A Buddhist monk, traditionally identified as Lezun, began carving the first cave at Mogao near the Dunhuang oasis. This created a long-lasting religious and artistic center on the eastern Silk Road. The caves later became a place where Buddhist texts were copied, stored, and sometimes preserved for centuries.
A Buddhist manuscript from Dunhuang is dated by its colophon (a note at the end giving details such as date and scribe) to 406 CE. This is key evidence that organized copying and manuscript culture were active early in Mogao’s history. Such dated items help historians anchor the larger Dunhuang corpus in time.
Cave 17 (later called the “Library Cave”) is linked to the monk Wu Hongbian and was originally used as a memorial space after his death in 862. Over time, the cave’s function shifted from shrine to storage. This shift helps explain why religious and administrative manuscripts could be amassed in a single, enclosed location.
A printed scroll of the Diamond Sutra is dated 868 and is widely cited as the world’s earliest dated printed book. Its presence among the Dunhuang finds shows that the local religious economy used both handwriting and printing to spread Buddhist texts. Printing did not replace copying, but it expanded how texts could be produced and circulated.
Manuscripts from Dunhuang include more than Chinese Buddhist sutras: they also preserve materials in Tibetan and other languages, and texts connected to different religions. This diversity reflects Dunhuang’s role as a frontier hub where ideas and writing systems met. For scribes and translators, it meant constant work adapting, copying, and organizing texts across communities.
Among the materials associated with Cave 17, dated documents run up to 1002. This provides a practical “latest manuscript” marker for much of what was stored there. It also suggests that the accumulation of texts was a long process rather than a single deposit event.
Cave 17 was sealed (walled off) sometime in the early 11th century. Whatever the immediate reason—such as space management, ritual practice, or local disruption—the sealing created a time capsule that protected tens of thousands of items. This preservation event is central to why Dunhuang manuscripts survive at all in such volume.
In June 1900, the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu uncovered the hidden cache while working at Mogao. The discovery quickly became known as one of the most important finds for the study of medieval Eurasian religion and society. It also began a complex modern story of dispersal, collecting, and preservation.
Beginning in 1907, the archaeologist Aurel Stein obtained thousands of manuscripts and fragments from Wang Yuanlu for removal to institutions in Britain (and related collections). This purchase helped preserve and study many items, but it also separated the corpus across countries and collections. That dispersal later made international cataloging and digitization especially important.
In 1908, the scholar Paul Pelliot also acquired a large selection of Dunhuang manuscripts for France, now mainly associated with the Bibliothèque nationale de France collections. Like Stein’s acquisitions, this created both opportunities for conservation and a lasting challenge: the same “library” was now split across institutions. Over time, scholarly work had to rely on shared catalogs and cross-collection comparison.
In 1987, UNESCO inscribed the Mogao Caves on the World Heritage List, highlighting their global cultural value. This recognition strengthened conservation efforts and encouraged coordinated management of the site. It also reinforced the importance of protecting related movable heritage, including manuscripts connected to Mogao.
In 1994, the International Dunhuang Project (now commonly called the International Dunhuang Programme) was established at the British Library to support collaborative cataloging, conservation, and digitization across institutions. The project responded directly to the corpus’s worldwide dispersal after 1900. Over time, it helped shift Dunhuang studies from collection-by-collection work to a more connected, cross-archive approach.
The Dunhuang manuscript corpus: copying, preservation, and compilation (4th–11th century CE)