The Mogao Grottoes were little known after the Yuan Dynasty, and remained basically the same for hundreds of years. However, since the discovery of the Sutra Cave, many western archaeologists and explorers were immediately attracted. They got a lot of precious books and murals from the king at a very low price, and transported them out of China or scattered among the people, which seriously damaged the integrity of the Mogao Grottoes and Dunhuang art. Pelliot showed some precious Dunhuang books to some scholars in Beijing, which immediately attracted academic attention. They wrote to the Qing Department, demanding that the local governments in Gansu and Dunhuang immediately check the documents of the Tibetan Sutra Cave and transport them back to Beijing. What is the escort appointed by the Qing court in Gansu? But before the inventory, Wang had hidden some cultural relics, and many of them were lost on the way. After arriving in Beijing, He and his relatives and friends caught some by themselves. Therefore, of the more than 50,000 documents found in 1900, only 8,757 were left in Shi Jing Library, and these documents are now kept in the National Library of China.

Some Dunhuang documents lost in China were later resold by collectors to Japanese collectors, and some of them were owned by Nanjing National Central Library, but more were hard to find. The manuscripts collected by Wang were sold to Japanese explorers Yoshikawa Koichiro and Lihua Zuixiang in191and 19 12 respectively. 19 14, oldenburg, a Russian Buddhist, excavated the evacuated Tibetan sutra cave and obtained more than 10,000 cultural relics, which were kept in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Since modern times, in addition to the carving up of cultural relics in the Tibetan Sutra Cave, Dunhuang murals and statues have also suffered huge losses. Murals, sometimes even taking only a small piece of image in murals, seriously undermine the integrity of murals. Wang also destroyed many murals to open some caves. 1922, hundreds of Russian czar soldiers were held in the Mogao grottoes, and they were filled with smoke in the caves, causing great damage. 1940s, when Zhang Daqian painted murals here, he found that some murals had inner and outer layers, so he took off the outer layer and looked at the inner layer. This practice later caused controversy, and it is still controversial until now.