AI to help

An ongoing digitization project of the academy has so far covered 290 caves of Mogao. Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence, researchers are coming across new finds more easily than before.

"AI technology can help to recognize, categorize and analyze similar scenarios or patterns of murals in various caves," said Zhou Yanlin, a researcher at the academy.

For archaeologists working at Mogao, the scope of work now goes beyond just the interior of the cave. A better understanding of the site and its surrounding areas is bound to reveal more about the golden age of the Silk Road.

The Dunhuang Academy established its own archaeological excavation squad in 2018. Since last year, Zhao has led his team to conduct excavations at the Tianwang Tang (Hall of the Heavenly Kings) ruins. With little known about their origins and their importance in Buddhist architecture studies, the ruins have long attracted researchers.

Zhao's team unearthed the outer architectural foundation of the hall. Murals, statues and fragments of Buddhist sutras were found in a half-collapsed shrine. A new courtyard was also discovered.

The archaeological team has also worked on ruins of Suoyang City in nearby Guazhou county since 2018 to gain a holistic view of Dunhuang's role in ancient trade networks.

In 1900, about 60,000 ancient documents, in many ancient languages from along the Silk Road, were discovered in Cave 17, also known as the "library cave". The manuscripts were encyclopedic in nature and spanned almost a millennium.

Many of these were taken overseas in the early 20th century, leading to Japan and the West becoming centers of Dunhuang studies.

However, things have changed thanks to the continuous efforts of Chinese researchers, particularly of those at the Dunhuang Academy.

In 2021 alone, nearly 1,000 academic papers were written by Chinese scholars on Dunhuang studies, excluding those on the preservation and management of the caves. In comparison, 40 were published in Japan, and 38 in the Western countries during that year.

For Neil Schmid, a US Sinologist who is a researcher at the Dunhuang Academy, archaeology can help him connect what he found on the Dunhuang murals or in documents with physical evidence.

"There has been an explosion of Dunhuang research in China in recent years," he said. "In Dunhuang, we can always find new things that teach us about the past, the present and the future."