Four decades ago, protecting the world's greatest collection of Buddhist art was a cold, lonely job. Stuck in the Gobi Desert, near the northwestern Chinese city of Dunhuang, where the last beacon of the Great Wall rears out of the tawny sands before Central Asia proper begins, young archaeologist Fan Jinshi and her colleagues drank salty water from the nearby Daquan (Big Spring) River that gave them diarrhoea, received newspapers once every 10 days and had to rely on growing their own vegetables.
'In the evenings, we read books by the light of a diesel lamp. It was very lonely on the weekends
but we got used to it,' recalls Fan, director of the Dunhuang Academy, a state body set up in 1944
and entrusted with the conservation of the Mogao Grottoes, the fabled 4th-to-13th-century collection of caves painted by devout Buddhist monks. Winter and summer nights alike were long. 'Every now and then we got a movie to watch and even if we'd seen it several times, we watched it. Stuff like The October Revolution and The Tunnel War,' says Fan, naming two communist classics.
Today, Fan works out of a smart new building in which the central heating roars throughout Dunhuang's bitterly cold winters, when the average low temperature hits minus-16 degrees Celsius. Waitresses at the local restaurant can return to Dunhuang city, about 25km away, every evening if they want to. Conference rooms, computers and a research block reflect the tremendous artistic, religious, cultural and political significance of Mogao, a collection of 492 painted and 242 unpainted caves hewn into a cliff face beneath the dunes of Rattling Sand Mountain. Just one of many Buddhist cave sites that dot the Silk Road, Mogao is by far the biggest and most famous.
Nearly 1,700 years ago, a monk called Lezun was on his way to India to seek enlightenment. With many kilometres of yellow sand and bone-dry, grey-pebbled desert behind him, Lezun still had to cross even-more forbidding stretches of the Taklamakan Desert, in what is today the Xinjiang autonomous region.
According to legend, Lezun collapsed, exhausted, in AD366 where Mogao now lies. Lifting his head, he saw a thousand points of light dancing around in the shape of Buddha. Today, scientists believe it was the glitter of mica in the rock; but thrilled with religious fervour, the monk declared the mountain contained Buddha's spirit and dug the first of its caves, in which to pray and meditate.
