhist deities. The paintings show Chinese-looking female figures alternated with foreign-looking (Indian, Persian) male figures.

After researching the historical period of the Sui Dynasty through the Tang Dynasty, it is apparent that this art is more mature through the grand palaces than anything that came before.  In the shining colorful landscape scenes, the painters created the atmosphere of an infinite world.

The scenes of music and dancing are among the art masterpieces of the human race.  The women dance and play lutes and drums.  One famous figure of a very beautiful woman dancing inspired the group Silk Road Flower Rain whose song immediately became a hit worldwide.  There are two hundred frescoes about music.  More than five hundred different bands and forty different musical instruments are depicted.  All together, 4,500 figures are depicted on the walls.  Ones that can be recognized include Lute Kanghou, Qiang Di, Hu Jiao, among others.

The Hu Xuan dance is mainly about spinning.  Figures are shown spinning really fast on an oval carpet.  In the poem by Bai Juyi, it said:

Spin to the left
Spin to the right
Never feel tired
With one thousand revolutions
They forget the time.

It was recorded that the best spinners were An Lushan and Concubine Yang.  In a scene with hundreds of musicians playing music together, the spinners are the embodiment of the prosperous Tang period.  It is said that at the time of Tang Yuanzong, he could arrange for three hundred musicians to play together.  If there was one wrong note, he could immediately spot it and correct it.   The large scenes of music in the frescoes can only be reviewed a little bit at a time because of the huge scale.

The beginning of the 20^th Century was the most humiliating period in Chinese history.  In May of 1900 the allied forces of the eight countries attacked for the first time and got all the way to the capital, Peking.  This woke the Qing rulers from their daydreaming.  The Chinese government headed by Cixi hurriedly escaped to Xian, leaving burning ruins and suffering civilians behind.  In such a chaotic and humiliating moment, the gate of Mogao Grottoes' Sutra Hiding Cave was accidentally opened by a Taoist named Wang, Yuanlu.  He had been in the military and then became a Taoist.  He felt it was a shame that Mogao Grottoes had never been repaired.  He decided to rebuild the grottoes temple, and he started to clean the statues and frescoes.

In the second month of the invasion, the foreign forces captured Peking.  Wang asked a gentleman named Mr. Yang to copy the inscriptions from the frescoes.  Mr. Yang soon discovered the secret of Sutra Hiding Cave, it was sealed with a mud wall that they broke through. Inside there were over 3000 ancient scrolls stacked on top of each other, filling the whole room. Among them were the oldest existing copies of the Lao Tze and the Lei Tse texts as well has many of the classics of the Taoist and Buddhist Canons.

At that time, the whole of China is busy with warfare in Baohui Bay.  Nobody gave any notice to this deserted place and dark caves. Wang Luyuan sent a few columns of sutra to the county magistrate, Wang Zonghan, who did not believe him totally, so he gave these sutras to Ye Zhing chang in Gansu, who was an expert on inscriptions.  He immediately suggested that they give all of the sutras to the capital city Lanzhou.  However, the government of the province was unwilling to pay for the transportation.  In March 1904, they asked the magistrate of Dunhuang to count the number of scrolls. 

In February 1904, a Hungarian named Stein, working on behalf of Britain, came to China for the second time.  This time he learned from Turkish merchants that the Taoist Wang had found a collection of ancient books.  Stein hurried to Dunhuang, but he found out that Wang was not easy to deal with.  Money means nothing to Wang, so with the help of his assistant, Jiang Xiaouwan, Stein finally made Wang believe that he was the disciple of Xuanzang.  He told him he came to China on a pilgrimage for Buddhist scriptures.  When Stein entered this cave, he was shocked by what he saw.  In his West Region Travel Notes he wrote, "When I saw the Sutra Hiding Cave, my eyes were immediately opened wide.  The sutras were piled one layer on top of another."

Under the flickering candle held by Mr. Wang was a 10-inch high pile of rolled up scrolls.  The whole area of the secret room was 500 square inches.  He spent seven days and nights selecting the cultural relics from the pile.  He was so excited to be judging the inscription of more than one thousand years ago, which was written with many kinds of characters.  He said, "In terms of its weight and state of preservation it surpasses all my previous discoveries."  He selected more than three thousand volumes, all of the best preserved ones, containing more than five hundred pictures.  It was put in twenty big wooden boxes and smuggled out of Dunhuang.  He had paid Wang forty pieces of u-shaped silver, which was only two hundred grams of silver.

After 16 months these treasures arrived at the British Museum.  The images immediately shocked the whole of Europe.  Stein's discovery was one of the greatest of the 20^th century.  The whole world shifted their attention to these ancient grottoes in the desert.  France, Japan, Russian, and America organized exploration teams and hurried to China.  Dunhuang, after being isolated for centuries, suddenly became full of foreigners.  The French explorer, Hibert, wrote in his diary, "Today is a holiday.  I just spent 10 hours crouching in the cave full of sutras, but I do not regret at all the time spent."

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