Mogao grottoes
Mogao grottoes
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Exterior view of the Mogao Grottoes |
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Location: | Gansu ( PR China ) | |
Geographic location: |
40 ° 2 '14 " N , 94 ° 48' 15" E | |
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The Mogao Grottoes ( Chinese 莫高窟 , Pinyin Mògāo Kū ) are a system of several hundred cave temples , located in a river oasis on the Silk Road in the Mogao (莫 高 镇) community in the city of Dunhuang , about 25 km from the city center. Dunhuang is part of Jiuquan in the Chinese province of Gansu .
Here, between the 4th and 12th centuries, Buddhist monks carved about 1,000 caves into the sandstone cliffs, which average 17 meters high, and decorated them with Buddhist motifs ( Buddha statues , sculptures and wall paintings). 492 of these caves are still preserved today and some are accessible to tourists. They belong to the Dunhuang Grottoes along with other caves in the Dunhuang area .
In 1900, the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu discovered around 50,000 documents from the 4th to 11th centuries that monks had walled up in a cave in 1036 to protect them from the oncoming Mongols . The most recent document is dated to the year 1002. Many of these documents are now in the possession of the British Museum in London. In 1907 the archaeologist Aurel Stein discovered a print version of the Diamond Sutra in the Mogao Grottoes . At the same time, the French sinologist Paul Pelliot found manuscripts from the 4th / 5th centuries in grotto no. Century in Tibetan, Chinese and other Central Asian languages. In 1943 the Dunhuang Academy was founded ("Dunhuang Relics Research Institute", until 1994 under the direction of Chang Shuhong ) to protect and systematically conserve the caves. The grottoes and the Western Thousand Buddha Caves have been on the list of monuments of the People's Republic of China (1-35) since 1961 . The Mogao Grottoes have been a World Heritage Site since 1987 .
Web links
- International Dunhuang Project
- Entry on the UNESCO World Heritage Center website ( English and French ).
- Mogao grottoes
- Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts : A Glimpse of the Mogao Caves
- Mysterious Mogao grottos. Spiegel Online, June 26, 2006
Individual evidence
- ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Center: Mogao Caves. Retrieved August 20, 2017 .