254, built during the Northern Wei period between 475Īnd 490 CE. 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. 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. Mogao is also used as the name of a modern town that is administered by Dunhuang city: Mogao Town ( 莫高 镇). 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". 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. 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 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. 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. 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 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.Īn important cache of documents was discovered in 1900 in the so-called "Library Cave", which had been walled-up in the 11th century. The first caves were dug out in AD 366 as places of Buddhist meditation and worship later the caves became a place of pilgrimage and worship, and caves continued to be built at the site until the 14th century. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 1,000 years.
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 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.
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