Dunhuang

Dunhuang was founded as a Chinese frontier commandery shortly after 104 BC, as the Han emperor Wu extended control west along the Hexi Corridor and built a line of beacon towers, walls and garrison posts out into the desert. Two of them, the Jade Gate at Yumen and the southern pass at Yangguan, became the points at which the routes to the Tarim Basin left imperial territory, and Dunhuang the last place to buy supplies, change animals and hire guides. Merchants, soldiers, envoys and monks passed through in both directions, and the town grew rich on provisioning them.

Buddhism travelled the same road. From AD 366 monks began cutting shrines into the cliff at Mogao, and successive dynasties, local rulers and donor families enlarged and repainted them for a thousand years, leaving one of the largest repositories of Buddhist art in the world. Under the Tang the town, then called Shazhou, was a cosmopolitan crossroads; Tibetan, Uyghur and Tangut rulers held it in turn after the Tang collapsed.

Sea routes and shifting politics gradually emptied the overland trade, and by the Ming the passes were abandoned and Dunhuang shrank to a village. It returned to the world's attention in 1900, when a Daoist caretaker, Wang Yuanlu, opened a sealed chamber at Mogao containing tens of thousands of manuscripts and paintings from the 5th to 11th centuries. Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others bought or removed large parts of the hoard in the following decade, and the Dunhuang manuscripts are now divided between libraries in London, Paris, Beijing and elsewhere — a loss still keenly felt locally. The Dunhuang Academy was set up in 1944 to study and conserve what remained, and the caves were inscribed by UNESCO in 1987.

The caves define the town's sense of itself. Dunhuang art — the flying apsaras, the swirling ribbons, the pigments of the Tang murals — appears on street lamps, hotel façades, shop signs and the railway station, and the painted dancers have been turned into a national dance style through Rain of Flowers Along the Silk Road, a dance drama created by the Gansu Song and Dance Ensemble in 1979. Dunhuang studies, the international scholarly field built on the manuscripts, gives the place an academic weight out of all proportion to its size, and the Dunhuang Academy is one of the most respected conservation bodies in China.

The population is mostly Han, with a Hui Muslim minority whose halal kitchens and small mosques are part of ordinary street life, and the northwestern manners of the Hexi Corridor prevail: direct speech, generous portions, an early evening and a strong sense of being on the edge of the country. Camel caravans, once the economic basis of the town, survive as rides on the dunes, and desert imagery is everywhere in local craft, from painted gourds to reproductions of cave murals.

Evenings belong to the night market and the riverside squares, where residents dance in groups to amplified music, a habit found across China but given local colour here by the sand blowing in and the sound carrying across empty ground. Large tourist stage shows on Silk Road themes run through the summer season.

About 190,000 people live in Dunhuang's county-level city, most of them in the town of Shazhou, its seat of government, and the rest in the irrigated oasis and the scattered settlements along the Dang River. It is a small place with a worldwide reputation, and tourism now underpins the economy: hotels, guides, drivers, restaurants and souvenir workshops employ a large share of working residents, and the town empties noticeably outside the season.

Farming remains the other mainstay. Cotton, grapes, apricots and melons grow on the irrigated land, and the fruit trade follows the harvest through the summer. Solar and wind farms have spread across the gravel plains around the oasis, part of Gansu's renewable-energy build-out, and the airport and railway have tied a formerly remote town into the national network.

Water is the long-term worry. The Dang River is fed by snowmelt from the Qilian Mountains, and decades of irrigation, groundwater pumping and a growing population have lowered the water table and with it the level of Crescent Lake, where diversions of groundwater have been proposed to raise it again. Shelterbelts of poplar and sand-fixing planting hold back the dunes at the oasis edge. Life runs on Beijing time even though the sun rises and sets about an hour and a half later here than on the coast, so shops open late in the morning and the night market stays busy well after dark.

Dunhuang eats like the rest of the Hexi Corridor — wheat, mutton and chilli — with a few dishes of its own. Lu rou huang mian, donkey meat with yellow noodles, is the local speciality: springy hand-pulled noodles dressed with a mushroom and vegetable sauce, eaten alongside a cold plate of sliced donkey meat. Hu yang men bing layers torn flatbread into a pot of stewed mutton until the bread has drunk the broth. Noodle shops also serve the wider northwestern repertoire of hand-pulled beef noodles, cold liangpi and dumplings.

The night market is where most visitors eat: lamb kebabs grilled over charcoal, whole roasted lamb legs, stir-fried dishes and river fish, with clay pots of tea and bowls of xing pi shui, the cold drink boiled from dried apricot skins. Sweet things lean on the harvest — apricots in early summer, then grapes, raisins and melons piled on roadside stalls, much of it dried for sale through the winter.

Halal food is widespread because of the Hui community, so mutton and beef outnumber pork on most menus, and hand-torn flatbread appears with almost everything. Wine is grown in Gansu's desert vineyards and sold locally, though tea and the fruit drinks are what people actually order with a meal.