China invites foreign expertise for Dunhuang protection

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 ◆ China invites foreign expertise for Dunhuang protection

China for the first time has invited foreign experts to help with plans to protect the Dunhuang grottos, a world cultural heritage site in northwest China's Gansu Province.

Fan Jinshi, director of the Dunhuang Studies Institute, said the 5-to-10-year plan had utilized ideas from American and Australian experts.

Fan said they had spent five years drawing up the plan and hoped to keep grottos in their original state while attracting more tourists.

He said protection of the grottos was a vast and methodical project, involving such disciplines as engineering, meteorology and chemistry.

In 1900, a Taoist priest discovered a cave at the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang which contained more than 50,000 sutras, documents and paintings from nearly 10 dynasties in the 4th to the 11th centuries.

The Mogao Grottoes were included by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on the World Heritage List in 1987.