Dunhuang Mogao Caves
also known as "Thousand Buddha Grottoes", it is located at the rock side of the Singing Sand Mountain in Dunhuang city of Gansu Province. The caves vary enormously in size, from tiny single-room cells that served as living quarters for individual monks to huge, cavernous worship halls housing monumental sculptures and mural cycles. The caves honeycomb a 1,600-meter-long cliff face running north and south, and contain some 2,000 clay sculptures and more than 45,000 square meters (484,000 sq. ft) of mural paintings. The soft stone in the region is unsuitably brittle for carving, so the sculptures are primarily made of clay, coated with a kind of plaster surface that allowed finishing details to be painted on or engraved. In spite of the erosion caused by wind and drifting sand for some thousand years, of the 1,000 or so caves cut between the foundation of the site in 366 AD and the last efforts in the 14th century Yuan period, 492 are still more or less well preserved. All have been subjected to some degree of various kinds of damage or indignities, from the long term erosion of wind and water, to the smoke from fires built by bivouacked troops. Ongoing restoration efforts are underway to preserve the caves and their contents.
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