Mogao Cave 17 is sealed
The Library Cave is walled up and plastered over in the early eleventh century, for reasons still debated: a response to threat, or the orderly retirement of sacred but disused material. Whatever the reason, it preserved around fifty thousand items in a dozen languages for nine hundred years.
Uncertain — sources disagree, or the dating is contested. Stated here, not resolved.
Subjects
- Mogao Caves · site · China
- Dunhuang · city · China
Evidence
Verified — Every field is supported by a cited authoritative source. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
International Dunhuang Programme
Catalogues and digitally reunites the material removed from Mogao Cave 17 and other eastern Silk Road sites between 1900 and the 1920s, now held in London, Paris, Beijing, St Petersburg and Tokyo. The dispersal is physical and permanent; the reassembly is digital.
British Library and partner institutions in China, France, Russia, Japan and Germany · Verified
Ongoing digitisation and cataloguing consortium
Mogao Caves
492 decorated cave temples with roughly 45,000 square metres of murals and over 2,000 painted sculptures, cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, together with the manuscript hoard of Cave 17.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre · 1987 · Verified
World Heritage List, inscribed 1987 (list entry 440)
Recorded on Mogao Caves
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.