About Dunhuang Research

Dunhuang Research

Dunhuang Research (Dunhuang Yanjiu) is a scholarly journal published by the Dunhuang Academy in Lanzhou, Gansu, founded in 1983. Issued bimonthly, it is the core Chinese journal for Dunhuang studies, publishing research on the Mogao Grottoes and other Dunhuang-area sites, the manuscripts from the Library Cave discovered in 1900, Dunhuang art, Buddhism, history, languages and conservation science. The journal anchors an international field that draws scholars from China, Japan, Britain, France and beyond, and it is a core-listed Chinese humanities journal — the house periodical of the institution that guards the most famous Buddhist cave complex in the world.

The field it serves: Dunhuang studies

Dunhuang studies — Dunhuangxue — is the interdisciplinary study of the Dunhuang oasis on the ancient Silk Road in northwestern China, and above all of the Mogao Grottoes, the cave temples carved into a cliff some 25 kilometres southeast of the city. The complex comprises 735 caves, of which 492 are painted, preserving more than 2,000 coloured sculptures and some 45,000 square metres of murals created by worshippers over a period of about a thousand years; the first caves were dug in 366 CE as places of Buddhist meditation and worship. In 1900 the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, self-appointed caretaker of the site, discovered the sealed Library Cave — Cave 17 — containing a vast cache of manuscripts. The contents were dispersed around the world, the largest collections ending up in Beijing, London, Paris and Berlin, and an international scholarly field grew up around them, now coordinated in part through the International Dunhuang Project. Dunhuang studies today covers history, geography, archaeology and art, together with languages, religions and conservation. A field so defined needs a journal of record in the place where the caves are; since 1983, that journal has been Dunhuang Yanjiu.

The Dunhuang Academy

The journal's publisher is the institution created to protect the caves. The Dunhuang Academy began in 1944 as the National Research Institute on Dunhuang Art, established after the painter Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian) had arrived at Mogao in 1941 to repair and copy the murals — exhibiting his copies in 1943 and elevating the artworks to national prominence — and after the historian Xiang Da persuaded the senior official Yu Youren to propose a permanent institute to prevent further destruction. Renamed the Research Institute on Cultural Relics of Dunhuang in 1950, it took its present name, Dunhuang Academy, in 1984, a year after the journal's founding. The Academy is a government-sponsored national comprehensive institution responsible for overseeing the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987: it manages the site day to day, runs its conservation and research projects, guides visitors, and collaborates internationally to increase digital access to the artefacts. The journal is edited within this custodial mission — scholarship produced by, and for, the people who conserve the caves.

Foundation in 1983

The journal was founded in 1983, as Dunhuang studies entered a period of rapid institutional growth in reform-era China. That same year saw a national academic conference on Dunhuang studies whose proceedings — including a volume on cave art edited by Duan Wenjie, the Academy's leading scholar of the murals — were published by the Dunhuang institute in Lanzhou. A bimonthly journal gave the field something a conference could not: a continuous, cumulative record. Research on the caves and manuscripts could now appear in a dedicated Chinese periodical, issue by issue, instead of scattering across general history, art and archaeology journals. The Academy's research programme overall has produced more than 150 books and 2,000 articles — described as the largest body of scholarly publication in Dunhuang studies — and the journal is the periodical spine of that output.

Scope: caves, manuscripts, art and conservation

The journal publishes across the whole range of its field. Its core territories are the Mogao Grottoes and the other Dunhuang-area sites such as the Yulin Caves; the manuscripts from the Library Cave, in their many languages and scripts; Dunhuang art, including mural painting and sculpture; Buddhism and the other religions that passed along the Silk Road; the history and historical geography of the Dunhuang region; the languages of the manuscripts; and conservation science — the study of how painted caves survive. The field's own development, as the Academy describes it, has run from early documentation, picture interpretation and content verification toward cave archaeology, Buddhist art, historical geography, ethnic religions and culture, Buddhist literature, folklore, music and dance, and the histories of technology and transportation; the journal's pages trace that widening. A characteristic citation shows the grain of the work: a 2006 article in the journal's sixth issue of that year, on the relationship between Dunhuang's popular character forms (suzi) and manuscript studies, is cited in international scholarship on the founding of Chinese manuscript studies as a discipline.

Conservation science: the journal's applied wing

Uniquely among humanities journals, Dunhuang Research serves a field in which scholarship and physical preservation are inseparable. The Mogao Caves were opened to the public in 1979, receiving 27,000 visitors that year; by 2014 the Academy was handling up to a million visitors annually, and it has conducted extensive carrying-capacity research and built digital exhibition centres to relieve pressure on the caves themselves. Conservation research — on mural pigments, cave microclimates, sand and water damage, and digital recording — therefore appears in the journal alongside philology and art history. The result is a periodical that reads, in places, like an engineering log for a World Heritage site and, in others, like a journal of medieval studies, because for Dunhuang both are the same enterprise.

An international field, a Chinese journal

Dunhuang studies has been international since the manuscripts were scattered in the early twentieth century: collections in London, Paris, Berlin, St Petersburg and Kyoto made scholars in Britain, France, Germany, Russia and Japan partners and rivals in the field. The journal, though published in Chinese from Lanzhou, addresses that whole community, and is described as anchoring a field that draws scholars from China, Japan, Britain, France and beyond. The Academy's wider collaborations run in the same direction — a 2016 memorandum with the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a research centre for Dunhuang studies established jointly with Peking University, directed by the Academy's head Zhao Shengliang with the Peking University professor Rong Xinjiang, aimed at nurturing high-level research talent with a focus on the Dunhuang documents and grotto art. The journal stands at the centre of this network as its Chinese-language periodical of record.

Publication rhythm and form

The journal is issued bimonthly — six issues a year — in Chinese, in the standard format of a Chinese Academy-affiliated humanities periodical: substantial research articles with the apparatus of notes and references that Dunhuang scholarship requires, since its arguments are typically built from manuscript readings, mural iconography and archaeological data that must be shown, not merely asserted. Its editorial home is with the Dunhuang Academy, whose headquarters and library are in Lanzhou's orbit and whose field station stands at the Mogao site itself; articles move between those two poles, written by Academy researchers working on the caves and by specialists at universities and institutes across China and abroad. Six issues a year, sustained since 1983, amount to more than four decades of continuous record — a shelf of volumes in which the modern study of Dunhuang can be followed from the reform era to the digital age.

Standing and citation

Within China's evaluation systems the journal is a core-listed Chinese humanities journal — the national designation for leading periodicals in its class — and it is routinely cited in international Dunhuang scholarship, where references to Dunhuang yanjiu by year, issue and page form part of the standard apparatus of articles and monographs on the manuscripts and caves. Based in Lanzhou, the provincial capital of Gansu, near the Academy's Dunhuang field station at the caves themselves, it unites the two geographies of its field: the desert site where the evidence is, and the city where the scholarship is edited. Founded in 1983 by the institution that has guarded Mogao since 1944, Dunhuang Research remains what its founding promised — the core journal of Dunhuang studies, and the running record of humanity's long conversation with the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.