Caves, a tiger hunt and psalms: Five must-sees at ACM’s Dunhuang show

SINGAPORE – The Asian Civilisations Museum (ACM) is staging South-east Asia’s largest show of treasures from China’s Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Sacred Caves: Dunhuang, Buddhism, And the Silk Road features four three-dimensional cave replicas, 22 paintings and 47 original artefacts from what was once a thriving hub on the Overland Silk Road from the fourth to 14th centuries.

It opens to the public on Sept 25 and runs until March 7, 2027. Here are five highlights not to miss.

1. A 13m-long reclining Buddha

This is the spectacle that greets visitors once they ascend the ACM stairs. The mammoth figure of the Shakyamuni Buddha, reclining after entering nirvana, was created during the late eighth century to the mid-ninth century when the Tibetan Empire seized control of Dunhuang.

Originally 15.6m in length, its replica has been reduced to 13m due to the venue’s size constraints, but its unusual details, from four joints in the fingers to an arm that extends past the figure’s hips, are faithfully recreated – corporeal signs of holiness.

The walls on each side show the Buddha’s 10 principal disciples and the rulers of Asia in states of heart-rending grief. The Tibetan monks who sponsored the cave paid attention to the space’s architecture too, shaping it long and shallow like a coffin.

2. Tang Dynasty cluster

The cluster of seven sculptures in the famous Cave 45 of the Mogao Caves is representative of the elegance of High Tang Dynasty artistic styles in the eighth century.

The preaching Buddha is flanked by his two most famous disciples, Kashyapa and Ananda, posed in a sinuous S-posture modelled after the female physique.

Artists incorporated folk standards of beauty into their works too: The figures boast slight bumps on their stomachs.

Surrounding murals include imagined aerial views of paradise, and tales of Avalokitesvara, or Guanyin, responding to his adherents’ entreaties. The panoramic canvas depicts ancient prisons, beheadings of prisoners and other now-alien aspects of Tang Dynasty life.

The pyramidal roof has been tessellated with thousands of small images of the Buddha.

In many such instances, those who helped pay for the caves signed their names in quiet pleas for good karma.

3. Lady Wang leads the way

Patron Lady Wang of Taiyuan leads two of her daughters and nine maidservants in a procession towards the Buddha, in a painting by the second director of the Dunhuang Academy, Duan Wenjie. The large-scale painting is a copy of the original that adorns the second-largest cave in the Mogao complex.

These portraits of patrons are clear indications of their comfort with asserting themselves in the hallowed space, but are equally evidence of the fashion du jour, such as women’s use of decorative appliques on their faces.

The attendants, meanwhile, wear men’s robes, a phenomenon that was fashionable during the seventh and eighth centuries.

The painting restores some of the damage that has been done to the cave original and is a key thrust of Dunhuang Academy’s scholarship. Artists study traces of damaged paintings and cross-reference them with those from the period to reverse the sands of time.

4. Syriac bible

An excerpt of biblical psalms written in Syriac, used by the Church of the East, on the same page as Buddhist sutras, speaks to the crossroads nature of the Mogao Caves.

Then a thriving cosmopolitan city during the Overland Silk Road, the Mogao Caves equally provided shelter to Christians.

The northern section of the complex, where these pages were discovered, have yielded the most fruit in this regard, with Venetian explorer Marco Polo supposedly having met some of its inhabitants. This artefact dates back to the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th and 14th centuries, and is displayed in the exhibition next to a bronze cross also discovered there.

It was long assumed to be Christian, though recent scholarship has cast some doubt on its true nature.

5. Religious pantheon

The most multicultural of the Mogao Caves is unfortunately one that did not make it to the ACM. Cave 285 features a whole pantheon of gods, from Chinese power couple Nuwa and Fuxi to Hinduism’s Vishnu to even the Greek sun god Apollo with a Chinese face.

But visitors will have an intriguing substitute in Cave 249, where the paintings combine Buddhist and Taoist mythology.

Created in the Western Wei Dynasty in the sixth century, it features a four-armed asura, powerful demigods in Indian religions, surrounded by the four animal-headed Chinese natural deities of wind, rain, thunder and lightning.

Around them is an entire time-travelling pantheon, such as the ancient Taoist Xiwangmu, or Queen Mother of the West, riding high in a four-phoenix chariot.

The original cave was painted in lapis-lazuli blue, an expensive material from Afghanistan that, in the West, was specially reserved for sacred figures like the Mother Mary.

Pay attention, too, to the famous depiction of a horse rider turning back to fire an arrow at a white tiger. These spaces were reserved not just for the holy, but also for the secular relief of nomadic hunting life.