BOOK REVIEWS
333
Art Treasures of Dunhuang, comp. by the Dunhuang Institute for Cultural Relics Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1981, 254 pp., 84 col. pls. & 84 b. & w. figs.
The preface of this book is by the first, and only recently retired, Director of the Dunhuang Institute for Cultural Relics Chang Shuhong. It offers a brief history of the Mogao grottoes or the Cave-Temples of the Thousand Buddhas at the Dunhuang oasis in the Gobi Desert of Gansu Province. A longer essay, by Shi Pingting and Shu Xue, follows. In this, more attention is given to description of the mural art which is the chief glory of the site. Although architecture (imitated in the rock-cut caves) and sculpture are also mentioned as other arts important to the temples, less is said about them. Finally, the vicissitudes of this long-abandoned centre of Buddhist worship since the Middle Ages are described.
The colour reproductions are chronologically arranged and compare well to those in recent Japanese publications which are considerably more expensive than this Hong Kong printed volume. However, this more modestly scaled production is intended for a less specialized readership and does not illustrate the murals as completely as the multiple-volumed works from Japan. One cannot obtain the impression of how a total cave complex looks from a few selections of details, especially as there are no views of caves as a whole and sculpture is separated to follow the wall-painting section.
Most useful are the notes for each plate, compiled by Wan Gengyu and Huang Wenkun. The content of each scene, and especially of narratives from Buddha's pre-birth legends or jataka tales, is given. Brief as these paragraphs are, they are the result of considerable new research and contribute greatly to both aesthetic pleasure and intellectual understanding in our viewing of the plates.
Finally, a five-page chronology of the caves ends the book.
The English translations of the original Chinese texts are quite good, although perhaps still reading as translations rather than as well-written English language.