The exquisitely carved Mogao Caves are located on Mingsha Shan, 25 kilometers from Dunhuang. Mogao means ‘high up in the desert’. It’s said that in the 4th century a monk named Lezun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas at the site of the Mogao caves. Compelled by his vision he convinced a rich merchant traveling the Silk Road to fun the building of a temple. Over the next thousand years various monks and emperors contributed to the caves, adding temple after temple and slowly carving sculpture after sculpture into the caves. Today, Mogao Caves is a collection of 492 temples and over 750 caves. They’re considered by many to be one of the finest examples of stone architecture in the world and in 1987 the site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Mogao caves are not natural; they were hand carved over the centuries into the eastern wall of the mountain. There are five levels of caves, rising to a height of 50 meters in some places. The caves are influenced by Indian Buddhist art, and indeed it’s thought that the idea of the caves themselves was inspired by the Indian concept of sanyas – wherein one renounces the world and moves away from civilization to meditate and pray. Paintings and frescoes and statues – from 113 feet to 2 centimeters – of Buddha in various poses cover the cave walls. Because they were caved over the course of a millennia, they also vary widely in style, reflecting the eras in which they were each carved. Many of them are very high quality and still in quite good condition.

One of the most interesting caves is the cave full of abandoned manuscripts. It’s thought that these bulky manuscripts became defunct after the invention of paper, but, since they were considered holy, they could not be destroyed and instead had to be stored somewhere safe. They languished there for centuries, forgotten, until Wang Yuan-Lu discovered them quite by accident in 1900. Some of the manuscripts date all the way back to 406, and they include not just holy scriptures, but also original works from great philosophers.  The discovery of these manuscripts attracted quite a bit of attention on the international stage and because of it Wang was able to arrange funds for the renovation and upkeep of Mogao’s temples.

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