Mogao Caves

The story

In 366, says an inscription of the Tang (618–907), a monk named Le Zun saw the cliff above the Daquan river glow with the light of a thousand Buddhas, and cut the first cave. For a thousand years after him, through the Northern Wei (386–534), Sui, Tang, Song and Yuan (1271–1368), people who passed through Dunhuang, the last oasis before the desert road to the west, paid for caves here. Today about 735 survive, 492 of them painted, with 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted statues.

In 1900 a Taoist named Wang Yuanlu, who had made himself keeper of the caves, found a sealed room behind a wall: the Library Cave, packed with scrolls in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Uyghur and Hebrew. Over the next years Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others bought or took away tens of thousands of them; they are now in London, Paris, St Petersburg, Kyoto and Beijing. The study of these papers became a field of its own, Dunhuang studies.

Close by, with a page of its own: Yungang Caves.

What is here

The standard (A) ticket includes the two films at the Digital Exhibition Centre, the shuttle and eight caves with a guide. The emergency (B) ticket covers four caves and the shuttle. Special caves are a separate ticket.

If you have one minute

In front of the Nine-Storey Building

The red tower against the cliff covers Cave 96. Inside sits a Maitreya Buddha about 35.5 metres high, made at the end of the 7th century, under the Empress Wu Zetian, of stone carved roughly and then built up in clay. The tower around him has been rebuilt several times; the nine storeys you see date from 1935.

Then look along the cliff on either side: tier upon tier of cave doors, linked by walkways, for over a kilometre. Behind each door is painted darkness that you will see only with a guide's torch.

Things people often get wrong

"You can visit any cave you like." Only eight caves are shown on the standard ticket, chosen in rotation to protect the paintings; the famous ones may be closed on your day.

"You can take photographs inside." Photography is strictly forbidden in the caves; cameras and bags are left at the entrance.

People who stood here

We searched Chinese sources first for this list, then English, French and Japanese ones.

• Wang Yuanlu (Taoist keeper of the caves, about 1849–1931)He found the Library Cave in 1900 and later sold manuscripts from it to foreign expeditions, using the money to repair the caves. He is still a figure of argument in China.
• Aurel Stein (archaeologist, 1862–1943)The Hungarian-born British explorer came in 1907 and took away thousands of manuscripts, among them the Diamond Sutra of 868, the oldest dated printed book in the world, now in the British Library.
• Paul Pelliot (sinologist, 1878–1945)The French scholar, who read Chinese, spent three weeks in 1908 sorting the Library Cave by candlelight and chose the most valuable manuscripts, now in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris.
• Zhang Daqian (painter, 1899–1983)From 1941 to 1943 he lived at the caves and copied more than two hundred murals, bringing them to the attention of the Chinese public.
• Chang Shuhong (painter, 1904–1994)He left Paris to found the Dunhuang Art Research Institute in 1944 and spent the rest of his working life protecting the caves; he is called the "guardian of Dunhuang".

Go deeper: six stops from the films to the Library Cave7 stops · about 2 min to read

A standard visit takes about four hours: the films first, then a shuttle to the caves and a guided walk through eight of them.

1. The Digital Exhibition Centre

The visit begins 15 kilometres away, at a centre in the desert near Dunhuang, with two films: one on the history of the caves, one projected on a dome inside a recreated cave. They exist so that fewer minutes are spent breathing inside the real ones.

2. The cliff and the Nine-Storey Building

From the shuttle stop you walk across the dry riverbed to the cliff. The caves run in up to five tiers; the Nine-Storey Building marks the middle.

3. The Tang: Caves 45 and 220

The Tang caves are the high point. In Cave 45, a Buddha, disciples and bodhisattvas stand with relaxed hips and calm faces, the "most beautiful bodhisattvas" of China. In Cave 220, painted in 642, an emperor in black robes leads his officials to hear the Buddhist sage Vimalakirti, a portrait of the Tang court itself.

4. Cave 61 and the map of Mount Wutai

One wall of this tenth-century cave is a bird's-eye map of the sacred Mount Wutai, with monasteries, roads and pilgrims. In 1937 the architects Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin used a temple named on it, the "Great Foguang Temple", to find a real Tang timber hall still standing on Mount Wutai, then the oldest known wooden building in China.

5. The Library Cave

Cave 17 is a small room off the passage of Cave 16. It was sealed around the early 11th century, perhaps to store worn-out sacred texts, perhaps for fear of war; no one knows. The room you see is empty; its contents are in a dozen countries, and the Dunhuang Academy and the International Dunhuang Programme have put tens of thousands of them online.

6. The sleeping Buddha of Cave 158

If your tour includes it, Cave 158 holds a Buddha lying on his side at the moment of his death, about 15.8 metres long, with mourners painted on the walls around him, among them foreign kings cutting their ears and chests in grief.

The caves and the same years elsewhere

Le Zun cut the first cave in 366; in the same decade the Huns crossed the Volga and set off the great migrations into the Roman world.