I’m writing about Dunhuang China, a documentary. Dunhuang is located in northwest China in Gansu province.
The video is in Mandarin but there are English subtitles competent enough to understand what the lovely host and the experts on the panels are saying about the meaning and history of Dunhuang’s Buddhist hand-carved grottos.
Dunhuang was located at the beginning of the ancient Silk Road and was first built during the early Han Dynasty (206 BC -219 AD).
Trade caravans came to Dunhuang from Europe, the Roman Empire, Persia, and India. Dunhuang was also the city the caravans left on the long trek west from China.
Dunhuang became a multicultural city that prospered during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 AD).
Over centuries, Buddhist grottos/caves were carved from the cliffs of Dunhuang and a monastery was built in this remote location.
About a thousand years ago, the site was sealed and abandoned to the shifting sands of the desert.
Then in the late 18th century, a Buddhist monk accidently rediscovered the library cave where thousands of priceless Buddhist books had been stored for millennia.
It’s as if a Tang Emperor saw the future and realized to save some of China’s history, it would have to be hidden in a remote, desolate location.
The documentary leaves a strong impression that China treasures what is left of the wall and ceiling paintings that captures centuries of Chinese history.
Many Chinese feel guilt at allowing some paintings to be cut away from the walls along with ancient Buddhist texts that were looted in the early 1900s by charlatans and thieves from Japan, England, France, Russia, Germany and the United States.
The documentary goes into detail of who these thieves were.
For decades now, a few scholars have sacrificed and struggled to study and preserve what’s left.
In October 2010, Tele Times International reported that PCCW Limited was awarded a contract by the Dunhuang Academy China to provide a digital theater system at the Dunhuang Mogao Caves Visitor Center. The plans call for four digital theaters.
Crystal Inks.com says, “Dunhuang has 492 caves, with 45,000 square meters of frescos, 2, 415 painted statues and five wooden-structured caves. The Mogao Grottoes contain priceless paintings, sculptures, some 50,000 Buddhist scriptures, historical documents, textiles, and other relics that first stunned the world in the early 1900s.”
Discover more at A Millennia of History at a Silk Road Oasis
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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