Mogao Caves, the great ancient treasure of the Silk Road
Also known as the caves of the thousand Buddhas, it is a set of more than 400 beautifully decorated temples carved into a rock face, southeast of the city of Dunhuang, in the province of Gansu, in north-central China. They were discovered in the West at the beginning of the 20th century by a British expeditionary. The grottoes are famous for their statues and wall paintings representing a millennium of Buddhist art, as well as for housing an enormous amount of manuscripts.
Legend has it that in the middle of the 4th century, a Buddhist monk had a mystical vision of a thousand golden Buddhas shining over a gorge, and taking this as a divine sign, he dug a small meditation cell out of the rock. Following his example, until the 14th century, many other monks dug caves along the cliff, adorning them with numerous sculptures and splendid wall paintings, mostly Buddhist but also Hindu and Taoist. For many years, the place was an important Buddhist prayer center where hundreds of monks came to share their ideologies.
The caves are located in an ancient strategic place on the Silk Road, a commercial crossroads and point of intersection of various religious, cultural and intellectual currents that would leave their documentary and artistic mark on the site, also serving as a place of prayer for pilgrims who they crossed the inhospitable but important region. They were abandoned around the 14th century, coinciding with the decline of the Silk Road, succumbed to looting and the destruction of its most important enclaves.
Carved into a cliff and forgotten for centuries, the Mogao Caves are possibly the most important Buddhist treasure in China, also witness to the rise and decline of the mythical Silk Road.
Exterior view of the Mogao Grottoes.
They gained importance again at the beginning of the 20th century, when a Taoist monk discovered a large number of hidden manuscripts in one of the caves, naming it the Library Cave. The room was hidden behind one of the murals that decorated the different caves, remaining hidden for more than 900 years, and all kinds of documents written in a large number of languages dating from the 5th century to the beginning of the 11th century were found inside, when it is believed to have been sealed. This important discovery caught the attention of European archaeologists, such as Aurel Stein or Paul Pelliot, who bought a large number of these documents, which would end up distributed in different European museums.
One of the most treasured and well-known documents hidden in the Mogao Caves is the Diamond Sutra, the world's oldest printed book printed nearly 600 years before Gutenberg's Bible. The copy is currently in the British Library, which has been claimed by China along with other pieces that were stolen from the place, whose looting by Western expeditionaries would loot 80% of the treasures housed there.
China's effort to preserve and restore the site would lead to the Mogao Caves being declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1987, and today it is an important tourist destination that attracts countless visitors. Likewise, the authorities plan to digitize all the content of the works of art and documents to prevent the originals from continuing to be damaged by their continuous exposure to light and humidity, in an effort to also offer a global vision of the historical, cultural and artistic to its visitors.
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