敦煌莫高窟是什么?
What are the Dunhuang caves?
Name: ________________ Date: ________
Key words
| Word | Pinyin | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 沙漠 | shāmò | desert |
| 洞 | dòng | hole; cave |
| 沙子 | shāzi | sand; grit |
| 据说 | jùshuō | it is said; reportedly |
| 墙 | qiáng | wall |
| 藏 | cáng | to hide; to conceal |
| 古老 | gúlǎo | ancient; old |
| 堆 | duī | to pile up; to heap up; pile; heap; stack |
| 古代 | gǔdài | ancient times; antiquity |
| 位于 | wèiyú | to be located at; to lie in |
| 商人 | shāngrén | merchant; businessman |
| 传说 | chuánshuō | legend; folklore |
English (for the teacher)
In the summer of 1900, at the edge of the desert in China’s northwest, Wang the Daoist priest, who looked after the caves, was clearing sand out of one of them. The story goes that he suddenly noticed a crack in the wall, and there seemed to be a space behind it. When he opened up the wall he found, to his astonishment, a small room hidden inside, piled from the floor to the ceiling with ancient scrolls, documents and paintings, some fifty thousand items in all. They had lain quietly in the dark for around nine hundred years, and nobody knows why they were sealed in there.
The place was the Mogao caves at Dunhuang in Gansu. The little room later came to be called the Library Cave.
Dunhuang is an oasis in the desert, and in ancient times it sat right on the Silk Road. Merchants, monks and travellers heading west from the heartland of China almost all had to pass through, and here the goods, religions and arts of East and West met and mixed. Legend says that in 366 AD a monk passing by saw the mountain opposite glittering with golden light, as if a thousand Buddhas were shining. He felt it was a holy place, and he cut the first cave into the cliff.
After that, generation after generation kept on digging, for more than a thousand years in all. Today the Mogao caves still keep more than seven hundred caves, over four hundred and ninety of them with murals and painted statues; together the murals cover more than forty-five thousand square metres, and there are over two thousand painted statues. Step inside and the walls are covered with stories of the Buddha, and with scenes of people long ago farming, hunting, trading and getting married. The most famous are the flying apsaras soaring through the air, the long ribbons on their bodies streaming in the wind, as if they really could fly.
But the Library Cave’s story doesn’t end happily. The Qing government of the day paid no attention to the treasure. In 1907 the British explorer Aurel Stein came to Dunhuang and, for very little money, carried off more than ten thousand scrolls and documents from Wang. The next year a French scholar took away another great batch. Today these treasures are scattered among museums around the world, in Britain, France and elsewhere. The most famous of them is a Diamond Sutra printed in 868 AD, the earliest surviving printed book with a clear date.
In 1987 the Mogao caves were added to the World Heritage List. Now, to protect the fragile murals, the number of visitors allowed into the caves each day is limited. So if you get the chance to go to Dunhuang, it’s best to book ahead. Standing before murals painted more than a thousand years ago, you may feel that time has stopped here.