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The library sealed inside a cave for nine hundred years
In June 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered a sealed chamber hidden behind a wall inside the Mogao cave complex near Dunhuang, in the desert of northwestern China. Inside were tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and printed documents stacked from floor to ceiling, preserved almost perfectly by the dry desert air. The cave had been sealed around 1000 CE and hadn't been opened since.
The manuscripts dated from the 4th through the 11th centuries and were written in multiple languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit. The collection was primarily Buddhist scripture, but it also contained government records, legal documents, astronomical charts, medical texts, literary works, and commercial contracts from the centuries when Dunhuang was a major crossroads on the Silk Roads.
Wang Yuanlu tried to alert Chinese authorities, but the government was in the midst of the Boxer Rebellion and didn't act on his appeals. Beginning in 1907, a series of foreign expeditions arrived at Dunhuang and acquired large portions of the collection. The manuscripts were scattered across institutions in London, Paris, Beijing, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo, where they remain today. The International Dunhuang Programme, formed in 1994, has since worked to digitize and reunify the collection online.
Among the tens of thousands of scrolls was a five-meter-long woodblock-printed copy of the Diamond Sutra, a sacred Mahayana Buddhist text. A colophon at the end of the scroll reads: "Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents," and dates it to 868 CE. That makes it the oldest dated printed book in the world, predating the Gutenberg Bible by nearly six hundred years.
The Diamond Sutra and thousands of other Dunhuang manuscripts are now freely viewable through the International Dunhuang Programme's digital archive.
