Syriac manuscripts in Chinese caves

SYRIAC WATCH: Dunhuang exhibition reveals China's multicultural past. Religious and cultural relics from Dunhuang's ancient grottoes are on show at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum (Enid Tsui , Life).

They may not have achieved the global renown of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Warriors, but it could be argued that Dunhuang's ancient grottoes are China's most important cultural relics.

These caves, hewn by hand out of cliffs that descend into the great Gobi Desert, chart the development of Chinese art for a thousand, uninterrupted years. They are also depositaries of a multicultural past that adds fluidity and colour to China's national identity.

Fourth-century devotees started carving meditation cells in the cliffs above the Dachuan River after a Buddhist monk named Le Zun had a vision at nearby San Weishan. Dunhuang's reputation as a sacred site grew and master craftsmen, both Chinese and from Central Asia, venerated the caves and added frescoes and statues until the Yuan dynasty. Silk Road travellers left Persian coins and Bibles written in the Syriac script, a close cousin of the Aramaic tongue of Jesus. Monks, Buddhist and Taoist were living in this remote spot until the 1930s.

[...]

Time and visitor number will continue to take their toll - which is why the Dunhuang Academy and its international partners have been pouring their efforts into digitisation projects and travelling exhibitions such as the one that opened at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum on Friday.

It will feature more than 200 genuine artifacts that have been discovered in the caves, including the Book of Psalms in Syriac and the only surviving copy of Essential Mantras in the Tanguy script.

[...]

More on Syriac in China here (also on the Dunhuang Library), here, here, here, and here.