Aurel Stein Reaches the Dunhuang Caves
In 1907, the Hungarian-born British archaeologist Aurel Stein reached the Mogao Caves near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the old Silk Road in western China. There he persuaded the caves' self-appointed guardian to sell him thousands of manuscripts and other items from a sealed chamber. Among them was a copy of the Diamond Sutra, dated to 868 CE, which is generally regarded as the oldest securely dated printed book. The acquisition transformed the study of medieval Asia, though it remains controversial.
The Mogao complex, a network of hundreds of Buddhist cave temples cut into a cliff face, had been developed over roughly a thousand years from the fourth century onward. Dunhuang sat at a junction of trade routes linking China with Central Asia, so its art and texts reflected many cultures. Sometime around the early eleventh century, a small side chamber, now known as Cave 17 or the "Library Cave," was filled with manuscripts and sealed. Why this happened is still debated; explanations include the safe storage of worn-out texts or protection from a feared invasion, but no single account is certain. The chamber was then forgotten for centuries.
Its rediscovery came around 1900, when a Daoist priest named Wang Yuanlu, who had taken on the care of the decaying caves, found the hidden room. Stein, who had already led expeditions through Chinese Turkestan for the British Indian government, heard of the find and arrived in 1907. After negotiations, helped by his Chinese secretary Jiang Xiaowan, he obtained a large number of manuscripts and paintings for a modest payment, made as a donation to the temple's restoration. He took them to Britain and India, and they now reside mainly in the British Library and the National Museum in New Delhi.
Other foreign scholars followed. The Frenchman Paul Pelliot visited in 1908 and selected many of the most valuable texts, and expeditions from Japan and Russia also acquired material. Chinese authorities eventually moved to secure the remainder in Beijing, though some pieces were lost along the way.
The manuscripts, written in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese and other languages, include Buddhist scriptures, but also contracts, letters, calendars, and school exercises. They offer an unusually direct view of everyday life along the Silk Road. Today the dispersal is viewed in sharply different ways. Some see it as a rescue of fragile materials, others as the removal of Chinese cultural heritage under unequal terms. The International Dunhuang Project now digitizes collections across institutions, making many items accessible online.