A Heck of an Art Trek : Think of China’s Mogao Grottoes as a 492-room gallery packed with 1,000 years of Buddhist art. It’s just a tad out of the way

Imagine a gallery that records 1,000 years of a great nation’s arts, religion and social customs. Now imagine that this gallery is not prominently located in a major city, but that its 492 rooms are cut into a dusty brown sandstone cliff in one of the most forbidding deserts on the face of the Earth.

If your visionary powers take you that far, you have a mental picture of the Mogao Grottoes--where cultural riches meet natural deprivation on the southwestern edge of the Gobi Desert.

This remote hideaway--1,200 miles west of Beijing, 250 miles east of China’s underground nuclear testing ground at Lop Nor and 15 miles southeast of the undistinguished town of Dunhuang--is the home of China’s greatest cache of Buddhist wall painting and sculpture. Despite considerable losses to vandalism, looting, natural disasters and misguided restoration, the remaining treasure is a stunning testimony to the vibrant society that once flourished along an ancient trade route known as the Silk Road.

The importance of the site and its fragile condition have made it the subject of a continuing conservation project, jointly undertaken in 1989 by the Chinese State Bureau of Cultural Relics and the Los Angeles-based Getty Conservation Institute. An international conference held in Dunhuang early last month, presented project findings to a gathering of cultural preservationists.

The visiting specialists studied many more than the 30 or so caves that are generally available to tourists who venture to the site, far from the Beijing-Shanghai-Xian circuit. During peak season, in the blistering heat of August, about 700 to 1,000 people visit the Mogao Grottoes each day, but that number trickles to almost nothing during the winter and the annual total of visitors is a mere 150,000. That number is likely to rise as the caves become more widely known and the Getty conservation project stabilizes the environment.

But one question that remains to be answered is how many visitors can be allowed into the caves without endangering the artwork. A nearby museum--currently under construction with the help of Japanese funding--will include replicas of 10 caves and provide educational exhibits that may eventually substitute for the real thing.

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The first clue that Dunhuang’s bleak landscape houses something unusual comes in a view from the road to Mogao, where visitors glimpse openings cut into a cliff that rises sharply above a dry riverbed.

But the dark holes reveal nothing of the astonishing contents of the caves. Neither do utilitarian concrete stairs and walkways that were built in the 1960s to provide access to the grottoes, or a brightly painted wood structure that covers entrances to a 108-foot-tall statue of Buddha.

The magic of Mogao (named for the region’s administrative district under the Tang Dynasty) is secreted in dim rooms that reveal themselves slowly--and sometimes incompletely. In the case of the giant Buddha and a similar, seated figure measuring 85 feet in height, you enter one of several doors and find yourself staring at an immense head, hand, foot or torso, then peering up and down through a vertical tunnel to see the rest of the towering figure. Cut out of the rocky cliff face, plastered with clay and painted, these sculptures are wonders of artistry and religious aspiration, but they are frustrating to encounter because they can’t be seen as complete entities.

Far more satisfying is the “Sleeping Buddha” in Cave 158, who reclines in full view of visitors and commands rapt attention. The 52-foot-long sculpture is surrounded by hundreds of painted figures on walls of the cave--some of whom tear their flesh in grief because their spiritual leader has left them and entered a state of nirvana--but the Buddha’s physical presence and beatific expression make the sculpture a profoundly peaceful sight. As an example of the Tang Dynasty period, when the art of Mogao reached its pinnacle, this art-filled cave marks a high point of aesthetic achievement.

Elongated caves focusing on one gigantic Buddha are the exception at Mogao, however. Most of the rooms are squarish enclosures with slanted, tent-like ceilings, and the best of the art that remains is painting, not sculpture. Anterooms and hallways originally led to the caves’ main chambers, but these entrances have collapsed or have been shortened over the years as a result of erosion or earthquakes. Walls and ceilings of the remaining chambers are typically covered by painted images, while groups of roughly life-size figures stand along back walls or on central stone platforms.

About 2,000 polychromed sculptures remain in the caves, but many more have been looted or destroyed and the survivors include hundreds that were garishly “restored” during the Qing Dynasty, drastically compromising their artistic integrity.

The wall paintings have also taken a beating, but they have fared better than the sculpture, largely because they are harder to remove. Indeed, the remaining 484,000 square feet of wall paintings compose a 1,000-year record of art history that follows the evolution of Chinese Buddhism and presents a wide-ranging picture of secular life.

Along with endless depictions of Buddha--which have caused Mogao (and smaller Chinese rock temples) to be dubbed “Thousand Buddha Caves”--there are scenes of battles, highway robberies, weddings, concerts and garden reveries.

One trademark image is that of apsaras , diaphanous angels of perfume and music who fly through the murals with ribbons of cloth encircling them. While these airborne creatures appear to predate the flowing forms of Art Nouveau by 1,000 years, more down-to-earth scenes provide cultural historians with records of Chinese costumes, folk customs and architecture.

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To understand how such a significant cultural monument came to be in such an inhospitable place, it is best to start at the beginning--which is to say, with a legend.

According to this bit of folklore, Lo-tsun, a monk who lived in a plain, cliff-side cave at Mogao, founded the rock temples in AD 366 in response to his vision of a thousand Buddhas. The monk is said to have created a special cave to assist his meditation or, in another version of the tale, to have persuaded a wealthy Buddhist pilgrim to commission an artist to paint a cave and dedicate it as a shrine to the monk’s safe return from a journey.

The legend can’t be proved, but the fact that hundreds of grotto shrines were created from the 4th Century to the 14th Century is indisputable. And their location--the very thing that seems so unlikely today--was largely responsible for the growth and longevity of the Mogao Grottoes.

The town of Dunhuang (Chinese for “Blazing Beacon”) seems to be in the middle of nowhere, but when the caves evolved it was strategically located on the Silk Road, at the western gateway to China.

Settled by the Chinese in 121 BC, Dunhuang grew up as an oasis, supply center and safe haven at the end of China’s communications beacons and fortifications. As the last stop in China for westbound travelers about to cross a fierce desert and the first Chinese refuge for eastbound survivors, Dunhuang was a logical place to pray for safe passage and give thanks for successful journeys.

Dunhuang has had a turbulent, ethnically varied history. Tibetans overtook the region in the latter part of the 7th Century, the Uighurs (a Turkic people) established themselves in 911, Mongols gained control in 1227, Muslims ruled in the early 16th Century, and White Russian soldiers resided in some of the caves for several months in 1920. But the Chinese have always regained control of the area.

The Silk Road--named in the 1870s by German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen--got its start in the 3rd Century, flourished through the 8th Century (when sea routes developed) and continued to play an important role in trade through the 14th Century. Best known as a commercial route connecting ancient China to the Mediterranean, the Silk Road was also a path of cultural exchange.

The biggest idea to enter China from India was Buddhism, and it eventually gained powerful support as well as a Chinese identity. The 492 surviving caves represent seven dynastic periods, beginning with the Wei Dynasty in the 4th Century and ending with the Yuan Dynasty in the 14th Century. The Wei works tend to look primitive because reds have oxidized into heavy black outlines. The Sui period (581-618) marks the end of foreign influence, whereas masterful (and predominant) Tang works (618-906) celebrate an indigenous Chinese style.

As Buddhist art became more Chinese in appearance, the faces of statues grew fuller, earlobes were elongated and upper bodies assumed larger proportions.

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The strength of Mogao art is its merger of Eastern and Western ideas, says Duan Wenjie, founding director of the Dunhuang Academy, which was established in 1944 to preserve and study the caves.

His favorite examples, such as Cave 285 from the Wei Dynasty, show distinctly Western and Chinese styles side by side, plus a melange of influences that he attributes to Greeks, Persians and Indians.

Many artworks in the caves relate stories about the adventures of Buddha in previous incarnations, before receiving enlightenment, and narratives depicting Buddhist concepts of universal suffering and transmigration. Among the most complex ideas made visual in the paintings are visions of Western Paradise, a luxurious Buddhist afterworld.

The paintings were created on clay-plastered stone walls and ceilings that had been hewn in the cliff. Except for the largest sculptures, which are formed over stone, three-dimensional figures were built on wood matrices, with bundles of reed covered by clay and painted.

Groups of monks or nuns sometimes pooled their resources to finance the decoration of caves, while rulers and wealthy families demonstrated their spiritual strength and earthly influence by commissioning artists to paint caves that common people visited on Buddhist holidays. Over time, images of the donors became more prominent, growing from a few inches tall to larger than life-size during the Tang era.

Dunhuang lost its status as an important commercial and cultural center as Silk Road trade slowed and the region’s water source from mountain glaciers diminished. The Mogao Grottoes were largely abandoned, but as the caves filled with sand they were preserved by the dry climate. Muslim zealots destroyed many human images in the caves, but when European archeologists and explorers rediscovered Mogao in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they found astonishing riches.

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Sir Aurel Stein, a British Orientalist and explorer, gained access to a library of manuscripts that had been sealed in Cave 17 and he surreptitiously bought thousands of examples for the British Museum in London. American archeologist Langdon Warner, who reportedly feared that the cave art would be lost if Westerners didn’t save it, made off with a Tang sculpture of a kneeling saint and a dozen fragments of wall paintings, which are in the collection of Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

The Chinese, who clamped down on foreign adventurers in the 1920s, tend to view Stein, Warner and others who denuded cultural monuments as robbers. Dunhuang Academy Director Duan grants these foreigners the status of “double personalities.”

“For the Chinese, they are thieves,” he said in an interview. “On the other hand, they were experts in their day.”

But the time for placing blame is over, he said. Now the Chinese hope that when they have adequate facilities for displaying the lost treasures, some of them may be returned.

In the meantime, the Getty conservation project has helped to pave the way to international goodwill and has made the Mogao Grottoes better known to the art world, Duan said.

“We are very happy to cooperate with the Getty Conservation Institute,” he said, “and we hope to expand the relationship.”