Lying in an oasis at the edge of the Taklimakan Desert, Dunhuang was a major stop on the ancient Silk Road, which linked the East and West through vibrant trade.
Dunhuang’s unique culture is most productively represented through the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It dates back to the 4th century and features 735 caves carved into a cliff, which lately house more than 2,000 colorful sculptures and 45,000 square meters of wall paintings.
This ordinary cultural treasure is helping to attract visitors to the historic city, President Xi Jinping added.
In August 2019, during an inspection excursion to Gansu province, the president set aside time for his first stop at the thousand-year-old caves, fulfilling a long-standing wish.
Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, has paid attention to the coverage of Dunhuang’s cultural relics over the years and the progression of Dunhuang’s culture.
During his excursion in 2019, Xi made his first stop at the Mogao Grottoes. He was captivated by a mural in Mogao’s Cave 323, upon seeing the figure of Zhang Qian, an envoy of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE). C. -220 A. D. ).
Although this is Xi’s first time visiting the Mogao Grottoes, he is already very familiar with the cultural relics found there, thanks to his long-standing emotional attachment to the site.
As early as 1986, Xi visited Gansu when he was vice mayor of the coastal city of Xiamen in Fujian province, but was unable to go to Dunhuang at the time due to a busy schedule and the long distance to the place. Years later, he still talks about his remorse for not making the trip.
During an educational discussion as part of his studies at Zhejiang University in 2005, Xi, then Party secretary in Zhejiang province, recited a list of accomplishments by famed Dunhuang expert Jiang Liangfu.
In 2009, while pursuing his studies as head of state at Lanzhou University in Gansu, Xi encouraged Zheng Binglin, director of the university’s Institute of Dunhuang Studies, to expand the progression of Dunhuang studies as a contribution to the country.
Xi has put Dunhuang’s price tag under pressure, calling it an “important ancient center” of Eastern and Western cultures, and one of the “living monuments” of interactions beyond other civilizations on the ancient Silk Road.
For Xi, the importance of Dunhuang goes beyond its history, and efforts are being made to revive and expand cooperation along and beyond the ancient Silk Roads.
In 2013, Xi proposed the structure of the Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, also known as the Belt and Road Initiative, which he embraced through the foreign network as a public intelligence and platform for cooperation.
“As we are now advancing Belt and Road cooperation, we came back to draw inspiration from the ancient Silk Road,” Xi said during his 2019 visit to the caves.
In September 2019, at a ceremony in Beijing, Xi presented the national honorary title of outstanding contributor to cultural-relic protection to Fan Jinshi, an archaeologist who has made a lifelong career of protecting and studying the cultural relics of the Mogao Grottoes.
As he shook Fan’s hand, Xi told him about the rains in Dunhuang.
More than a month ago, at a symposium held during Xi’s stopover in Dunhuang, Fan discussed with Xi a number of points on herbs that could contribute to the preservation of Dunhuang’s cultural relics by adding water.
At the meeting, Xi asked questions about issues ranging from the number of tourists to the effect of natural disasters. “Coverage of the world’s cultural heritage will have to put tourism first as our most sensible priority. “We must not concentrate only on ticket sales and the search for economic benefits,” he stressed.
“What Xi is involved in are the most urgent and demanding situations that Dunhuang faces today,” Fan said.
Thanks to decades of hard work, really important advances have been made in safeguarding the site’s priceless treasures, also through the use of technology.
In 2020, a leading laboratory was installed to examine the erosion mechanism of caves, simulating herbaceous environments for specific cover measures.
Xi’s excursion to the Mogao Caves took him to the library cave, where around 60,000 rare cultural relics were discovered. However, around 40,000 coins were lost in more than 10 countries: Britain, France, Russia and Japan.
“Only when the country is strong can its culture prosper,” Xi said, recalling the discovery of the Library Cave in 1900, at a time when the country was too weak to safeguard its cultural relics.
Xi has encouraged the Dunhuang Academy to share its cultural and artistic resources digitally on a global scale.
In April 2023, a virtual reproduction of the Library Cave will be made available to the public through an interactive virtual platform.
The platform uses a complex virtual generation to reproduce ancient scenes from the Library Grotto. It invites visitors to immerse themselves in Dunhuang culture through role-playing games and a “time travel” to ancient dynasties.
Two days after his visit to the Mogao Grottoes, when inspecting a publishing company in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, Xi again raised the topic of Dunhuang.
“Xi pointed out that the Dunhuang manuscripts have valuable ancient content and documents,” said Fu Kangnian, the company’s deputy general manager.
In response to Xi’s call to better utilize historical resources, a significant number of books related to Dunhuang and the jiandu — bamboo or wooden slips that ancient Chinese people wrote on before the invention of paper — have been published in recent years.
After years of work, a series of compilation books on the history of Dunhuang have been published, filling in the gaps in ancient records and offering reference topics for studies on Dunhuang.
Even more remarkable is that the conservation efforts applied to the Dunhuang culture have extended beyond the local boundaries. The ideas and technologies employed to protect the caves have been applied to more than 500 national-level cultural relics protection projects, and introduced to BRI partner countries.
Xinhua