Buddhist frescoes

The unfortunate thing is photography wasn't allowed in the Mogao caves. Each cave is painted with elaborate scenes from Buddhist fables, the whole cave is painted with thousand Buddhas like wall paper. In the centre there would be Buddhist sculptures of their deities. It is fascinating. Numerous foreign explorers would come in the early days to take away the frescoes. They would carved them out of their rock surface. There used to be tens of thousands of sutras or religious writings. A greedy monk sold a lot of them to these explorers, chief among them, a German, Aurel Stein who carted away museum size trove back to Dresden which was bombed by the Allies. All the stuff he took from Dunhuang was incinerated by the bombing. An early convert to Buddhism went to India to study the religion and came home to translate everything he learned into Chinese and hence this trove of sutras. Over the years more and more monks joined and painted and sculpted and then you have the Mogao caves sitting at a very strategic position along the ancient Silk road. While this picture is not from the Dunhuang caves but from a temple in Yunnan. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures but I did take this one and was reprimanded for doing so. I'm glad I did.