The Mogao Caves, or Mogao Grottoes (Chinese: 莫高窟; pinyin: Mògāo kū) (also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas and Dunhuang Caves) form a system of 492 temples 25 km (15.5 miles) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis strategically located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 1,000 years. The first caves were dug out 366 AD as places of Buddhist meditation and worship. The Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist grottoes and, along with Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes, are one of the three famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites of China.

In the early 1900s, a Chinese Taoist named Wang Yuanlu appointed himself guardian of some of these temples. Wang discovered a walled up area behind one side of a corridor leading to a main cave. Behind the wall was a small cave stuffed with an enormous hoard of manuscripts dating from 406 to 1002 AD. These included old hemp paper scrolls in Chinese and many other languages, paintings on hemp, silk or paper, numerous damaged figurines of Buddhas, and other Buddhist paraphernalia. The subject matter in the scrolls covers diverse material. Along with the expected Buddhist canonical works are original commentaries, apocryphal works, workbooks, books of prayers, Confucian works, Taoist works, Nestorian Christian works, works from the Chinese government, administrative documents, anthologies, glossaries, dictionaries, and calligraphic exercises. Wang sold the majority of them to Aurel Stein in 1907 for 220 pounds.

 
The travel of Zhang Qian to the West, Mogao caves, 618-712 AD.Rumors of this discovery brought several European expeditions to the area by 1910. These included a joint British/Indian group led by Aurel Stein (who took hundreds of copies of the Diamond Sutra because he was unable to read Chinese), a French expedition under Paul Pelliot, a Japanese expedition under Otani Kozui which arrived after the Chinese government’s forces[clarification needed] and a Russian expedition under Sergei F. Oldenburg which found the least. Pelloit was interested in the more unusual and exotic of Wang’s manuscripts such as those dealing with the administration and financing of the monastery and associated lay men’s groups. These manuscripts survived only because they formed a type of palimpsest in which the Buddhist texts (the target of the preservation effort) were written on the opposite side of the paper. The remaining Chinese manuscripts were sent to Peking (Beijing) at the order of the Chinese government. Wang embarked on an ambitious refurbishment of the temples, funded in part by solicited donations from neighboring towns and in part by donations from Stein and Pelliot.The image of the Chinese astronomy Dunhuang map is one of the many important artifacts found on the scrolls.

Today, the site is the subject of an ongoing archaeological project. The Mogao Caves became one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1987. From 1988 to 1995 a further 248 caves were discovered to the North of the 487 caves known since the early 1900s.

莫高窟（Dunhuang Caves）俗稱千佛洞，被譽(yù)為20世紀(jì)最有價(jià)值的文化發(fā)現(xiàn)、“東方盧浮宮”，坐落在河西走廊西端的敦煌，以精美的壁畫(huà)和塑像聞名于世。它始建于十六國(guó)的前秦時(shí)期，歷經(jīng)十六國(guó)、北朝、隋、唐、五代、西夏、元等歷代的興建，形成巨大的規(guī)模，現(xiàn)有洞窟735個(gè)，壁畫(huà)4.5萬(wàn)平方米、泥質(zhì)彩塑2415尊，是世界上現(xiàn)存規(guī)模最大、內(nèi)容最豐富的佛教藝術(shù)圣地。近代發(fā)現(xiàn)的藏經(jīng)洞，內(nèi)有5萬(wàn)多件古代文物，由此衍生專門(mén)研究藏經(jīng)洞典籍和敦煌藝術(shù)的學(xué)科——敦煌學(xué)。1961年，被公布為第一批全國(guó)重點(diǎn)文物保護(hù)單位之一。1987年，被列為世界文化遺產(chǎn)。