As we all know, China is an ancient civilization with a long history and many brilliant cultural treasures. However, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, due to the decay and incompetence of the Qing government, many precious cultural relics were plundered by the great powers, causing immeasurable losses to our country, including the cultural treasures in the Mogao Caves. Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Caves, was built in the Pre-Qin period of the Sixteen Kingdoms, and later after continuous construction, the scale is getting larger and larger, with a total of more than 700 caves, more than 40,000 square meters of murals, in addition to a large number of clay painted sculptures.
However, since the Yuan Dynasty, the Mogao Grottoes have gradually fallen into obsolescence, until a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanzhu discovered the Tibetan Scripture Cave at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and the Mogao Grottoes regained people's attention. Wang Yuanhuan was a native of Macheng, Hubei Province, who had served as a soldier in the Qing army in his early years because of his family's poverty, and after leaving the army, he became a Taoist monk and traveled around. In 1897, the 48-year-old Wang Daoist came to the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang. At this time, the Mogao Caves had been abandoned for a long time, and Wang Daoshi regarded this place as his own Taoist temple and became the only owner of this place.
After staying in the Mogao Caves, Wang Daoshi first spent a period of time cleaning up the place, and then he began to run around, painstakingly soliciting, preparing to accumulate money to repair the damaged cave. At the same time as collecting donations, he also invited yang Heqing, a local, as an assistant to help him copy the scriptures and sell them to the surrounding people to increase his income. One day in the summer of 1900, when Yang Heqing was prostrating the head of the pot in the Yongdao of Cave 16, he felt that there was an empty echo and suspected that there was a secret room. He told Wang Daoshi about this, and in the middle of the night, Wang Daoshi and Yang Heqing opened the wall and found that they were piled up with ancient objects such as writing scrolls, prints, painting banners, and bronze Buddhas, and the cave was found.
In the face of these things, Wang Daoist did not know their value, and he invited the local squires to identify them, who believed that they were meritorious items of the ancestors' Buddhism and must be properly preserved. At this time, Wang Daoshi knew the importance of the matter and hurriedly reported it. However, both the county decree of Dunhuang County and the Daotai of Quanzhou Prefecture believe that the samples of scriptures sent by Wang Daoshi are waste paper. Fortunately, Ye Changzi, a scholar in Gansu, was a cultural man, and he saw the importance of these scriptures at a glance, and suggested that these cultural relics be sent to Lanzhou for safekeeping, but the freight cost 5,000 taels of silver, and as a result, no one was willing to give this money. In the end, the Gansu provincial government gave Wang Daoshi an order to "check the scriptures and save them on the spot", and then there was no follow-up. Later, the reluctant Wang Daoshi even wrote a letter to Cixi, but eventually sank into the sea.
In 1907, the Englishman Stein came to Gansu, and he told Wang Daoshi in a very poor Chinese dialect that he admired Xuanzang very much, so he followed his footsteps, crossed the mountains and mountains from India, crossed the desert, and came here through all kinds of difficulties and dangers to seek the true scriptures. This remark seems very absurd now, but it is strange that Wang Daoshi actually believed it and was very moved. In the end, Stein exchanged 200 taels of silver for the right to enter the cave, and picked up twenty-four boxes of Buddhist scriptures and five boxes of Buddhist embroidery and paintings.
For a time, the news of Dunhuang's valuable Tibetan scriptures did not go away, and in 1908, the French sinologist Bo Xihe came and bought more than 6,000 manuscripts. Then, Japan's Orange Ruichao, Yoshikawa Koichiro, Russia's Ordenburg, the United States' Warner, and so on all came and took a large number of sutra scrolls through the hands of Wang Daoist. At this point, there is basically nothing left in the Mogao Caves, and the literature has been lost. Nowadays, if our scholars want to study the culture of the Mogao Caves, they have to go to foreign museums to find materials, which is really regrettable.