Dunhuang manuscripts

Most of the manuscripts originate from a cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries. These were sealed in what is now known as the Library Cave (Cave 17) sometime in the early 11th century. The site at Sachu (modern-day Dunhuang) was an important regional centre for manuscript production during this period and had also served as an official printing office during the 8th and 9th centuries when the area was under Tibetan rule and formed part of the Silk Road network.

Wang Yuanlu reportedly used the cave complex as a base for his alms-collecting activities and allegedly had discovered the documents concealed behind a sealed wall in an annex within one of the caves.

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 Tibetan, Chinese, and Old Uyghur.

The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history, medicine and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions and philosophy including Daoism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, and Manichaeism, are also represented. These manuscripts constitute a major resource for academic research across numerous disciplines, including history, medicine, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies. The majority of the manuscripts Pelliot took and are stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collection are in Chinese (3,000 texts) and Tibetan (4,000 texts). The multitude of other languages represented in the manuscripts include Khotanese, Kuchean, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Prakrit, Hebrew, and Old Turkic.

The removal of the manuscripts has since been described by some scholars as "plunder," with the Chinese government calling for their return, including eight volumes that were repatriated by a Japanese businessman in 1997.

History

The majority of surviving Dunhuang manuscripts were kept in a cave, the so-called Library Cave (Cave 17), which had been walled off sometime early in the 11th century. The documents in the cave were discovered by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu, who was interested in restoring the Mogao Caves, on 25 June 1900. In the next few years, Wang took some manuscripts to show to various officials who expressed varying level of interest, but in 1904 Wang re-sealed the cave following an order by the governor of Gansu concerned about the cost of transporting these documents. From 1907 onwards, Wang began to sell them to Western explorers, including British archaeologist Aurel Stein and French sinologist Paul Pelliot. According to Stein who was the first to describe the cave in its original state:

Heaped up in layers, but without any order, there appeared in the dim light of the priest's little lamp a solid mass of manuscript bundles rising to a height of nearly ten feet, and filling, as subsequent measurement showed, close on 500 cubic feet. The area left clear within the room was just sufficient for two people to stand in.

Stein had the first pick and he was able to collect around 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments for which he paid £130 (equivalent to £13,521 in 2025), although these include many duplicate copies of the Diamond and Lotus Sutras. Pelliot took almost 10,000 documents for the equivalent of £90 (equivalent to £9,361 in 2025), but, unlike Stein, Pelliot was a trained sinologist literate in Chinese, and he was allowed to examine the manuscripts freely, so he was able to pick a better selection of documents than Stein. Pelliot was interested in the more unusual and exotic of the Dunhuang manuscripts, such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men's groups. Many of these manuscripts survived only because they formed a type of palimpsest whereby papers were reused and Buddhist texts were written on the opposite side of the paper. Hundreds more of the manuscripts were sold by Wang to Ōtani Kōzui and Sergey Oldenburg.

In addition to the manuscripts that he acquired from Wang, Pelliot also uncovered a large number of manuscripts and printed texts from Caves 464 and 465 (Pelliot's Caves 181 and 182) in the northern section of the site. These documents date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), and are written in various languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Old Uyghur. The documents also include over two hundred fragments of texts written in the Tangut language, which is significant as the Tangut script (devised in 1036) is entirely absent from the Library Cave documents.

Scholars in Beijing were alerted to the significance of the manuscripts after seeing samples of the documents in Pelliot's possession. Due to the efforts of the scholar and antiquarian Luo Zhenyu, most of the remaining Chinese manuscripts were taken to Beijing in 1910 and are now in the National Library of China. Several thousands of folios of Tibetan manuscripts were left in Dunhuang and are now located in several museums and libraries in the region. Rumours of caches of documents taken by local people continued for some time, and a cache of documents hidden by Wang from the authorities was later found in the 1940s. Those acquired by Western and Japanese scholars are now held in institutions around the world, including the British Library, the Tokyo National Museum, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. All of the manuscript collections are being digitized by the International Dunhuang Project, and can be freely accessed online.

“The Chinese regard Stein and Pelliot as robbers,” wrote the British sinologist Arthur Waley. “I think the best way to understand [the feelings of the Chinese] on the subject is to imagine how we should feel if a Chinese archaeologist were to come to England, discover a cache of medieval manuscripts at a ruined monastery, bribe the custodian to part with them and carry them off to Peking. [...] Pelliot did, of course, after his return from Tun-huang, get in touch with Chinese scholars; but he had inherited so much of the nineteenth-century attitude about the right of Europeans to carry off ‘finds’ made in non-European lands that, like Stein, he seems never from the first to last to have had any qualms about the sacking of the Tun-huang library.”