Dunhuang manuscripts

Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents (mostly manuscripts, but also including some woodblock-printed texts) in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called 'Library Cave' (Cave 17) at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers, such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took the majority of these treasures from China to Europe.

In addition to the Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved a large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), several hundred years after the Library Cave was sealed, and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur.^[1]

The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions, including Daoism, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, and Manichaeism, are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese. Other languages represented are Khotanese, Kuchean, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tibetan, Old Uyghur, Prakrit, Hebrew, and Old Turkic.^[2] The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies.^[3]