Why is Dunhuang, known as the treasure house of Buddhist art, the hope of human civilization?

Mogao Grottoes, commonly known as Thousand Buddha Cave, is located 25 kilometers southeast of Dunhuang County, Gansu Province, and was dug on the cliff at the eastern foot of Mingsha Mountain. According to "Li Huairang Rebuilds the Buddhist Shrine Monument in the First Year of Emperor Wu of Zhou Dynasty (AD 698)", in the second year of Jianyuan in the former Qin Dynasty (AD 366), the monk Le Zun made caves, and the monk Fa Liang continued to build them. After sixteen countries, Northern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Song, Xixia and Yuan Dynasties, a huge cave group was built. On the cliff face nearly 1000 meters long in the south, there are many caves as dense as honeycombs, especially in the middle, with up to five rows up and down. There are 492 numbered caves, more than 45,000 square meters of murals, 24 15 colored sculptures, 5 wooden eaves in Tang and Song Dynasties, and thousands of lotus columns and floor tiles. The Mogao Grottoes are large in scale, rich in content and long in history, ranking first in the national grottoes and the largest and best-preserved treasure house of Buddhist art in the world.

The content of Dunhuang art includes architecture, sculpture and murals, which are combined into a unified whole. The grottoes are shaped like Zen grottoes, central columns and square Buddhist temples. Statue is the main body of Dunhuang grottoes art, except for a few clay sculptures with stone tires up to tens of meters high, the rest are painted clay sculptures. Murals can be roughly divided into seven categories: Buddha statues, immortals, stories, portraits, historical changes, Buddhist monuments and decorative patterns.

Changes of Western Scholars in the Murals of Mogao Grottoes in the Prosperous Tang Dynasty

The grottoes in the late Sixteenth Kingdom (Beiliang) inherited and developed the tradition of Han and Jin culture in Hexi Corridor, and at the same time, due to the frequent exchanges between Dunhuang and other countries in the Western Region, it showed obvious artistic style in the Western Region. A new artistic style of the Central Plains began to appear in caves in the Western Wei Dynasty. With China myth as the content, with beautiful bones and clear images as the modeling characteristics, it pays attention to the expression of verve and tolerance. During the Northern Wei Dynasty, most of the wall paintings were based on earth red, painted with cyan, green, ochre and white, with warm and heavy colors. After the Western Wei Dynasty, white walls were used as the background color, and the colors tended to be fresh and elegant.

Sui dynasty is an active period in the history of Dunhuang art development, which embodies the spirit of change and plays a connecting role in the development of Dunhuang art.

The Tang Dynasty was the golden age of Dunhuang art, with colorful sculptures in various forms, and a huge statue as high as 30 meters appeared. Murals have diverse themes and magnificent scenes. Character modeling, shading and line drawing skills have reached an unprecedented level. 156 Zhang Yichao's travel map and Mrs. Guo Song's travel map show the travel of Zhang Yichao and his wife in the late Tang Dynasty. On the murals with banners and scrolls, ceremonial figures, music, dances, attendants and other figures were painted in sections, forming a vast procession, which created the first time that the Mogao Grottoes were painted as personal praise murals. On the basis of combining the essence of foreign art, inheriting and developing the traditional techniques of the previous generation, artists have created China Buddhist art with national characteristics.

View of the Western Buddha on the seawall of Cave 0 14 in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes Local Amitabha Buddha

The caves of the Five Dynasties inherited the legacy of the late Tang Dynasty. Most of the cave dwellings in the Song Dynasty followed the old style of the Five Dynasties in terms of shape, content and techniques, with a few exquisite works. There were basically no new caves in Xixia period, only the caves of the previous generation were rebuilt. Cave dwellings in the Yuan Dynasty presented a new style from content to form, and some exquisite masterpieces appeared. In the murals of this period, although there are few new themes, they have characteristics in composition and coloring. The composition is determined to be simplified, and the color is mostly based on a large area of green, and the color of the whole picture is cold. The technique of dipping powder and piling up gold is commonly used in murals, which was rare in the previous generation.

Some social life scenes depicted in Dunhuang murals at that time reflected the contents of production activities and social activities such as hunting, farming, textile, transportation, fighting, music and dance in ancient China. All kinds of figures in murals retain a lot of information about the costumes of people of all ethnic groups in the past. There are a large number of pavilions, pavilions, towers, palaces, cities, bridges and five existing wooden eaves in the murals, which are the image patterns and precious materials for studying ancient buildings in China. Sculpture and painting in China have a history of thousands of years. Many famous painters' works recorded in art history have been lost, and a large number of murals and colored sculptures in Dunhuang art have provided rich physical materials for the study of China art history.