Mogao Caves
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How it came to be
At Mogao, near the Silk Road town of Dunhuang, the first cave was made in 366. Caves were dug here for a thousand years, from the Northern Wei (386-534) to the Yuan (1276-1386), and 492 of them line the cliff on five levels. They hold about 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted sculptures.
In June 1900 Wang Yuanlu, a Taoist priest who looked after the caves, found a sealed door behind a mural in the passage of Cave 16. Beyond it, in Cave 17, now called the Library Cave, more than 50,000 manuscripts, paintings, printed documents and textiles from the 4th to the 11th century had lain for centuries.
Within ten years the contents had been sold to foreign expeditions and scattered across the world. In 1910 the Qing government ordered what was left moved to Beijing, though Wang kept some bundles back. The Mogao Caves were inscribed in 1987.
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