Mogao Caves

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A complex of 492 decorated cave temples cut into a cliff about 25 km south-east of Dunhuang, with murals covering some 45,000 square metres and work spanning roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries. Tradition, recorded on a stele of 698, holds that the monk Yuezun cut the first cave in 366. Cave 17, the Library Cave, was sealed in the early eleventh century and reopened in 1900, yielding on the order of fifty thousand manuscripts, paintings and printed texts in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Khotanese, Uyghur, Hebrew and other languages. Among them was the Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated complete printed book. The contents were dispersed to London, Paris, St Petersburg, Beijing and Tokyo between 1907 and the 1920s. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.