The Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, form a system of 500 temples 25 km (16 mi) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis 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 as a collective term to include other Buddhist cave sites in and around the Dunhuang area, such as the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, Eastern Thousand Buddha Caves, Yulin Caves, and Five Temple Caves. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 1,000 years. The first caves were dug out in 366 CE as places of Buddhist meditation and worship; later the caves became a place of pilgrimage, and caves continued to be built at the site until the 14th century. 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. An important cache of documents was discovered in 1900 in the so-called "Library Cave", which had been walled-up in the 11th century. The contents of the library were subsequently dispersed around the world, and the largest collections are now found in Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin, and the International Dunhuang Project exists to coordinate and collect scholarly work on the Dunhuang manuscripts and other material. The caves themselves are now a popular tourist destination, but the number of visitors has been capped to help with the preservation of the caves.
Etymology The caves are commonly referred to in Chinese as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (Chinese: 千佛洞; pinyin: qiānfó dòng), a name that some scholars have speculated to have come from the legend of its founding, when a monk Yuezun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas at the site. This name, however, may have come from the large number of Buddha figures at the site, or the miniatures figures painted on the walls of these caves as these figures are called "thousand Buddhas" colloquially. The name Mogao Caves (Chinese: 莫高窟; pinyin: Mògāo kū) was used in the Tang dynasty, where 'Mogao' refers to an administrative district at the site during the Tang dynasty. Mogao may mean "peerless" (literally "none higher", where "mo" means "none", and "gao" means "high"); an alternative reading may be "high in the desert" if "mo" is read as a variant of the Chinese term for "desert". Mogao is also used as the name of a modern town that is administered by Dunhuang city: Mogao Town (莫高镇). The Mogao Caves are also often referred to as the Dunhuang Caves after the nearest city Dunhuang, which means "blazing beacon" as beacons were used at the frontier outpost to warn of attacks by nomadic tribes. The term Dunhuang Caves however is also used in a broader sense as a collective term for all the caves found in or around the Dunhuang area.
History Dunhuang was established as a frontier garrison outpost by the Han dynasty Emperor Wudi to protect against the Xiongnu in 111 BC. It also became an important gateway to the West, a centre of commerce along the Silk Road, as well as a meeting place of various people and religions such as Buddhism. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang were first constructed in the 4th century AD and were used as a site of Buddhist worship and pilgrimage. The caves contain over 400,000 square feet of frescoes and sculptures, making them one of the largest repositories of Buddhist art in the world. The construction of the Mogao Caves is generally taken to have begun sometime in the fourth century AD, when Dunhuang was under control of the Former Liang dynasty. According to a book written during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, Fokan Ji (佛龕記, An Account of Buddhist Shrines) by Li Junxiu (李君修), a Buddhist monk named Le Zun (樂尊, which may also be pronounced Yuezun) had a vision of a thousand Buddhas bathed in golden light at the site in 366 AD, inspiring him to build a cave here. The story is also found in other sources, such as in inscriptions on a stele in cave 332; an earlier date of 353 however was given in another document, Shazhou Tujing (沙州土鏡, Geography of Shazhou). He was later joined by a second monk Faliang (法良), and the site gradually grew, by the time of the Northern Liang a small community of monks had formed at the site. The caves initially served only as a place of meditation for hermit monks, but developed to serve the monasteries that sprang up nearby. The earliest decorated Mogao Caves remaining to this day (caves 268, 272 and 275), were built and decorated in the Northern Liang period between 419 and 439 CE, before the invasion of the Northern Wei. They share many stylistic characteristics in common with some of the Kizil Caves, such as Cave 17. Members of the ruling family of Northern Wei and Northern Zhou then constructed many caves here, and it flourished in the short-lived Sui dynasty. By the Tang dynasty, the number of caves had reached over a thousand.
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