Dunhuang is a city along the Silk Road, located at the easternmost end of the Taklamakan Desert. Here, the northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan converge, and are joined by the northerly routes which pass above the Tianshan Mountains. All travelers heading east pass through here and continue down the Hexi Corridor, which passes between Tibet and the Gobi desert, into China's interior at Chang'an. It is also the crossroad of the Silk Road and the traditional north-south route from India through Tibet to Mongolia. This highly strategic location first came under Chinese control in the 2nd c. BCE, when the Han Dynasty conquered the Xiongnu; the Han-era Great Wall was extended to near Dunhuang thereafter. It forms the western extent of where Chinese is traditionally spoken (Sogdian, followed by Uighur, was the dominant language beyond Dunhuang, in what is now Xinjiang) and marks the entry point into China for Silk Road travelers.
Having been a major Chinese frontier garrison throughout the Tang Dynasty, Dunhuang fell to invading Tibetans in 786 AD following the An Lushan rebellion. Some Chinese there began to adopt the Tibetan alphabet as a result, which persisted long after the Chinese military retook the area in 848. For the next century and a half, Dunhuang remained a thriving city, containing one of the largest surviving communities of Sogdians within China.
Leading up to the collapse of the Tang Dynasty, local rulers at Dunhuang had declared their own independence and formed alliances with the Uighurs and Khotanese, and by the start of the 11th c., Dunhuang fell outside the borders of Song-dynasty China. As both the Silk Road trade and the Sogdian language died out in the region around Dunhuang, it was captured by the Western Xia (Tanguts) in 1036, and later taken by Mongols in 1227 before entering a long period of decline as long-distance trade had shifted away from the Silk Road entirely. The original city was formally abandoned in 1524; the Qing dynasty reestablished the modern city of Dunhuang near the ruins of the original site in 1725.
Above: exterior of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, and a 1907 photograph of the Library Cave as seen by Aurel Stein.
Much of the historical, archaeological, and modern tourism interest in Dunhuang surrounds its vast array of Buddhist caves (grottoes): beginning in the 5th c. AD, local Buddhist monks carved a series of caves from the rock faces of nearby mountains, containing various shrines, temples and places of meditation. These caves continued to be expanded and maintained until the 13th-14th c. [290]; they are noted for their murals and artwork, and remain a tourist attraction today.
Most significant by far, though, is the so-called "Library Cave". In 1900, a local Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, was working on restoring the caves when he stumbled upon a sealed chamber, which turned out to have been a storeroom containing over 40,000 rolled-up manuscripts dating back as early as the 5th c., with none more recent than 1002 AD. By 1907, Aurel Stein (among other European explorers) had learned of the discovery, and arrived at Dunhuang to attempt to purchase and remove the manuscripts and other sacred materials from the Dunhuang Caves, despite potential objections from those still engaged in active religious practice there: "'Would the resident priests be sufficiently good-natured--and mindful of material interests--to close their eyes to the removal of any sacred objects?'" [292]. For this, Stein is reviled by modern Chinese scholars as a robber; the ensuing piecemeal sale of documents by local monks scattered the materials of the Library Cave among various institutions across the globe, which are now being collated and digitized by the International Dunhuang Project.
These manuscripts represent by far the largest cache of surviving written documents found anywhere along the Silk Road, and contain not only thousands of Buddhist sutras, commentaries, treatises, and even student notes, but also texts from other religions and philosophies: Confucian, Daoist, Nestorian Christian, Jewish, and Manichaean scriptures, and a wide variety of nonfiction and classical Chinese literature. Among the Buddhist manuscripts, the Diamond Sutra, a woodblock-printed text, is the oldest surviving complete printed (not hand-copied) book in the world, dating to 868 AD. Various languages besides Chinese are represented among the documents, including Sogdian, Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Uighur; even a single page of the Zoroastrian Avesta appears. Texts from the 9th c. and beyond are frequently written in the Tibetan alphabet, as the Tibetan monks who arrived at Dunhuang after 786 began to copy existing manuscripts into their own language. While Manichaean texts adopted Buddhist language and structure, Nestorian Christian texts were translated literally into Chinese; these documents from Dunhuang form the main source of knowledge of these religions in China, which largely did not survive an imperial ban on foreign religions in 845 AD.
Among the more mundane documents are a variety of receipts and administrative records from the monastery complex which operated the caves; receipts for government payments to the military garrison at Dunhuang also demonstrate the importance of government spending as having been a much larger source of income for the area than commercial Silk Road trade. Surviving later Sogdian and Uighur documents related to this commercial activity describe only local, small-scale trading caravans, as opposed to the archetypical long-distance commerce often associated with the Silk Road.
Hansen, Valerie. The Silk Road: A New History with Documents (Oxford, 2016).