1 The Dunhuang Manuscripts: from Cave to Computer Susan Whitfield Over a century ago a cave was discovered near Dunhuang, in present-day Gansu Province in Chinese Central Asia. It was full of manuscripts on paper, paintings on silk, hemp and paper and some of the earliest printed material in the world. During the same decade tens of thousands of other manuscripts were unearthed from desert sites in neighbouring Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. In over twenty languages and scripts, on a wide variety of media, and encompassing over 1500 years of history, this corpus represents one of the earliest, largest and richest manuscript resources in the world. The Dunhuang cave — probably a local monastery library 1 — is by itself one of the largest and earliest Buddhist archives. Yet it is dismaying that with over a century of Dunhuang scholarship behind us there has been very little exploitation of this resource either as a manuscript archive or as a record of contemporary Buddhism. The site had originated as a retreat for Buddhist monks who, from the mid-fourth century, excavated small caves for living and meditation out of a friable cliff face about ten miles south-east of the Silk Road garrison and trading town of Dunhuang. It was one of scores, if not hundreds, of such sites along the Eastern Silk Road. The community grew and soon there was a thriving Buddhist monastery and many cave chapels decorated with floor to ceiling murals and statue groupings made from clay over a straw or wood skeleton. By the mid-eighth century, there were up to a thousand such caves, stretching for nearly a mile in several tiers along the cliff. 2 (Fig. 1) At this time this area was under Chinese control but, following the An Lushan rebellion in China in 755 and the subsequent withdrawal of Chinese forces from the “western regions”, the Tibetans of the first empire moved in and imposed their control over Dunhuang and the southern Silk Road kingdoms to its west. About eighty years later a Chinese loyalist general succeeded in driving them of Dunhuang and the area, although nominally Chinese under the title of ‘The Returning to Allegiance Army District’, became semi-autonomous under control of the Zhang family. 3 The Buddhist abbot of the region was called Hong Bian 洪 and, sometime around the mid-ninth century, he had a large cave built at the floor of the cliff – now known as cave 16. When he died in about 862 a small memorial chapel was excavated from the side corridor of this cave. A stone inscription recorded Hong Bian’s life and merits, and a portrait statue was placed on a platform in front of the back wall (Figs. 2, 3). We do not know why and we do not know when, but sometime in the next one hundred and fifty years the statue was removed, placed in the cave above and the small memorial chapel was filled with the manuscripts, paintings and remnants – forty thousand items or more – until it was crammed full. The door was then plastered over and the corridor of cave 16 repainted so that the entrance was hidden. And hidden it remained, during the reign of the Tanguts, the Mongols, during the Chinese withdrawal at the start of the Ming, their moving back in the middle of the Qing dynasty and the local rebellion of the late nineteenth century. Then a Chinese Daoist monk arrived — Wang Yuanlu (Fig. 4) —