Dunhuang Youth Blend Ancient Craft and Modern Tech

Facing smoke-blackened murals inside Cave 454 at the Mogao Caves, a young restorer receives a lesson that has echoed across generations. “More than 1,000 years ago a craftsman poured his whole heart into these paintings,” Water Biwen, deputy director of the Dunhuang Academy’s conservation technology service center, tells post-00s restorer Tang Zuzu. “Now the murals have fallen ill. When you repair them, it is as if your eyes meet his across time and space.”

The scene, reported by People Daily as part of the “Cultural China Tour” interview series, captures a quiet transformation underway in one of the world’s great heritage sites: a rising generation of Chinese restorers is pairing centuries-old techniques with new materials, digital tools, and now an international standard, to safeguard murals that have endured for a millennium.

Why It Matters

The Mogao Caves, carved into cliffs on the edge of the Gobi Desert in Gansu province, span more than ten centuries of construction. They hold 735 caves, roughly 45,000 square meters of murals, and more than 2,400 painted sculptures—a living record of Silk Road civilization. Those treasures face relentless natural aging from wind-blown sand and swings in temperature and humidity, producing a familiar catalog of diseases: flaking, salt decay, hollowing, cracking, powdering, and smoke damage.

How China tackles those threats matters well beyond Dunhuang. In 2026, an international standard led and drafted by the Dunhuang Academy was approved for development, becoming the first global standard in mural protection.

A Hard Case in Cave 454

Three caves are under active restoration: No. 126, No. 169, and No. 454, each with different construction eras, mural themes, and damage profiles. Caves 126 and 169 both suffer compound diseases—cracking, hollowing, salt decay, powdering, and mud staining—across more than 100 square meters of murals each, according to the People Daily report.

Cave 454 is the hardest. Built around 974–976 AD under Cao Yangong, the fifth jiedushi of the Cao clan Guiyijun during the Northern Song dynasty, its murals exceed 500 square meters and include sutra illustrations, donor portraits, Buddhist narratives, and rare secular scenes of ancients playing chess. In the Qing dynasty, locals used the cave as a folk “Niangniang Temple,” burning incense for long periods until thick soot covered the paintings. Combined with hollowing damage, the cave was kept closed for long-term protection.

Smoke removal here demanded a new approach. “The smoke damage in Cave 454 is unlike the smoke-affected murals we treated previously at Tibet’s three major monasteries and Gansu’s Labrang Monastery,” Water Biwen said. Earlier methods relied on chemical softening and mechanical clearing, but lab tests found those chemicals caused incense ash to blot and spread, leaving surfaces gray and risking the pigment layer.

The team turned to a different idea. “We took a try-it-and-see attitude, screened sponges of different materials, and found nanosponge is soft, and its physical adsorption does not strip pigment particles,” Water Biwen said. After the Cave 454 project launched in October 2024, the flexible sponge adsorption cleaning technology was widely applied in May 2025, and most smoke cleaning was completed—restoring obscured lines and colors.

The Next Generation

The Dunhuang Academy’s conservation center now has more than 100 restorers, two-thirds of them young or middle-aged workers under 40. Post-95s have become the backbone of the business, and post-00s staff keep joining—Tang Zuzu among them.

His path into restoration was deliberately slow. “When I first joined the institute, I wasn’t handed restoration tools to directly work on murals,” Tang said. “My main work at first was doing data records.” Only after mastering documentation did he begin simple supporting tasks, from cleaning mud stains to helping senior colleagues prepare restoration materials. New restorers undergo at least three years of systematic training on simulated test blocks before touching lower-difficulty real murals.

That caution reflects a core ethic. “A pigment layer that has survived a thousand years—if it falls off due to my negligence, that is an irrecoverable loss,” Tang said. “The burden is heavy and tolerates no impatience.”

Water Biwen frames the guiding principle bluntly: “A restorer is not a creator—no secondary beautification, no subjective fabrication. Our only duty is to guard the authentic historical information of the artifact.” He sums it up as “treat the illness, don’t do cosmetic surgery; reinforce, don’t alter appearance.” Tang Dynasty red pigments that oxidized into warm brown, he notes, are themselves time’s evidence and must not be forced back to an imagined original color.

Old Craft, New Science

The academy’s approach is not technology for its own sake. The flaking-repair technique still in use dates to the 1950s, when the Dunhuang Academy invited Czech experts and adapted European fresco restoration craft: injecting material behind flaking pigment, softening it, and rolling it back into place with soft cotton balls. The core logic has held for more than 70 years while materials and details kept improving.

What has changed is the diagnostic toolkit. As early as 2007, the academy deployed in-situ non-destructive analysis and built China’s first mobile laboratory for archaeological sites, moving equipment to the mural rather than removing samples—“the artifact stays still; the equipment moves.” X-ray fluorescence and Raman spectroscopy were already in frontline use when Water Biwen joined in 2012. For wood-bone clay sculptures, X-ray inspection now works like a CT scan, revealing internal armature rot without harm.

Restorers themselves are clear that new tools must earn their place. “Mature traditional techniques, tested by decades of practice, are not easily eliminated; new materials and technologies must undergo sufficient testing and the test of time,” Water Biwen said. “Cultural relic protection means seeking development through inheritance.”

This blend of practice and rigor helps explain why the academy has undertaken 128 provincial and ministerial research projects and above since 2019, tackling what Chinese reports describe as bottleneck technologies in tomb mural protection, painted sculpture armature replacement, sandstone cave temple weathering prevention, and comprehensive earthen-site conservation.

Setting a Global Standard

Dunhuang’s accumulated experience is now shaping how the world talks about mural damage. As China Daily reported, the International Working Group on Mural Conservation Standards, under the ISO Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage Conservation (ISO/TC 349), was established on March 26, 2026. It is led by China, with former Dunhuang Academy director Su Bomin as convener, and brings together experts from 15 countries.

The standard, “Conservation of cultural heritage — Mural paintings — Classification of deterioration,” is developed by experts from 11 countries including China, the United States, Italy, and France. It establishes a unified system for classifying mural deterioration, addressing longstanding problems caused by inconsistent terminology, and classifies damage into optical change, physical deformation, deposits, material loss, structural damage, biological deterioration, and chemical degradation.

Technology is expanding the frontier further. Wang Wanfu, deputy director of the academy’s conservation research department, said AI can process large volumes of data, including high-resolution images, to catch early signs of damage invisible to the naked eye—enabling timely intervention. In restoration, AI can analyze styles across periods and generate multiple options for experts to evaluate. China has also set up a China-Kyrgyzstan joint laboratory on cultural heritage conservation under the Belt and Road Initiative.

What to Watch

The broader context is one of continuity. Since Chang Shuhong hung the Dunhuang Art Research Institute sign in 1944, generations have upheld the “Mogao Spirit” of perseverance, dedication, and pioneering. The academy’s “Digital Dunhuang” project has captured murals in 300 caves, stitched images for 200, and produced more than 500 terabytes of results.

Yet the guiding ethos remains conservative by design. Physical murals, Water Biwen insists, must guard the traces of time—digitization and virtual restoration belong to research and display, not to the wall itself. For the young restorers of Cave 454, the task ahead is to keep the line between stewardship and creation intact, preserving a thousand-year-old conversation for the centuries still to come.