There are 493 grottoes in ten dynasties, including the Western Wei Dynasty, the Northern Zhou Dynasty, the Sui Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties, the Song Dynasty, the Xixia Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty, with more than 45,000 square meters of murals and more than 2,000 colored sculptures, making them the largest treasure house of existing Buddhist art in the world. If the murals are arranged, it can stretch for more than 30 kilometers, making it the longest, largest and richest gallery in the world. In recent decades, scholars at home and abroad have been very interested in Dunhuang art and have been studying it continuously, forming a special discipline "Dunhuang Studies". Mogao Grottoes is an art hall integrating ancient buildings, sculptures and murals, especially colorful murals. The capacity and content of Dunhuang murals are incomparable to any religious grottoes, temples and palaces in the world today. Looking around the cave and the ceiling, there are pictures of Buddha statues, flying, geisha music, fairies and naked women everywhere. There are Buddhist story paintings, classic paintings, Buddhist historical paintings, miraculous paintings, portraits of patrons, and various exquisite decorative patterns. The sculptures in Mogao Grottoes have long enjoyed a good reputation. There are sitting statues as high as 33 meters, and there are also small bodhisattvas of more than ten centimeters. Statues are preserved in most caves, which is a large sculpture museum. Its grottoes were mainly excavated in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. Mogao Grottoes is a great art palace and an encyclopedia of images. Mogao Grottoes 196 1 were listed as the first batch of national key cultural relics protection units by the State Council. 1987 was listed as a world cultural heritage protection project by UNESCO, and was awarded the "World Cultural Heritage" certificate on 199 1. It has been included in the seventh volume 18 lesson of the compulsory education curriculum standard experimental textbook, entitled "Mogao Grottoes". It was included in the sixth grade book of the national standard language of Jiangsu Education Edition, entitled Dunhuang Murals.
In front of the Mogao Grottoes, it faces the Dangquan River, which is1680m long from north to south and 50m high. The caves are distributed in rows, inside the upper and lower Mogao Grottoes.
There are five floors at most. It was built in the Sixteen Kingdoms period. According to the book Li Kerang Rebuilds the Monument to the Mogao Grottoes in the Tang Dynasty, in 366 BC, two years after the founding of the Qin Dynasty, the monk Lezun passed by this mountain and suddenly saw the golden light shining like Buddha, so he dug the first grotto on the rock wall. Since then, Zen master Fa Liang and others have continued to build caves here to practice, which are called "desert grottoes", meaning "high places in the desert". Later generations renamed it "Mogao Grottoes" because of the common "desert" and "Mo". There is another saying: Buddhists say that it is impossible and impossible to build a Buddha cave because of its infinite merits. Mogao Grottoes means that there is no higher cultivation than building Buddha Grottoes. During the Northern Wei, Western Wei and Northern Zhou Dynasties, the rulers believed in Buddhism, and the construction of grottoes was supported by princes and nobles, which developed rapidly. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, with the prosperity of the Silk Road, the Mogao Grottoes flourished, and there were more than a thousand caves in Wu Zetian. After the Anshi Rebellion, Dunhuang was occupied by Tubo and Guiyi Army successively, but the carving activities were not greatly affected. In the Northern Song Dynasty, Xixia and Yuan Dynasty, the Mogao Grottoes gradually declined, and only the caves of the previous dynasties were rebuilt, with few new buildings. After the Yuan Dynasty, with the abandonment of the Silk Road, the construction of the Mogao Grottoes stopped and gradually disappeared into the world's field of vision. It was not until the fortieth year of Kangxi in Qing Dynasty (170 1) that people paid attention to it again. There are 735 caves in the Mogao Grottoes from the Northern Wei Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty, which are divided into north and south areas. The Southern District is the main body of the Mogao Grottoes, where monks engage in religious activities. There are 487 caves with murals or statues. There are 248 caves in the North District, of which only five have murals or statues, and the rest are places where monks practice, live and bury after death, with living facilities such as heatable adobe sleeping platform, stove kang, flue, niche and desk lamp. There are murals and statues in 492 caves in the two districts, including 45,000 square meters of murals, 24 15 clay sculptures, 5 wooden cornices in Tang and Song Dynasties, and thousands of lotus columns and floor tiles. [ 1]
The Mogao Grottoes have been little known since the Yuan Dynasty, and have remained basically the same for hundreds of years. However, after the discovery of the Sutra Cave, it attracted many western archaeologists and explorers. They got a lot of precious books and murals from the king at a very low price, and transported them out of China or scattered among the people, which seriously damaged the integrity of the Mogao Grottoes and Dunhuang art. 1907, British archaeologist Mark Aurel Stein traveled to Dunhuang along the ancient Silk Road south of Lop Nur during his second archaeological trip to Central Asia. When he heard that the cave of Tibetan scriptures had been discovered in the Mogao Grottoes, he found the king and expressed his willingness to help build the Taoist temple, which won the trust of the king. So Stan was allowed to enter the Tibetan Sutra Cave to select documents. He finally took away 24 boxes of notebooks and 5 boxes of other artworks with only 200 taels of silver. 19 14, stein came to the Mogao grottoes again and bought 570 Dunhuang documents from the king for 500 taels of silver. Most of these collections were donated to the British Museum and some museums in India. The British Museum now has about13,700 Dunhuang-related collections, making it the largest museum in the world with Dunhuang cultural relics. However, in recent years, it has been criticized for its poor protection of China's cultural relics and even its theft. 1908, pelliot, a French archaeologist who is proficient in sinology, immediately rushed to Dunhuang from Dihua after learning that the ancient manuscripts had been discovered in the Mogao Grottoes. After three weeks' selection in the cave, he finally got more than 10000 Dunhuang documents, most of which were later collected in the French National Library. 1909, pelliot showed some precious Dunhuang books to some scholars in Beijing, and these books immediately entered the interior of the Mogao grottoes.
Attract the attention of academic circles. They wrote to the Qing Department, demanding that the local governments in Gansu and Dunhuang immediately check the documents of the Tibetan Sutra Cave and transport them back to Beijing. What is the escort appointed by the Qing court in Gansu? But before the inventory, Wang had hidden some cultural relics, and many of them were lost on the way. After arriving in Beijing, He and his relatives and friends caught some by themselves. Therefore, of the more than 50,000 documents found in 1900, only 8,757 were left in Shi Jing Library, and these documents are now kept in the National Library of China. Some Dunhuang documents lost in China were later resold by collectors to Japanese collectors, and some of them were owned by Nanjing National Central Library, but more were hard to find. The manuscripts collected by Wang were sold to Japanese explorers Yoshikawa Koichiro and Lihua Zuixiang in191and 19 12 respectively. 19 14, oldenburg, a Russian Buddhist, excavated the Cave for Evacuating Tibetan Scriptures and obtained more than 10,000 pieces of cultural relics, which are now in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Since modern times, in addition to the carving up of cultural relics in the Tibetan Sutra Cave, Dunhuang murals and statues have also suffered huge losses. At present, all the murals of the Tang and Song Dynasties are no longer in Dunhuang. 1923 Periot and Langdon Werner, who arrived at Harvard University, successively taped a large number of valuable murals, and sometimes even uncovered only a small piece of image in the murals, which seriously damaged the integrity of the murals. Wang also destroyed many murals to open some caves. 1922, hundreds of Russian czar soldiers were held in the Mogao grottoes, and they were filled with smoke in the caves, causing great damage. 1940, when Zhang Daqian painted murals here, he found that some murals had inner and outer layers, so he removed the outer layer to watch the inner layer. This practice later caused controversy, and it is still controversial until now. From 1940 to 1942, China painter Zhang Daqian went to Dunhuang Mogao grottoes twice to copy murals, and the total time there was about one year, during which the murals peeled off. Luo Huaqing, executive director of the Exhibition Center of Dunhuang Research Institute, pointed out that there are about 30 murals stripped by Zhang Daqian. Cave No.1 130 of Mogao grottoes is one of the most representative grottoes in Dunhuang, and the 26-meter-high Buddha statue in the grottoes is the second largest Buddha statue in Dunhuang. Zhang Daqian's peeling mural is located in the entrance tunnel. According to reports, he first peeled off a layer of Xixia murals, and then peeled off a second layer of late Tang murals. Now people can only see the bottom of the murals in the Tang Dynasty, and the murals in the Tang Dynasty have been scraped beyond recognition because the previous coverage increased the adhesion of the soil. On the wall of the tunnel, he clearly left the cross section of his peeling painting. According to records, it took 29 years to build this grotto, and an average of one meter was excavated every year. Zhang Daqian made great improvements to it in a short time. The typical grottoes where he uncovered murals are 108 and 454 caves.