This cave, also known as the Hidden Library Cave, is located at the north wall of the corridor of cave 16. It was excavated during the Late Tang Dynasty in the honor of Hongbian who was Buddhist governor of the Hexi Corridor. At the beginning of the 11th century, a great abundance of Buddhist scriptures, paintings, instruments, and other religious and social documents, as many as some 50,000 pieces in total, were secretly stored here, then the door of Cave 17 was sealed with a new wall with paintings. As time passed by, the closure of this cave gradually escaped people`s memory......
It was till 1900 that this sealed cave was accidentally rediscovered by the Taoist Wang Yuanlu when he was removing sand accumulated there. Yet to our great sorrow, during the period from 1905 to 1915, the British Aurel Stein, Frenchman Paul Pelliot, Japanese Kozui Otani, and Russian Oldenberg successively arrived at Mogao and tricked away from Taoist Wang nearly 40,000 pieces of the precious ancient documentations at a throw-away price.
The all-inclusive documentations from the Hidden Library Cave cover such fields as politics, economy, military affairs, literature, history, geography, medicine, science and technology, folks, religions, and art etc. from the fourth to the eleventh century. Besides Chinese-language manuscripts, there are quite a few documentations in Tibetan, Uighur, Khotanese, Sogdian, Turki, Rabbinic, Sanskrit etc. The abundant precious historical documentations draw attentions from scholars in China, Britain, France, Russia, America, and Japan, whose research contributes to emergence of an internationally known new subject, i.e., the Dunhuang Studies. |
Asia Travel 
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