Dunhuang and the Silk Road: Imperial Archaeology to Digital Reunification

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a colloquium with Susan Whitfield on the International Dunhuang Project, an international collaboration to make art from Dunhuang Road freely available on the Internet.

Panelist/Discussant: Patricia Berger, Art History, UC Berkeley

Speaker/Performer: Susan Whitfield, curator, Central Asian manuscripts at the British Library; faculty member, The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online

The discovery in 1900 — and dispersal worldwide within little over a decade— of a Library Cave hidden for almost 1000 years in the Buddhist cave temples of Dunhuang was a catalyst for China's positioning itself as a key player in a pre-modern 'global' world, the Silk Road. Dunhuang, a UNESCO world heritage site, remains at the forefront of China's bid to consolidate this through the current international Silk Road nomination. In her talk, Susan Whitfield will introduce the collections, their discovery and dispersal and the role of China in the collaborative work of the past two decades to reunite the collections digitally, through the International Dunhuang Project (http://idp.bl.uk).

Global Chinese Studies Colloquium