Journeys on the Silk Road (38 page)

Above all, people come to Dunhuang to see the Mogao Caves. And they arrive not once a year for an annual pilgrimage, but daily. Today, a paved path to the caves crosses a footbridge over the dry bed of the Daquan River, near where Stein camped. The poplars Abbot Wang planted along the river banks still provide welcome shade from the summer heat. The caves remain a place of pilgrimage for some. A visiting brown-robed priest lights incense sticks near a central pagoda, places them in a large incense holder and bows three times. Other visitors follow his example, although most simply pose at the photogenic spot. The rickety ladders to the caves have been replaced by steps and walkways. The once-exposed entrances to the honeycombed grottoes that reminded Stein of troglodyte dwellings have been fitted with metal doors. It is no longer possible to wander unescorted from cave to cave, as Stein did.

On a clear autumn day, a guide unlocks a door to one of the grottoes. She walks ahead down a narrow passage that opens onto a dark chamber. She flashes her torch on the wall. After the dazzling sunshine outside, our eyes adjust to the mute light, and murals in azure, lapis, and ochre emerge from the darkness. Row upon row of painted Buddhas adorn every inch of the walls. The ceiling is covered in images of celestial musicians and dramatic hunting scenes that include a galloping horse invested with the energetic confidence of a Picasso. The magnificence of this grotto alone—like a Buddhist Sistine Chapel—is overwhelming. It is just one of 492 remaining painted caves in the world’s greatest gallery of Buddhist art.

Unlike the Sistine Chapel, the artists who painted these are unknown. So many hands have taken part in their creation. First came laborers who chipped and hollowed each cave out of conglomerate rock. Others hauled mud from the Daquan River in front of the cliff, mixed it with straw and lined each cave wall. This created a “canvas,” a smooth surface—finished with a thin layer of plaster—over the lumpy rock interiors. Next came the artists who, under the direction of a senior monk, drew and then painstakingly painted the walls and ceilings. Traces of gold and precious stones still adorn some of the images. By the flickering light of oil lamps, they must have looked especially magnificent. Artists also created the painted clay statues of fierce temple guardians, jeweled bodhisattvas and Buddhas of the past, present and future. More than 2,000 statues remain.

We re-emerge, blinking, into the sunlight, and the guide leads the way to another cave behind a nine-story pagoda facade. Inside we are dwarfed by a 116-foot Buddha, the largest of three colossal Buddhas at the caves. Elsewhere are an eighty-five-foot seated Buddha of the future, Maitreya, and a fifty-one-foot sleeping Buddha. A smaller sleeping Buddha, forty-seven feet long, is surrounded by statues of seventy-two disciples. Each face reveals a different reaction as they observe the Buddha entering
parinirvana—
the final nirvana—on the point of physical death.

Paintings on some of the walls are like storyboards on which unfold morality tales and legends of the Buddha. A sixth-century cave depicts a prince being devoured after he offers his body to a tigress so she can feed her hungry cubs. The final scene depicts the prince’s brothers making their gruesome discovery and fleeing, their hair raised in horror. Painted when few could read, even an illiterate ancient peasant could grasp this story—a modern-day manga cartoon could not tell it more vividly.

No two caves are alike. Each differs in size and decoration. Some evoke the interiors of tents, their high tapered ceilings painted like the drapery of richly patterned fabric. Yet many share an identical layout—a narrow hallway that opens onto a square chapel with a central altar. Most of the images are Buddhist, but there are also images of everyday life: a butcher cutting meat while three hungry dogs wait expectantly nearby, an artisan making pottery, even a man defecating. There are scenes that recall the ancient travelers from afar who ventured along the Silk Road, including images of big-nosed foreigners. Others portray an ever-present peril that faced Silk Road merchants—bandits. We enter a cave where the evidence of a more recent foreigner is evident. A rectangle on the wall is devoid of the murals that fill the rest of the chapel. The aftermath of Langdon Warner disfigures like a wound.

At the northern end of the cliff is the cave all visitors want to see. Behind its door a narrow passageway leads to a large cave containing statues. On the right of the passage, about four feet above the ground, is the opening to an antechapel. The painted figures of two attendants—one holding a fan, the other a pilgrim’s staff—decorate the antechapel’s far wall. They flank two painted Bodhi trees whose leafy branches frame the statue of a seated monk. The figure is Hong Bian, once the most revered Buddhist dignitary west of China’s Yellow River. His statue, removed to make room for the scrolls, has been restored to the chapel built in his honor more than 1,000 years ago. The statue of Hong Bian and the painted figures of his two attendants are all that remain within the chapel. The Diamond Sutra and the 50,000-plus scrolls that once filled it from floor to ceiling are spread around the world. The mural and the statue within the niche can’t match the splendor of others at the caves. But this empty grotto is the site of one of the Silk Road’s most dramatic episodes and the place that has transformed our understanding of a culture unlike any other.

What occupies today’s guardians, however, is not what has gone from the caves but how to safeguard what remains. For well over a millennium, the caves survived desert winds, earthquakes, invasion, refugees, pilgrims, and vandals. But their greatest threat in the twenty-first century is from tourism. The trickle of visitors who arrived in the late 1970s, when the caves were first opened to the public, has turned into a torrent. More than 650,000 people arrive each year, eager to see the Silk Road’s most magnificent site, and the numbers continue to soar. It seems incredible now that the caves could ever have been abandoned and forgotten. As improbable as the art of the Louvre and the books of the British Library slipping from memory and into a sleep lasting centuries. But having awoken, the danger now is that the caves will be loved to death.

Many of the sacred caves are small, some no bigger than a suburban bedroom. They were never designed to hold large numbers of people. Locals refer to some of the tiny chapels as the “falling-down caves.” This is not a reference to Stendhal syndrome—the sense of being overwhelmed by the beauty of art—although it is impossible not to be transported by the exquisite images. Rather, it is the result of too many people in too small a space breathing too little air, especially in summer when most tourists arrive. Every humid breath expelled by visitors risks damaging the wall paintings. So does the rush of air that changes the temperature each time a cave door is opened. Both activate salt—the caves’ great enemy—within the walls. Salt causes the paint to flake and peel from the murals—wiping far more than the sublime smile from the Buddha’s face.

How best to deal with so many visitors is a concern for the Dunhuang Academy, the prestigious research institute which since 1943 has served as guardian of the caves. Juggling the competing demands of mass tourism and conservation is tricky, the academy’s deputy director, Dr. Wang Xudong, acknowledges. “One of the most challenging issues we face is the rapid increase in tourists and the influence created by people,” he says. “Although the site is large overall, the space in the individual caves is quite small. So the capacity is definitely limited. One needs to balance enabling visitors to come and enjoy the site, but at the same time not having any destructive influence on it. This is easy to say but difficult to do.”

His office is a fifteen-minute walk from the caves and close to the main entrance through which visitors arrive all day, every day. Remoteness was once the caves’ great natural protector. Dunhuang was still difficult to reach even two decades ago when Wang Xudong first arrived after an arduous journey from his hometown four hundred miles away. “The economy was not as developed when I was younger, and it was a long way for us. When I came to work here in 1991, I had to change buses twice and have one overnight stop. Now you have the train and freeways,” he says.

Better transport and a prosperous Chinese economy have led to a huge increase in domestic visitors, who comprise about 90 percent of today’s overall numbers. The Dunhuang Academy has been working with international specialists, including the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, to strike a balance between conservation and tourism. The Getty’s conservation scientist Dr. Neville Agnew, one of the first foreign scientists to work on protecting Chinese heritage sites, says this has involved looking at how many visitors the caves can cope with and how to manage them. After a long day working in the caves, Agnew and his team of specialists gather back at the Dunhuang Academy, where amid laptops and charts, they discuss the day’s findings and consider how best to protect the caves for the future.

Agnew explains that China’s best-known tourist attractions—Beijing’s Forbidden City and Xian’s Terracotta Warriors—receive many more visitors than Mogao, but the nature of the caves is different. “The Terracotta Warriors have a big shed over them and people can walk around. Many of the cave temples are relatively small with a narrow entrance . . . The tourist industry says, ‘Why don’t you take more visitors? Take more visitors.’ But you can’t do that. The site is very, very sensitive.”

Visitors see inside about a dozen caves during a two-hour tour, but plans are underway to limit further the time people spend in the World Heritage–listed caves. There is no suggestion the caves will be closed, as has occurred at France’s Lascaux Cave with its prehistoric animal paintings. Closure might be in the best long-term interest of the Buddhist caves, but tourism brings much-needed revenue into Gansu, one of China’s poorest provinces.

Tourism is not the only threat to the caves; there is the ever-encroaching sand. The movement of the dunes is imperceptible but relentless. On a ridge above the caves, a fence helps reduce the amount of sand blown over the cliff and into the caves. But no fence can stop the advance of the sands which have reclaimed so many Silk Road towns and treasures over the years. The desert, less than three miles from Dunhuang, is expanding by an estimated twelve feet a year. Rivers have run dry, crops have died and even Crescent Lake has shrunk to a fraction of its former size. The water table has fallen as Dunhuang’s thirsty population has expanded from 40,000 to 200,000 in the past fifty years.

Walking along a flat sandy expanse above the grottoes, there is an unearthly silence on a windless day. The visitors to the caves are out of sight and earshot in the valley below. Not a breath rustles the scant vegetation, not an insect hums. It is a silence rare in the modern world with the unceasing throb of traffic, aircraft, computers, and cell phones. Perhaps there was a similar silence when the monk Lezun arrived in 366 and, inspired by his golden vision of a thousand Buddhas, carved the first grotto here. It is not hard to imagine why the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas were created in this place of terrifying beauty on the edge of two great deserts, the Taklamakan and the Gobi. One direction is pancake flat, the other sees rolling dunes that stretch to the horizon. People once came to the caves to pray for their own survival. Perhaps the greatest miracle is that the caves themselves have survived.

Picture this: monks sit cross-legged before a long, low table. The smoke of fragrant incense and the sound of resonant chanting fill the room. The monks’ gaze shifts from the golden statues around them to small screens held in the hand of each robed figure. “Thus I have heard . . .” It is hardly as romantic as the image of a monk slowly unrolling a long paper sutra. But far-fetched? Just as handwritten scrolls gave way to printed ones such as the Diamond Sutra, so the book and the printed word are undergoing change every bit as dramatic.

Portable devices such as the Kindle and the iPad are transforming how we read. Will the printed book go the way of cassette tapes, video recorders, pay phones, and manual typewriters? And will the book-lined study become as quaintly old-fashioned as an overstuffed Victorian parlor? It may be premature to write the obituary of the printed book. Theaters have not emptied with the advent of film, nor have paintings been rendered redundant by digital art.

And yet, so many vital elements in the life story of the Diamond Sutra—printing, libraries, reading, even the use of paper—are undergoing profound change. Paper was once a precious resource. In the year 700, a Dunhuang official lamented that paper was so scarce he could not fulfill his promise to copy a sutra. Today, much of the world’s paper is thrown away the same day it is printed. But as forests dwindle and as books and other documents increasingly begin life on screen, it is possible that paper and the printed book may become more valued again.