Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes was founded in the pre-Qin period of the Sixteen Kingdoms, and has since been built by the Northern Dynasty, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Western Xia, Yuan and other dynasties, forming a huge scale, there are 735 caves, 45,000 square meters of murals, 2415 clay painted sculptures, is the world's largest and richest Buddhist art shrine, in 1987 was listed as a world cultural heritage. Regrettably, however, the more than 40,000 precious scriptures stored in the Mogao Caves were lost overseas at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and all this was related to a Taoist monk named Wang Yuanzhen.
In 1907, Wang Daoshi sold more than 13,000 sutra scrolls to Stein in England for 700 taels of silver; a year later he sold 5,500 fine sutra scrolls to Bo Xihe in France at the price of 500 taels of silver; four years later, Japan's Tachibana Ruichao and others bought more than 400 sutra scrolls from Wang Daoists with 350 taels of silver; in 1914, Wang Daoist sold more than 500 sutra scrolls to Oldenburg in Russia. Incomplete statistics show that in just a few years, nearly 20,000 precious cultural relics have been lost overseas from the hands of Wang Daoshi. Wang Daoshi was also much insulted for this, and people called him a rat with a blind eye and a forgetfulness of righteousness.
Wang Daoshi was born in 1849 and served as a soldier in the Green Camp of the Qing Army as an adult. After leaving the Green Camp, he was ordained as a Taoist monk and traveled as far as Xinjiang. In the autumn of 1897, Wang Daoshi came to the Mogao Caves. At this time, the Mogao Grottoes were dilapidated because they had been unmanaged for a long time, and Wang Daoshi became the only master of the place and began to take charge of the desolate cultural treasure house. That is to say, from this day on, Wang Daoshi's body was destined to have a name that he could not afford. But we all seem to be wrong to blame this little person who should have looked different.
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. While collecting donations, he also invited Yang Mou, a local, as an assistant to help him copy the scriptures and sell them to the surrounding people to increase their income. One day in the summer of 1900, when Yang Mou was prostrating the head of the pot on the north wall of the cave YongDao, he felt that there was an empty echo and suspected that there was a secret room. He told Wang Daoshi about this, and the Mogao Cave was discovered.
Although Wang Daoist did not have much culture, he realized the importance of these sutras. He took two scrolls of scriptures from the cave, and then walked 50 miles to the county seat of Dunhuang, where he found the county commander Yan Ze, hoping that he would send someone to keep these scriptures properly. Unexpectedly, Yan Ze was a person who did not learn and had no skills, only gold and silver treasures in his eyes, these two precious scriptures were undoubtedly like waste paper in his eyes, and he rudely drove away wang Daoist. However, Wang Daoshi was not discouraged, and he picked two boxes of scripture scrolls from the Tibetan scripture cave, drove the donkey for more than 800 miles to Suzhou, and found the Daotai Tingdong, who was then the Ansu Military Preparation Road. The Lord Tingdong browsed it and finally concluded that the writing on the scrolls was not as good as his calligraphy, and that was it.
After returning from Suzhou, Wang Daoshi wrote a letter to Empress Dowager Cixi reflecting the situation in the Cave, but did not receive an echo. From the day the cave was discovered, Wang Daoshi traveled for 6 years for the safety of the scriptures and did everything that he, a small man, could do, but his efforts were not rewarded, and the officials of the Qing government paid no attention to these precious scriptures. After 6 years of traveling, Wang Daoshi finally despaired, so when the Englishman Stein appeared as a Buddhist believer, he sold him more than 13,000 sutras at one time, and then he could not receive them, which eventually led to the outflow of tens of thousands of precious sutras. The silver two obtained from the sale of scriptures were not appropriated by Wang Daoshi for himself, but were all used in the repair project of the Mogao Caves. Ask yourself, if you were a Daoist monk, would you be able to do better than him under the circumstances at that time? Tens of thousands of scriptures were outflowed, and the responsibility of the Qing government was greater than anyone else, and it was obviously unfair to blame all the charges on Wang Daoshi, and he, a small person, could not afford it.