English edition of Digital Dunhuang officially launched

Digital Dunhuang, an online resource database, became available in English from Sept. 20, 2017, marking a giant leap towards global sharing of the stunning Dunhuang resources.

More than 120 scholars and artists from Britain, France, Italy, America, South Korea, Japan, and Brazil, as well as China's mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan attended the launch ceremony, after which they also discussed the Dunhuang school of painting, its heritage and innovation.

The Dunhuang Caves, included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, are a treasure house of ancient Chinese civilization.

The goal of Digital Dunhuang is to pool massive amounts of data related to the Dunhuang Caves, famous for their grottoes with ancient wall paintings, that have already been available or will be in the near future, including images, videos, and archaeological and protection materials.

Based on more than 20 years of arduous work in digitalizing the artworks, Digital Dunhuang is a large and integrated digital resource and service platform for Dunhuang wall paintings and research results.

Stored in a structured and orderly way, these resources are permanently preserved for sharing with scholars and the public around the world. This is another effort to inherit and promote the splendid ancient Chinese civilization.

Dunhuang Academy has so far completed digitalizing wall paintings of 150 caves and accumulated more than 300 TB of data. The amount will continue to increase as the work continues. Dunhuang documents and related research are also abundant.

A great quantity of literature scattered around the world also needs to be linked or included in Digital Dunhuang.

Digital Dunhuang in Chinese, which went online on May 1, 2016, provides high-resolution digital resources and virtual tours of 30 Dunhuang caves carved during the Northern Wei (386-534), Western Wei (535-556), Northern Zhou (557-581), Sui (581-618), Tang (618-907), Five Dynasties (907-960), and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties.