Chinas Buddhist

Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.

Cave temples along the ancient Silk Road document the
cultural and religious transformations of a millennium. Researchers
are striving to preserve these endangered statues and paintings
by Neville Agnew and Fan Jinshi
MOGAO,
near the city of Dunhuang, was a vibrant way station on the
Silk Road, a place for travelers and merchants to rest and to
worship. Depicted here during the middle of the Tang dynasty
(618 to 907 C.E.), the oasis was a lively haven for caravans
emerging from the surrounding deserts. As pivotal points
along the great trade route, Mogao and Dunhuang were sites
of immense cultural, religious and material exchange.
Buddhist practitioners prayed in the caves that they carved
into the cliff face and hung ceremonial banners to decorate
them, while pilgrims prepared for the journey east to Beijing
or west toward the Mediterranean.
Treasures at Dunhuang
Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Scientific American Month 1997 1
ROME
ALEXANDRIA
QUILON
BUKHARA
HAMADAN
GUANGZHOU
TYRE
BAGHDAD
REY
MARY
SAMARKAND
KASHI
SHACHE
BARBARICUM
HOTAN
DUNHUANG
XIAN
ANXI
BEIJING
TURPAN
ANTIOCH
ENCROACHING SAND threatens the Mogao Grottoes (above) as it pours over the cliff face.
The reinforced concrete facade (right), built in the 1960s, strengthens some of the grottoes
that have been eroded by wind and weakened by earthquakes. As the map of the Silk Road
(below) shows, Dunhuang sat on the very outskirts of China, at the point where the two arms
of the trade network joined after circling the deadly Takla Makan Desert.
40C Scientific American July 1997
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
CELESTIAL DEITIES, called apsarasas, painted on
this grotto ceiling date from the Western Wei dy-
nasty (535 to 542 C.E.).
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Title goes here, please
DESERT ENVIRONMENT stretches in all di-
rections around the Daquan River, which
provides the water for Mogao. The Ming-
sha Dunes can be seen in the far distance;
directly in front of them, next to the river,
lie the trees and the cliff face, honey-
combed with grottoes.
WORSHIPING BODDHISATTVAS adorn Cave 328. These statues, from the
high Tang, are covered with the ne dust that blows down from the Ming-
sha Dunes, obscuring the sculptures and the wall paintings.
Scientific American July 1997 41
O
ne thousand nine hundred
kilometers due west of Bei-
jing, on the edge of both the
Gobi and the Takla Makan deserts, sits
one of the worlds most important cul-
tural gateways. The city of Dunhuang
which means blazing beaconrepre-
sented the last oasis for Chinese travel-
ers setting out for the West along the
northern or southern arm of the Silk
Road. The two routes skirted the dead-
ly Takla Makan Desert, joining again
on the far side at Kashi (1,600 kilome-
ters to the west). For travelers coming
to the East, the two forts of Dunhuang
the Jade Gate, or Yumen Barrier, and the
Yang Barriermeant successful passage
around the Takla Makan, where the
way was marked by the bleached bones
of camels, horses and unfortunate voy-
agers. This fortied outpost formed the
furthermost extension of the Great Wall
of China.
From the fourth through the 14th
century, the 7,500-kilometer Silk Road
linked China to Rome and to every
place in between, including Tibet, In-
dia, Turkestan, Afghanistan and the
Arabian Peninsula. The roadits name
coined by the 19th-century explorer
Baron Ferdinand von Richthofenwas
more than a trade route. It was the rst
information highway, spanning a quar-
ter of the circumference of the globe
and virtually the entire known world at
that time. Out of the Middle Kingdom
came the astonishing riches and techno-
logical innovations of China: silk, ce-
ramics, furs and, later, paper and gun-
powder; from the West came cotton,
spices, grapes, wine and glass. Art and
ideas moved along with these goods,
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
goods, back and forth along the bandit-
rid-den trail, transforming vastly differ-
ent cultures.
It was along the Silk Road that Bud-
dhism, which originated in India in the
6th century B.C.E., traveled to China.
The full owering of this religion is
powerfully evident in the rock temples
near the town of Dunhuang. Around
360 C.E., Buddhist pilgrims journeying
through Dunhuang began to carve caves
in a 1,600-meter-long cliff, 25 kilome-
ters southeast of the city. In these soft
sandstone and conglomerate rock grot-
toes, the worshipers built shrines, lodg-
ings and places for sacred works and
art; they also made offerings and prayed
for safe passage. Over the next 10 cen-
turies, monks carved hundreds of shrines
in the rock, honeycombing the cliff face.
Some 490 of these grottoes remain
today, home to 2,000 or so clay statues
of the Buddha and 50,000 square me-
ters of wall paintings. These works of
art reect the changes of 10 periods and
dynasties, including the Tang (618 to
907 C.E.)which, in its middle period,
marked the full unfolding of Chinese
art and culture. The murals from the
high Tang document the daily life of the
many people from all social classes who
passed through and lived in Dunhuang;
those from earlier periods depict a some-
what austere Buddhism. The paintings
also record trade, manufacturing prac-
tices, customs, legends and sutras (sa-
cred prayers). And they show the trans-
formation of Indian Buddhism into its
Chinese form: Chinese myths and pat-
terns are gradually incorporated into
Indian iconography, until a purely Chi-
nese Buddhist art emerges. These
Mogao Grottoes, as they are
called, represent the largest col-
lection of Buddhist mural art
in China and an unsurpassed
repository of information
about life in ancient China
and along the Silk Road.
The Silk Road closed dur-
ing the 15th century as the
Takla Makan oases dried up,
no longer replenished by reced-
ing glacial streams of the Qilian
Mountains, and as invaders swept
through the region, converting large
parts to Islam. Much of Dunhuangs
Buddhist legacy remained intact be-
cause of its location. Indeed, the citys
physical isolation often proved its
salvation. During the two
eras when Buddhists
were persecuted by
KNEELING FIGURE from the
middle Tang resides in Cave
384. Statues such as this
one provide detailed infor-
mation about the costumes
of medieval China.
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
Chinese emperorsin 446, by the Em-
peror Wu, and in 845, by the Emperor
WuzongDunhuang proved too re-
mote from the center of power to be
much affected. This also held true dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution of the late
1960s. (Although Tibetans conquered
the city twice, in 781 and again in the
early 16th century, the invaders revered
the site and worshiped there. Their styl-
istic inuence can be seen in some of
the caves.)
At the turn of this century, however,
foreign devils in the form of archae-
ologists began the systematic discovery
and removal of the cultural heritage of
the Silk Road. These men embarked on
a frenzied race to gather as many arti-
facts as they could transport. Among
the most renowned of them were Swed-
ish explorer Sven Hedin, Parisian Paul
Pelliot, Harvard Universitys Langdon
Warner, and Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-
born British collector. Stein arrived on
the scene in 1907. He had apparently
heard of the site from the rst known
Western visitorsfellow Hungarian
count Bela Szechenyi and his two com-
panions, who had made their way there
in 1878.
Stein is most reviled by contemporary
Chinese scholars for carting off the
7,000 ancient Buddhist texts and paint-
ings that are now housed in the British
Museumincluding the earliest known
book, a block-print version of the Dia-
mond Sutra from 868 C.E. These manu-
scripts were taken from Cave 17, a li-
brary that had been sealed around 1000
C.E. and only rediscovered in the early
1900s by a resident Taoist priest, Wang
Yuanlu. Wang fell victim to Steins per-
suasion, and later Pelliots, secretly sell-
ing off manuscripts for a pittance,
which he used to restore the rock-cut
temples. (Other less signicant texts
that were removed include model apol-
ogies for a drunken guest to send to his
host of the previous evening, along with
the appropriate response from the host.)
By the time China was nally closed to
foreign archaeologists in the mid-1920s,
the European explorers had removed
not only many thousands of texts but
Chinas Buddhist Treasures at Dunhuang Scientific American July 1997 43
COLLAPSED CEILING of Cave 460 is indicative
of the weakness of the soft sandstone and
conglomerate rock of the grottoes, which have
been thinned over time by erosion.
THE GREAT MONASTERY at Mount Wutai in Shanxi Province is depicted
in this wall painting from the Five Dynasties period (907960 C.E.), found
in Cave 61. Mogao has 50,000 square meters of wall paintings.
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
also statues and even some of the wall
paintings themselves. These are now
held by many major institutions in Eu-
rope, India, Japan and the U.S.
Today the threats to the Mogao Grot-
toes are of a different nature, originating
in the immediate surroundings. Over
the years, constant winds have eroded
the cliff, and sand has cascaded down
the face, covering the entrances, partly
lling the grottoes and obscuring both
the sculpture and the wall paintings
with a ne dust. Where moisture from
rain and snow has seeped in through
the cracks and holes, the paintings have
deteriorated, and the clay plaster on
which they were painted has separated
from the rock face. The weak conglom-
erate sandstone has been extensively
fractured during earthquakes, most re-
cently in 1933, and entire grottoes have
collapsed.
Visitors have taken their toll as well.
In older times, passersby would light
res in the caves, coating the paintings
with soot. More recently, a steady
stream of tourists has introduced hu-
midity into the caves, threatening the
fading pigments and eroding the oor
tiles, some of them 1,000 years old. Mo-
gao was opened to the public in 1980,
and more ights to Dunhuangs enlarged
airport have resulted in a rapid increase
in tourism to the area. Dunhuang has
been transformed from an ancient town
into a modern city as new hotels have
mushroomed.
Since 1988 the Getty Conservation
Institute in Los Angeles has worked with
the Dunhuang Academy and the State
Bureau of Cultural Relics of China to
help conserve the famous site, which
UNESCO designated a World Heritage
Site in 1987. Together scientists and
preservationists from the academy and
the Getty, aided by members of other
Chinese research organizations, have
built ve-kilometer-long windbreak
fences. These barriers, made with both
synthetic fabrics and desert-adapted
plants, stand above the grottoes to re-
duce the amount of sand being blown
over the cliff face. Previously, 2,000 cu-
Chinas Buddhist Treasures at Dunhuang 44 Scientific American July 1997
EVER PRESENT SAND had to be constantly brushed and carted away (above), until researchers
designed ve-kilometer-long fences (right) to contain the sand above Mogao. To stabilize the
sand still more, they planted vegetation adapted to the desertincluding Tamarix chinensis,
Haloxylon ammodendron, Calligonum arborescens and Hedysarum scoparium(inset).
PRESERVATION includes monitoring paintings
to see if the pigment is fading or has changed
in hue, sometimes even from white to black
(right). Scientists also track heat, humidity and
other atmospheric parameters on the cliff (far
right). Information on changes in the internal
environment can be used to determine how
many visitors can enter the caves and for how
long a period. G
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.
bic meters of sand had to be removed
from outside the caves annually. The
fences have cut this volume by 60 per-
cent; dust lters and seals have been
tted on the doors to the caves to pro-
tect against the sand that is still blown
down. To strengthen the caves, scien-
tists are measuring cracks, particularly
the large ones that intersect the rock of
several caves, and are planning to pin
and stabilize them.
To monitor environmental conditions
and their impacts on the site, research-
ers have installed a solar-powered mete-
orological station on the cliff face. The
equipment records baseline data such
as wind speed and direction, solar radi-
ation, humidity and precipitation. Vari-
ous substations in selected caves record
relative humidity, carbon dioxide, tem-
perature as well as the number of visi-
tors. Readings about the internal mi-
croclimate are compared with data
from caves that are closed to people
and with data from the outside. Taken
together, this information is being used
to develop tourism strategies.
Despite vigilant monitoring of the
caves, it was clear that the parade of
visitors had to be limited, especially in
the popular caves that depict some of
the well-known parables from the life
of the Buddha. So the Dunhuang
Academy built a large museum and ex-
hibition gallery nearby, where about 10
caves are replicated. Because these full-
size facsimiles are well lit, unlike the
grottoes themselves, viewers can spend
more time in them than they are al-
lowed to in the original caves.
As with many areas of science, ar-
chaeology has undergone a form of re-
vival in China in the past 10 to 20 years;
in a few instances, joint efforts between
foreign and Chinese archaeological
teams have been part of this renaissance,
though, for the most part, excavations
have been undertaken strictly with the
professional and scholarly resources of
China alone. The most prominent re-
cent discoveries include the tomb of the
First Emperor Qinshihuanglled with
thousands of terra-cotta soldiers and
horsesin Xian in 1974; the 4,000-
year-old Caucasian mummies from the
southern part of the Takla Makan Des-
ert; and the 13th-century B.C.E. tomb
unearthed in the province of Jiangxi,
which was lled with pottery as well
as bronze vessels, bells and weapons
adorned with an iconography never
seen before.
The importance of saving Mogao
and other sites cannot be emphasized
enough. Even the remoteness of a site
such as the Mogao Grottoes does not
guarantee its preservation. The collabo-
ration between the Getty and the Dun-
huang Academy represents a new stage
in Chinese preservation of cultural her-
itage. Scientists must continue to ex-
plore ways to protect these cultural leg-
acies so that todays pilgrims, traveling
perhaps less harsh routes than those en-
circling the ever deadly Takla Makan,
can witness the worlds history.
Chinas Buddhist Treasures at Dunhuang Scientific American July 1997 45
The Authors
NEVILLE AGNEW and FAN JINSHI work to-
gether on the preservation of the Mogao Grottoes
at Dunhuang. Agnew is associate director for pro-
grams at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los
Angeles, where he has been since 1988, and holds
a doctorate in chemistry. Fan is deputy director of
the Dunhuang Academy, where she has worked
since 1963. She has written extensively about
many aspects of the history, art and archaeology of
the Mogao Grottoes.
Further Reading
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road: The Search for the Lost Cities and Trea-
sures of Chinese Central Asia. Peter Hopkirk. University of Massachusetts
Press, 1980.
Dunhuang, Caves of the Singing Sands: Buddhist Art from the Silk Road.
Roderick Whiteld. Photography by Seigo Otsuka. Textile and Art Publications,
London, 1995.
Conservation of Ancient Sites on the Silk Road. Proceedings of an Interna-
tional Conference on the Conservation of Grotto Sites: Mogao Grottoes, Dun-
huang, the Peoples Republic of China. Edited by Neville Agnew. Getty Conserva-
tion Institute, Los Angeles, 1997.
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Copyright 1997 Scientific American, Inc.