The Mogao Caves

Cut from 366 onwards by monks settled at the Dunhuang oasis, the caves hold forty-five thousand square metres of murals, the largest Buddhist gallery in the world. In 1900 a Daoist monk found a chamber behind a wall containing fifty thousand manuscripts sealed around the year 1000, in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Sogdian and Hebrew, including the oldest dated printed book known, a Diamond Sutra of 868. European and Japanese explorers carried off most of it between 1907 and 1914; the collections are now split between London, Paris, Saint Petersburg and Beijing.