By Guy Rubin, Managing Partner of Imperial Tours

Centuries ago, in a cliff-face in the midst of China’s vast Taklamakan desert, artists hollowed, sculpted and painted 492 caves, creating more than 450,000 square feet of spectacular murals. That is more than 30 times the mural area of the Sistine Chapel. But whereas the Sistine Chapel was painted over a few years, the works at the Mogao Caves began in the fourth century A.D. and were completed over the next millennium. 

Given that over that thousand-year period competing imperial dynasties, local aristocracies and even foreign nations conquered the nearby city of Dunhuang, it would have been an astounding feat, perhaps even a miracle, for the painted caves to have merely survived the subsequent wars and mayhem. However, the Mogao caves – in spite of the unavoidable cultural differences between these different religions and peoples - did not just survive, they actually prospered through this period. For although rival  dynasties, families, tribes, religions and nationalities dominated its surrounding area, the sheer magnificence of the caves was so overwhelming as to prevail over any cultural, religious and political differences in its successive rulers. 

Rather than destroy all vestiges of their predecessors, a typical strategy of the time, a new ruler would instead fund local artists to incorporate his image into the mythological chorus of the caves’ hallowed murals. The ruler would thereby use the caves’ beauty to legitimize his new administration. In this way, art served as a bridge uniting different cultures; the murals provided an artistic space in which alien cultures could make compromises to each other and salve potential sources of enmity. They were used to finesse contradictions between rich and poor, between Confucianists and Buddhists, and between Tibetans, Han and other ethnicities.  As such, the murals of the Mogao Caves, bespeaking a universal harmony, herald the triumph of transcendent aesthetic beauty over the destructive dynamic of temporal orders.

Compare this example of cultural intercourse and compromise with another of Dunhuang’s famous sites – the remnants of the earliest sections of the Great Wall. This 16-foot-high wall of stamped earth, reinforced with wood, appears as spectacularly random in the midst of the world’s second-largest desert. Over 2,000 years old, this sinuous fortification, as weathered and cracked as the gargantuan rock formations it purports to divide, now seems more a product of nature than of humanity. Even though the power and scale of the seemingly infinite desert mock the Great Wall’s pretensions to mastery, it is an achievement for this human endeavor to have been constructed and have survived for so long in such a hostile environment.

On the one hand, the Mogao Caves create a space for cultures to meet, while on the other, the Great Wall was intended to keep cultures apart. From its inception thousands of years ago, the Great Wall has been a touchstone for debate about how China should deal with cultures and peoples alien, and perhaps hostile, to it. Opponents of the Great Wall typically argued that peace could be attained through economic, social and political engagement with China’s borderland tribes. When this policy of engagement was preponderant, the borderlands were peaceful. However, at these times, proponents of the Great Wall argued that Chinese prestige was suffering as a result of China’s continual concessions to the border tribes, and so the pendulum swung the other way.

Let us leave the ancient remnants of this Great Wall to travel along the local trade route that led Chinese culture to clash for its first time with a foreign civilization. The Silk Road brought great economic and military benefits to China. The westward flow of goods from China fostered terrific fortunes; exports of silks, teas and jade products, as well as of brilliant inventions of paper, gunpowder, the compass and other things reaped unimaginable financial rewards. The eastward movement of goods most importantly introduced the fantastically swift horses of Central Asia’s Ferghana Valley, which facilitated China’s regional military supremacy. Furs, gold, gems and spices were also highly appreciated.

However, the benefits of such exchange came at a cost, namely commerce and contact with alien peoples, concepts and ideologies. The homegrown religions of Daoism and Confucianism were threatened by the eastward spread of Buddhism. Han Chinese were forced to deal with the growing military threat of Tibet and the semi-nomadic fierce tribes of the western regions. Meanwhile the rapid economic growth of the Chinese Empire was drawing a greater diversity and number of peoples and thought systems into its sphere of influence. There was a clear and present danger that this crucible of heterogeneous admixtures could so overheat as to blow the Chinese Empire asunder.

So, how did governors of Dunhuang, the wealthiest and most significant of the borderland areas, deal with the challenge of managing so much diversity? To understand the factors of their successful strategy, you should first put yourself in the saddle of a traveler of the time. 

The first time you journey to Dunhuang, the closest you will probably come to the vicissitudes of the desert will be in the flickering shadow of your airplane as it fleets across the pitiless expanses. However, not far from Dunhuang, at the Dunes of the Singing Sands, you can mount a camel and recreate the experience of traveling along the Silk Road 2,000 years ago.  Even when you are lulled into reverie by your proud-nosed camel’s lolling sway, you will still feel the heat of the sun parching your skin. In your imagination, you might see yourself within a large caravan of traders. There may even be a protecting contingent of soldiers accompanying your group. 

However, it is early morning and the hum of the tall, shifting sands fills you with foreboding.  You open your eyes to see the dunes rise out of the air before you; instantly you are dwarfed by the immensity of the desert. One foul sandstorm is all that is required for you to lose your group, your family and your bearings. You recall the stark warning of Fa Xian, that famous monk of the fourth century A.D., who writes from this same spot, “the only signs of a road are the skeletons of the dead.  Wherever they lie, there lies the road to India.”  Though you have heard tell of brigands along the way, you now feel all too keenly that your greatest threat lies not from other people, but from nature itself. 

The perennial threat of the desert hung over every oasis town, inhabitant and traveler. This constant reminder of life’s transience and death’s arbitrariness acted as a break on any dispute; it added a broader dimension to life along the Silk Road. Although this factor naturally calmed social unrest, Dunhuang’s governors did not need to rely on it.  At any given moment, they could enforce their will through a forceful military presence.  The threat, implied by their strong garrison, was softened by conciliatory cultural policies. It is the syncretic give and take of this cultural policy of engagement that is exhibited in the murals of the Mogao Caves.

In the shadowy caves (take a flashlight with you), there is no apparent contradiction between the thousands of Buddhas painted on the lower walls and the Daoist symbols painted on the ceiling. Nor is there one between the Confucianist veneration of ancestors on one wall and a representation of the historic Buddha running away from his family on another. Instead of analytically challenging components of each others’ belief systems, the artists have assimilated all aspects of the faiths in a rich mythological tapestry. What appears irrational to one person will surely seem inspiring to another – both will agree that the representations are dazzlingly rich and beautiful.

George Bernard Shaw commented that we learn from history that we do not learn from history. As we enter an age which the historian Samuel Huntington has characterized as being afflicted with the clash of competing civilizations, we do well to remember that civilizations have clashed many times before. They did so along the Silk Road approximately two thousand years ago, and the principle fruit of this encounter were hundreds of cave paintings of spell-binding harmony and beauty.