Dunhuang manuscripts

The Dunhuang manuscripts are a large and varied collection of religious and secular texts, consisting mainly of handwritten manuscripts on materials such as hemp, silk, and paper, along with some woodblock-printed items. Composed in a range of languages including Chinese, Tibetan and others, these manuscripts were discovered in 1900 at the Mogao Caves near Sachu in Dunhuang, Gansu Province, China, by the itinerant Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu. After taking over the caves, Wang sold the manuscripts to Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot for a modest sum. Knowing the philological value of the Dunhuang manuscripts, Stein and Pelliot bought them from Wang and took them from China to Europe.

Most of the manuscripts originate from a cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries. These were sealed in what is now known as the Library Cave (Cave 17) sometime in the early 11th century. The site at Sachu (modern-day Dunhuang) was an important regional centre for manuscript production during this period and had also served as an official printing office during the 8th and 9th centuries when the area was under Tibetan rule and formed part of the Silk Road network.

Wang Yuanlu reportedly used the cave complex as a base for his alms-collecting activities and allegedly had discovered the documents concealed behind a sealed wall in an annex within one of the caves.

In addition to the Library Cave, manuscripts and printed texts have also been discovered in several other caves at the site. Notably, Pelliot retrieved a large number of documents from Caves 464 and 465 in the northern section of the Mogao Caves. These documents mostly date to the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), several hundred years after the Library Cave was sealed, and are written in various languages, including Tibetan, Chinese, and Old Uyghur.

The Dunhuang documents include works ranging from history, medicine and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions and philosophy including Daoism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, Judaism, and Manichaeism, are also represented. These manuscripts constitute a major resource for academic research across numerous disciplines, including history, medicine, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies. The majority of the manuscripts Pelliot took and are stored in the Bibliothèque nationale de France's collection are in Chinese (3,000 texts) and Tibetan (4,000 texts). The multitude of other languages represented in the manuscripts include Khotanese, Kuchean, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Prakrit, Hebrew, and Old Turkic.

The removal of the manuscripts has since been described by some scholars as "plunder," with the Chinese government calling for their return, including eight volumes that were repatriated by a Japanese businessman in 1997.