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Beijing to Host Large Exhibition of Dunhuang Art
A large-scale exhibition scheduled to open in the Chinese capital next Tuesday will give modern city dwellers a taste of Buddhist art from more than 1,000 years ago.
The Dunhuang Art Exhibition, garnering dozens of precious relics originating from Dunhuang in northwest China's Gansu Province, will be unveiled at the Museum of Chinese History on the east side of Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, it was announced Friday.
The two-month show, the world's biggest to highlight Dunhuang art, is part of the commemorative activities for the centennial anniversary of the discovery of the Dunhuang Sutra Cave.
Exhibits include four full-size replicas of Dunhuang caves, copies of 30 murals, ten copies of figurines, 14 authentic sutras and ten sutra copies, six genuine paintings and 44 reproductions, as well as more than 80 photographs of Dunhuang relics collected both at home and abroad.
In 1900, Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu discovered a cave at Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang containing more than 50,000 sutras, documents and paintings of nearly 10 dynasties ranging from the 4th to the 11th century.
The Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang, popularly known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, were carved out of the sandrocks stretching for about 1,600 meters along the eastern side of Mingsha Hill, 25 km southeast of Dunhuang.
A Tang Dynasty inscription records that the first cave in the Mogao Grottoes was made in 366 A.D. Despite erosion and man-made destruction, the 492 caves are well preserved, with frescoes covering an area of 45,000 square meters, more than 2,000 colored sculptured figures and five wooden eaves overhanging the caves.
According to archaeologists, it is the greatest and most consummate repository of Buddhist art in the world. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) listed the Mogao Grottoes on the World Heritage List in 1987.
"This is the first time that we have put relics in the sutra cave on display. All authentic relics are collected from Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan and Gansu," said Fan Jinshi, director of the Institute of Dunhuang Studies, one of the organizers of the exhibition.
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