The Mogoa Grottoes located in the Gobi desert in Dunhuang County, Gansu Province, These are located on the precipitous face of the east ridge of the Mingsha Mountains. Their construction began in the year 366 AD and, by the time of the Tang-dynasty empress named Wu Zetian, more than one thousand rooms had been carved and painted. Those that have been preserved to this day include rooms from the dynasties of Northern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, Five Dynasties, Song, Westerm Xia, and Yuan.

The Mogoa Grottoes consist of 492 caves with the beautiful murals of 25,000 square meters (approx. 269,097 square feet) wall fresco paintings and more than 3000 painted sculptures.

The 16th grotto at Dunhuang is the one that attracted global attention and brought treasure seekers from the West. Two Song-dynasty paintings on its walls show Bodhisattvas on a journey. This is the latest evidence of use of the cave and from this it can be surmised that around the beginning of the eleventh century, when the Western Xia people invaded this area and conquered Dunhuang, monks at the Mogao Grottoes prepared to flee. They sealed the cave and never returned. For nine hundred years, the room was silently shut off from the world. In the year 1900, when the passageway was being cleaned of debris, this stone archive full of sutras, books, embroideries and sculpture was suddenly discovered. It had some 50,000 items in it and these were later found to include not only a large number of Buddhist sutras, but also Daoist works and works of the Confucian canon, in addition to historical records, poetry, literature, information on geography, population, business accounts, calendars and so on. It was discovered to be a full library containing material that documented some ten dynasties, from the Jin in the 4th century to the Song dynasty. The discovery of the hidden 'sutra cave' was a tremendous and startling event for both Chinese and foreign scholars around the world. It attracted extreme attention and as a result was quickly plundered by scholars from England, France, America, Russia, and Japan. In 1943 a Dunhuang Arts Academy was established which began to restore the cave and protect and research its remaining contents.

There are five levels in all to the Mogao Grottoes, which range from north to south across roughly 1,600 meters. The largest grottoes are 40 meters high and 30 meters square. The smallest are less than one foot. Dunhuang studies have become an established field of scholarship in many institutions by now, and countless numbers of books and PhD theses have been written about the history and artwork of this extraordinary place. Rather than try to cover the scope of this 'museum' here, the reader is encouraged to go and see for himself.

Despite years of erosion, the murals are still brightly colored, with clear lines. Through pictures of different styles and schools drawn in different historical periods, they tell Buddhist stories and ways as well as life in the secular world. All these, plus a largest quantity of Buddhist sutras and relics kept in the caves have provided valuable material for a study of ancient China's politics, economy, and culture and arts, as well as its science and technology, military affairs, and religion, documenting national history as well as cultural exchanges between China and the world.