![]() In London, the work is conducted in a climate-controlled chamber several stories underground, where conservators first undo the work of previous generations, removing backings, frames, and patches. Conservators in libraries from Paris to Tokyo have been restoring the ancient manuscripts and scanning them into an extensive, searchable database. Run by a team based in the British Library and working with partners in China, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea, the International Dunhuang Project is making the contents of the library available to experts worldwide, while simultaneously preserving them for future generations. ![]() For decades, however, they have faced real problems, both in conducting research and in sharing their findings Stein and the explorers who followed him scattered the library’s holdings among more than a dozen libraries and museums around the world.īut since 1994, an ambitious digitization program has slowly pushed the Dunhuang cache online, allowing scholars to reconstruct individual documents whose pages might be held by multiple collections, and to get a truer sense of its scope. Given how international the materials from Dunhuang are, scholars have agreed that the methods for their study should be, too. The collection mirrors the remarkable diversity of Dunhuang itself, where Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Manicheans, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews, and Chinese scribes copied Tibetan prayers that had been translated from Sanskrit by Indian monks working for Turkish khans. It’s an extraordinarily demanding branch of study: the Library included documents in at least seventeen languages and twenty-four scripts, many of which have been extinct for centuries or known only from a few examples. In the century since the Dunhuang Library was discovered, a whole academic discipline has sprung up around the materials it contained. By 1910, when the Chinese government ordered the remaining documents to be transferred to Beijing, only about a fifth of the original hoard remained. After Stein came Paul Pelliot, a brilliant, hotheaded French Sinologist who took some of the best items in Wang’s library after staying up nights reading through them at breakneck speed by candlelight, and others, including delegations from Russia and Japan. News of the Dunhuang Library set off a manuscript race among the European powers. Claiming to be following in Xuanzang’s footsteps, Stein convinced Wang to sell him some ten thousand documents and painted scrolls for a hundred and thirty pounds. Stein prevailed, eventually persuading the monk by invoking his patron saint, Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim who made an arduous journey to India in search of religious texts in the seventh century A.D. Wang didn’t want to let any of the documents out of his sight, and was uneasy about selling them. Stein rushed to Dunhuang, and, after waiting for two months, he finally met with Wang. One of the first to hear about it was the Hungarian-born Indologist and explorer Aurel Stein, who was then in the middle of his second archaeological expedition to Central Asia. Soon, however, rumors of the discovery began to spread along the caravan routes of Xinjiang. He contacted local officials and offered to send the materials to the provincial capital strapped for cash and preoccupied with the Boxer Rebellion, they refused. Curious, he knocked down the wall, and found a mountain of documents, piled almost ten feet high.Īlthough he couldn’t read the ancient scripts, Wang knew he had found something of incredible significance. One day, he noticed his cigarette smoke wafting toward the back wall of a large cave shrine. Wang Yuanlu, an itinerant Taoist monk, appointed himself their caretaker. ![]() But by the early twentieth century, the town was a backwater, and its caves had fallen into disrepair. It had also long been famous as a center of Buddhist worship pilgrims travelled great distances to visit its cave shrines, comprised of hundreds of lavishly decorated caverns carved into a cliff on the city’s outskirts. In the early Middle Ages, Dunhuang had been a flourishing city-state. When the room, which came to be known as the Dunhuang Library, was finally opened in 1900, it was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, on par with Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls. They sat there, hidden, for the next nine hundred years. The chamber was filled with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts. Just over a thousand years ago, someone sealed up a chamber in a cave outside the oasis town of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China.
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