Mogao Caves or Grottoes in Gansu Province, China
The Mogao Caves or Mogao Grottoes is also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and Dunhuang Caves form a system of 492 temples. It is an oasis that is strategically located at a religious and cultural crossroads. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art which spans a period of 1,000 years. The cave shrines were constructed in 366 CE as places to store scriptures and art. The Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist grottoes and, along with Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes, are one of the three famous ancient sculptural sites of China. The Mogao Caves or Mogao Grottoes is located in Dunhuang County, Gansu Province, China.
The inspiration in the excavation of the Mogao Caves was a vision by Lè Zun who is a Buddhist monk. The number of temples eventually grew to more than a thousand. As Buddhist monks valued austerity in life, they sought retreat in remote caves to further their quest for enlightenment. From the 4th until the 14th century, Buddhist monks at Dunhuang collected scriptures from the west while many pilgrims passing through the area painted murals inside the caves. The cave paintings and architecture served as aids to meditation, as visual representations of the quest for enlightenment, as mnemonic devices, and as teaching tools to inform illiterate Chinese about Buddhist beliefs and stories. The murals on the caves cover some 450,000 square feet. It has become a repository for venerable, damaged and used manuscripts and hallowed paraphernalias and in the 11th century, the caves were walled off to protect its contents.
As Buddhist monks valued austerity in life, they sought retreat in remote caves to further their quest for enlightenment. From the 4th until the 14th century, Buddhist monks at Dunhuang collected scriptures from the west while many pilgrims passing through the area painted murals inside the caves. The cave paintings and architecture served as aids to meditation, as visual representations of the quest for enlightenment, as mnemonic devices, and as teaching tools to inform illiterate Chinese about Buddhist beliefs and stories.
In the early 1900s, a Chinese Taoist named Wang Yuanlu appointed himself guardian of some of these temples. Wang discovered a walled up area behind one side of a corridor leading to a main cave. Behind the wall was a small cave stuffed with an enormous hoard of manuscripts dating from 406 to 1002 CE. These included old hemp paper scrolls in Chinese and many other languages, paintings on hemp, silk or paper, numerous damaged figurines of Buddhas, and other Buddhist paraphernalia. The subject matter in the scrolls covers diverse material. Along with the expected Buddhist canonical works are original commentaries, apocryphal works, workbooks, books of prayers, Confucian works, Taoist works, Nestorian Christian works, works from the Chinese government, administrative documents, anthologies, glossaries, dictionaries, and calligraphic exercises.
The discovery had drawn the attention of many people who conducted expeditions to the area like the joint British/Indian group led by Aurel Stein, a French expedition under Paul Pelliot, a Japanese expedition under Otani Kozui which arrived after the Chinese government’s forces and a Russian expedition under Sergei F. Oldenburg which found the least. Pelloit was interested in the more unusual and exotic of Wang’s manuscripts such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men’s groups. These manuscripts survived only because they formed a type of palimpsest in which the Buddhist texts (the target of the preservation effort) were written on the opposite side of the paper. The remaining Chinese manuscripts were sent to Peking (Beijing) at the order of the Chinese government. The mass of Tibetan manuscripts remained at the sites. Wang embarked on an ambitious refurbishment of the temples, funded in part by solicited donations from neighboring towns and in part by donations from Stein and Pelliot. The image of the Chinese astronomy Dunhuang map is one of the many important artifact found on the scrolls.
Today, the site is the subject of an ongoing archaeological project. The Mogao Caves became one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1987.