- Introduction
- Background
- Topics
- Archaeology & the Discovery of the Dunhuang Caves
- Explorers
- Artefacts as Evidence
- Understanding Manuscripts
- Links
Over a thousand years ago scribes sat in a temple near the Silk Road town of Dunhuang carefully copying Buddhist sutras on to fine mulberry paper coloured with yellow dye. Thousands of merchants, soldiers, government officials and pilgrims paused at the temple on their route east into China or west towards Persia and Europe. Some used the rolls of manuscripts stacked on shelves in the monastery library, little imagining that in the future these would attract the admiration of the world.
The idea of storing valuable documents and books in a library is not a modern one. Since ancient times monasteries in both East and West have had large libraries possessing rare and valuable works. Time, social upheaval and natural forces have destroyed most of these and therefore the discovery in 1900 of a hidden, sealed library cave at a Buddhist monastery in Chinese Central Asia was unprecedented and of incalculable scholarly value. The discovery was made a few miles outside the town of Dunhuang, Gansu Province in northwest China at a strategic point on the ancient silk road linking East and West. Hundreds of caves had been carved out of the cliff face in the first millennium and decorated with colourful murals and statues depicting buddhas and bodhisattvas.
The library cave was packed full of Buddhist sutras and other secular documents in many central Asian languages dating from about AD 400 to 1000. Among them was the earliest dated printed book in the world, a copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra. Competitive archaeological activity in the region meant that by 1915 the library - of about 40,000 items - was dispersed among collections in Paris, St Petersburg, Beijing and London, making the library impossible to study as a whole.
Through the creation of a computer database containing images, cataloguing data, maps, bibliographies and other information, the International Dunhuang Project is making this material accessible to students and scholars around the world - encouraging the study and understanding of the fascinating Dunhuang library cave which can tell us so much about the lives and the beliefs of the people who lived and travelled on the Silk Road.