Dunhuang exhibition reveals China's multicultural past

They may not have achieved the global renown of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors, but it could be argued that Dunhuang's ancient grottoes are China's most important cultural relics.

These caves, hewn by hand out of cliffs that descend into the great Gobi Desert, chart the development of Chinese art for a thousand, uninterrupted years. They are also depositaries of a multicultural past that adds fluidity and colour to China's national identity.

Fourth-century devotees started carving meditation cells in the cliffs above the Dachuan River after a Buddhist monk named Le Zun had a vision at nearby San Weishan. Dunhuang's reputation as a sacred site grew and master craftsmen, both Chinese and from Central Asia, venerated the caves and added frescoes and statues until the Yuan dynasty. Silk Road travellers left Persian coins and Bibles written in the Syriac script, a close cousin of the Aramaic tongue of Jesus. Monks, Buddhist and Taoist were living in this remote spot until the 1930s.

All this history can be a bit overwhelming. The great cultural essayist Yu Qiuyu certainly thought that about the Mogao caves - the area with the highest concentration of these ancient cells. In A Bitter Journey Through Culture, he said a visitor would be bowled over by an excess of cultural awareness and crushed into insignificance by the giant hands of great artists.

Yu went there in the 1980s. Today's visitors need to brace themselves for another reason. Fierce crowd control means that everyone is whisked through the few accessible caves by brusque official guides swinging their torches from one bodhisattva to another, and giving highly condensed versions of the great Jataka tales as told by centuries-old murals.