A03_P19

Dating the concealment of the Library Cave at Mogao, Dunhuang

Staff R¹, Liu R², Pollard M³, Zhao Y⁴, Yu Z⁴, Zhang X⁴, Monteith F⁵, Guo Q⁴, Su B⁴

¹University Of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom, ²British Museum, London, United Kingdom, ³University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom, ⁴Dunhuang Academy, Dunhuang, China, ⁵Northwest University, Xi'an, China

The Mogao Grottoes, located 25 km southeast of Dunhuang in Gansu province, China, contain 735 caves carved into the rock. Of these, the majority of the 492 caves in the south section contain Buddhist art, many of which are regarded as the finest extant early Buddhist paintings in China. As a UNESCO World Heritage Site situated at the eastern end of the Silk Road, the construction and development of the Dunhuang Grottoes vividly illustrates the arrival and transformation of Buddhism in China. However, the full potential of the site to inform the broader field of Buddhist studies is limited by a paucity of robust chronology.

Chief among the grottoes, the so-called 'Library Cave', accidentally rediscovered in 1900, housed >60,000 manuscripts and drawings dating from the first millennium CE. Among the myriad questions relating to the site, the date of the concealment of the Library Cave has been highly debated; it is directly linked to the nature of the manuscripts recovered from the Cave, and the broader historical context in which the concealment took place.

Here, we apply radiocarbon dating and Bayesian chronological modelling to narrow down the timing - and hence the likely circumstances - of the Library Cave's concealment.