Buddha’s Caves (The Daily Star)

Sand is implacable in far western China. It blows and shifts and eats away at everything, erasing boundaries, scouring graves, leaving farmers in despair.

It’s one of many threats to the major tourist draw of Dunhuang, an oasis city, on the lip of the Gobi desert: the hundreds of rock-cut Buddhist grottoes that pepper a cliff face outside town. Known as Mogaoku — “peerless caves” –and filled with paradisiacal frescos and hand-moulded clay sculptures of saviour-gods and saints, they are, in size and historical breadth, like nothing else in the Chinese Buddhist world.

And Mogaoku is in trouble. Thrown open to visitors in recent decades, the site has been swamped by tourists in the past few years. The caves now suffer from high levels of carbon dioxide and humidity, which are severely undermining conservation efforts. The short-term solution has been to limit the number of caves that can be visited and to admit people only on timed tours, but the deterioration continues…

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For more information and photos of the caves, click here.

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