1908, pelliot, a French archaeologist who is proficient in sinology, immediately rushed to Dunhuang from Dihua after learning that the ancient manuscripts had been discovered in the Mogao Grottoes. After three weeks' selection in the cave, he finally got more than 10000 Dunhuang documents, most of which were later collected in the French National Library.
From 65438 to 0909, 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.
Inside Mogao grottoes
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 Cave for Evacuating Tibetan Scriptures and obtained more than 10,000 pieces of cultural relics, which are now 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. At present, all the murals of the Tang and Song Dynasties are no longer in Dunhuang. 1923 Periot and Langdon Werner, who arrived at Harvard University, successively taped a large number of valuable murals, and sometimes even uncovered only a small piece of image in the murals, which seriously damaged the integrity of the 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. 1940, when Zhang Daqian painted murals here, he found that some murals had inner and outer layers, so he removed the outer layer to watch the inner layer. This practice later caused controversy, and it is still controversial until now. From 1940 to 1942, China painter Zhang Daqian went to Dunhuang Mogao grottoes twice to copy murals, and stayed there for about one year, during which the murals peeled off. Luo Huaqing, executive director of the Exhibition Center of Dunhuang Research Institute, pointed out that there are about 30 murals stripped by Zhang Daqian. Cave No.1 130 of Mogao grottoes is one of the most representative grottoes in Dunhuang, and the 26-meter-high Buddha statue in the grottoes is the second largest Buddha statue in Dunhuang. Zhang Daqian's peeling mural is located in the entrance tunnel. According to reports, he first peeled off a layer of Xixia murals, and then peeled off a second layer of late Tang murals. Now people can only see the bottom of the murals in the Tang Dynasty, and the murals in the Tang Dynasty have been scraped beyond recognition because the previous coverage increased the adhesion of the soil. On the wall of the tunnel, he clearly left the cross section of his peeling painting. According to records, it took 29 years to build this grotto, and an average of one meter was excavated every year. Zhang Daqian made great improvements to it in a short time. The typical grottoes where he uncovered murals are 108 and 454 caves.