The writing is on the wall

More than a century after the Mogao Grottoes were discovered, it is a hard task saving them from the ravages of man and nature YANG YANG

In 1900 a Taoist priest named Wang Yuanlu found a cave in Dunhuang, Gansu province, packed with tens of thousand of volumes of Buddhist sutra.

Six years later the Hungarian-British archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein arrived in Dunhuang followed soon after by the French archaeologist Paul Pelliot. Both paid a pittance for priceless treasures from the cave, and both took photos of it and its surroundings.