The Flying Apsaras of Dunhuang: A Thousand Years on the Silk Road

At the western end of the Hexi Corridor, where the Silk Road once split into its northern and southern routes around the Taklamakan Desert, sits Dunhuang — an oasis town that grew into one of the great crossroads of the ancient world. For a thousand years, monks, merchants, and travellers paused here, and on the cliffs outside the town they left one of the richest bodies of art ever made: the Mogao Caves.

A Thousand Years of Caves

The Mogao Caves — Mògāokū, the "Peerless Caves" — are carved into a sandstone cliff about 25 kilometres southeast of Dunhuang, in what is now Gansu province. According to tradition, the first cave was cut in 366 CE, when a monk named Le Zun had a vision of a thousand Buddhas shining in golden light and dug a meditation cell into the rock.

Others followed for the next thousand years, from the fourth to the fourteenth century. By the time the last cave was painted, the cliffs held hundreds of shrines — today around 735 caves survive, holding some 45,000 square metres of murals and more than 2,000 painted clay sculptures. It is the largest and best-preserved treasury of Buddhist cave art in the world.

Who Are the Flying Apsaras?

Among the murals' many figures, none is more beloved than the feitian — the flying apsaras. They arrived in China with Buddhism, descendants of the apsaras and gandharvas of Indian art: celestial beings who scatter flowers and make music to honour the Buddha.

Over the centuries they changed shape. The earliest feitian are sturdy and Indian; later ones grow slender and Central Asian; by the height of the Tang dynasty they are unmistakably Chinese — light, lyrical figures whose long ribbons and trailing scarves give the illusion of flight without wings. They play lutes and flutes, scatter petals, and spiral through the cave ceilings in great processions of music and colour.

The ribbons are the key. Chinese painters gave the feitian streaming sashes instead of wings, and it is the ribbons — not the bodies — that carry the motion. It is one of the most graceful solutions to depicting flight in the history of art.

The Library Cave

In 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu, caretaker of the caves, noticed a crack in a corridor wall and opened a hidden chamber that had been sealed for nearly nine hundred years. Cave 17 — the "Library Cave" — held tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, and textiles, dating from the fifth to the eleventh century.

What made the find extraordinary was its languages. The documents were written in Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, Uyghur, Sogdian, and more — evidence of how many peoples passed through Dunhuang and left their mark. Among them was a printed copy of the Diamond Sutra dated 868 CE, often described as the world's oldest complete printed and dated book.

The discovery turned Dunhuang from a local shrine into a global subject of study — the site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, cared for by the Dunhuang Academy.

A Meeting of Cultures

Dunhuang's art is the record of a meeting. Buddhism travelled east from India along the Silk Road, carrying its gods and its stories; Central Asian painters brought their pigments and their sense of space; Chinese artists gave it all a new grace and a new palette of mineral blues, greens, reds, and gold. The result is not any single tradition but a conversation between them — one that lasted a thousand years and never quite ended.

The Feitian on Your Table

We carry a small part of that conversation into our Dunhuang collection, where the feitian leave the cave walls for the tea table.

They are small pieces of a very old story — the story of flight, music, and the meeting of cultures that Dunhuang has told for more than a thousand years.