Mogao Cave

Mogao Cave

 The Mogao Caves or Mogao Grottoes,also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas form a system of 492 temples 25 km (16 mi) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis strategically located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China. The caves may also be known as the Dunhuang Caves, however, this term is also used to include other Buddhist cave sites in the Dunhuang area, such as the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, and the Yulin Caves farther away. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 1,000 years.The first caves were dug out 366 CE as places of Buddhist meditation and worship.

Mogao Cave

Mogao Cave

The Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist grottoes and, along with Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes, are one of the three famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites of China. The caves are examples of rock-cut architecture although, unlike the sites just mentioned, the local rock is a rather soft gravel conglomerate that is not suitable for either sculpture or elaborate architectural details. By the Tang Dynasty over a thousand caves had been excavated.

Mogao Cave

Mogao Cave

Following a revival of interest in the caves from the 19th century, the portable objects, and some sections of painted wall, were removed from the site, especially after the discovery in 1900 of the sealed-off "Library Cave", which had been walled-up in the 11th century as a depository for old manuscripts and paintings. The largest collections of dispersed material are in Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin, and the International Dunhuang Project now exists to coordinate and collect scholarly work on the Dunhuang manuscripts and other material. The caves themselves are now a popular tourist destination, with a number open for visiting.