Page 11 - 15 Day China Sample

The art of the Mogao Grottoes is composed of cave architecture, sculptures and murals. There are now 492 caves with 4500 square meters of murals and 2500 sculptures. The Mogao art features five Tang and Song wooden cave buildings and 50,000 volume ‘Dunhuang Books’. The treasure is one of the greatest cultural discoveries in the 20th century. The frescoes evolve one story after another, telling of the strife between the good and the evil and the extremely happy life in the paradise. The heaven and the earth thus seemed to have unified into one. The colored sculptures, frescoes and ancient buildings were the crystallization and materialization of the spirit and life of the builders and artists and the worshippers of the day. On the morning of June 2nd 1900, Wang Yuanlu, the chief monk of the Mogao Grottoes, a former farmer from Macheng of Hubei Province, found a crevice at the earthen wall of the pavilion in memory of Hong, a famous monk of the Tang Dynasty. It turned out to be a secret chamber stored with Buddhist scriptures, ancient books, Buddhist sculptures, Buddhist mass musical instruments, and paintings on silk and all kinds of other cultural relies. Some estimate that they numbered four or five hundred thousand. At that time, nobody was aware that this discovery was one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in the 20th century.