Digital technology is being utilized at cultural relics protection and collection institutes all over the world to intensify the endeavors to conserve the world cultural heritage in Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu Province.

Dubbed "Digital Dunhuang", the ongoing program will help pool in a virtual way all the treasures from Dunhuang, which are scattered at different museums, libraries and research institutes around the world, Dunhuangologists believe.

"To put it more accurately, Digital Dunhuang embraces two categories of work," said Liu Gang, a researcher at the Dunhuang Academy in Dunhuang, Gansu.

The first category of work is to create highly intelligent digital images of the caves, murals, painted clay sculptures and all cultural relics relevant to Dunhuang, and the second category is to digitize historical records and research findings on Dunhuang and related materials and compile them into electronic files, Liu explained.

The city of Dunhuang, located adjacent the crossroads of the ancient Silk Road, has been made famous largely by the Buddhist Grottoes, popularly known as the Mogao Grottoes, which are one of the world's most vital sites of ancient Buddhist culture.

The grottoes, also famed as Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, contain some 2,000 clay sculptures and more than 45,000 square meters of mural paintings, which date back from the 5th to the 14th centuries.

The grand grottoes were included in the world cultural heritage list of the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization in 1987.

Of the 735 caves, 492 still more or less remained intact. All have been subjected to various kinds of damage or indignities to some extent, from the long-term erosion of wind and water, to the smoke from fires built by bivouacked troops, according to specialists from the Dunhuang Academy.

The damages have also stemmed from the modern perils of mass tourism, where the moisture from the breath of visiting crowds can impair delicate murals that have survived for centuries in a arid desert climate, the specialists acknowledged.

The introduction of digitization technology will upgrade conservation efforts, including tourist number control, for the irrecoverable cultural heritage, according to specialists.

A Virtual Caves project, which constitutes part of the Digital Dunhuang program, will allow viewers, without entering the grottoes, to feel like they are visiting the real grottoes of amazing Buddhist art.

However, scholars are paying more attention to the academic aspect of the use of new digital means to eternally conserve, especially in an intact way, the magnificent cultural heritage, including Buddhist manuscripts, painted scrolls and other historical documents.

Studies on Dunhuang were launched as early as the year 1900, when the Dunhuang Library Cave, which had been sealed for 850 years and held more than 50,000 relics dating from the 4th to 11th centuries, was accidentally found by a Taoist priest.

Part of the Dunhuang relics have since been taken out of China and acquired by collectors in Britain, France, Russia, Japan, India, the Republic of Korea and Finland.

This early internationalism has an echo in the contemporary distribution of Dunhuang materials and Dunhuang studies around the world.

But not all of the Dunhuang collections overseas are available to researchers and common viewers. Demand for the availability among the scholars is another key factor behind the Digital Dunhuang program.

The program in process has drawn participants from more than a dozen organizations which possess related collections or have interest in conservation of the cultural heritage. Included are the Dunhuang Academy, the National Library of China based in Beijing, national libraries of Britain and France, Russian academy of sciences and the US-based Mellon Foundation.

The most eye-catching part of the program is said to be the digital shooting of the Dunhuang caves, or Virtual Caves, with financial support from the Mellon Foundation.

Starting in 1998, the shooting work, undertaken by the Dunhuang Academy in partnership with other academic organs, including Northwestern University of the United States, has had the measurement, shooting and compilation of 22 caves completed and the cyber viewing schemes developed for another 42 caves, said Li Zuixiong, vice president of the academy.

According to Liu Gang, the state-of-the-art digital photography technology has been used for the shooting project, or Virtual Caves, which is able to display the mural paintings that are invisible under natural light or obstructed by structural members of the caves, including posts.

Another part of the Digital Dunhuang program, or "Digital Dunhuang Library Cave", is also well underway, Li Zuixiong said.

Digital versions of manuscripts and painting scrolls from the library cave now have almost every detail of the documents, which were difficult to view under magnifiers, perceivable to researchers, noted Lin Shitian, a specialist on rare ancient books from the National Library of China.

In mid-May, a digital Dunhuang website went into operation in the Chinese language, which allows viewers to scan nearly 10,000 titles of digitized Dunhuang records and 300 images of mural paintings and sculptures.

The development and application of digitization technology, in collaboration with Internet services, are not only expected to bring together again the scattered Dunhuang treasures, albeit in a virtual way, but also have facilitated the expansion of the research scopes of Dunhuangology, which has become a discipline of world fame, said Fan Jinshi, president of Dunhuang Academy.

It takes both time and capital and needs more efficient international cooperation to accomplish all the goals of the Digital Dunhuang program, Fan said.
 
(Xinhua News Agency May 27, 2004)