Academic Reading — Test 120

Reading passage

For travellers crossing the forbidding deserts of north-western China, the town of Dunhuang once offered a rare promise of safety. Set against the edge of the Gobi, where wind-driven sand has shaped the land for thousands of years, the settlement grew up around springs and a modest river that allowed crops to be grown in an otherwise barren region. From roughly the second century BCE, when the Han dynasty extended its authority westward, Dunhuang became a fortified frontier post and a place where merchants, soldiers and pilgrims could rest before continuing their journeys. Its position was strategic rather than accidental: here the principal trade route divided, with one branch skirting the northern margin of the Taklamakan Desert and the other tracing its southern edge. Whichever direction a caravan took, Dunhuang was the last substantial town before the emptiness ahead. The wealth that flowed through the oasis came from the long-distance commerce now commonly called the Silk Road, although that name was coined only in the nineteenth century by a German geographer and was never used by the people who actually travelled the routes. Silk was certainly carried westward, but it was only one commodity among many. Glass, gold, woollen textiles, horses, spices and precious stones all changed hands, and the goods rarely travelled the entire distance in a single shipment. Instead, items passed from one trader to the next across a relay of markets, so that a bolt of cloth might be exchanged dozens of times before reaching a distant buyer who knew nothing of its origin. Dunhuang prospered as one link in this chain, taxing and supplying the caravans that passed through it. Yet the lasting fame of Dunhuang rests less on trade than on religion. Buddhism reached China from India along these very routes, and the faith took deep root in the oasis. A few kilometres from the town, at a site known as the Mogao Caves, monks and patrons began carving sanctuaries into a cliff face from the fourth century onwards. Over the following thousand years, hundreds of these grottoes were hollowed out and decorated, financed by wealthy merchants seeking spiritual merit, by local officials and occasionally by ruling families. The walls were covered with brightly coloured murals depicting religious scenes, donors and everyday life, while the caves housed painted clay statues, some of them enormous. Because the desert air is exceptionally dry, much of this artwork has survived in remarkable condition, offering historians an unbroken visual record spanning many centuries. The most celebrated discovery at Dunhuang came not from the murals but from a small chamber that had been sealed and forgotten. Around the year 1900, a Daoist caretaker named Wang Yuanlu stumbled upon a hidden room packed with tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings on silk and printed documents. The hoard had apparently been walled up in the early eleventh century, possibly to protect it from an approaching threat, and then left untouched for nearly nine hundred years. Among the items was a copy of a Buddhist text dated to 868 CE, which is generally regarded as the earliest printed book whose date is known with certainty. The manuscripts were written in numerous languages, including Chinese, Tibetan and several tongues no longer spoken, and they covered subjects ranging from religious doctrine to contracts, letters and medical advice. News of the find spread quickly, and over the following years foreign explorers arrived to acquire large portions of the collection. Several thousand documents were removed and carried off to libraries and museums in Europe, India and elsewhere, a dispersal that remains a source of controversy. Scholars continue to debate whether this removal preserved fragile materials that might otherwise have decayed, or whether it amounted to the plundering of a nation's heritage. Whatever the verdict, the scattering of the collection meant that the study of Dunhuang became an international undertaking, with researchers in many countries working on fragments of what had once been a single library. Today Dunhuang is protected and studied with great care. The Mogao Caves were placed on a list of internationally significant sites, and conservators now monitor humidity, restrict visitor numbers and use digital photography to record every surface before it fades further. The town that once served thirsty caravans has become a centre for tourism and research, drawing visitors who come not for trade but to glimpse a vanished world. In its layered history of commerce, devotion and rediscovery, Dunhuang preserves the memory of an age when goods and ideas moved slowly but steadily across the breadth of a continent.