China for the first time has invited foreign experts to help with plans to protect the Dunhuang grottos, a world cultural heritage site in northwest China's Gansu Province.
Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Studies Institute, said the 5-to-10-year plan had utilized ideas from American and Australian experts.
Fan said they had spent five years drawing up the plan and hoped to keep grottos in their original state while attracting more tourists.
He said protection of the grottos was a vast and methodical project, involving such disciplines as engineering, meteorology and chemistry.
In 1900, a Taoist priest discovered a cave at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang which contained more than 50,000 sutras, documents and paintings from nearly 10 dynasties in the 4th to the11th centuries.
The Mogao Grottoes were included by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the World Heritage List in 1987.
International forum on grotto art opens
An international seminar on Maijishan grotto art and Buddhist culture along the Silk Road is being held in Lanzhou University in northwestern China's Gansu Province.
The forum marks the 1,600 anniversary of the building of the Maijishan grottos, Zheng Binglin, director of Dunhuang Studies Institute under Lanzhou University, said at the opening of the meeting Monday. Some 120 Chinese and overseas experts attended the opening.
The participants will visit grottos along the Silk Road and discuss the artistic value of those grottos.
Maijishan grottos, 50 km southeast of Tianshui city of northwestern China's Gansu Province, house a large number of murals and sculptures dating from the 4th-15th century. Maijishan grottos are China's most famous grotto complexes along with Mogao grottos, Yungang grottos and Longmen grottos, respectively located in Gansu, Shanxi and Henan provinces.
Zheng said the meeting aims to promote the communication between domestic and overseas experts on grotto art and China's grotto studies.
(Edited from Xinhua News Agency July 18, 2002)
