DUNHUANG, China — For the growing army of middle-class Chinese with a little extra money to spend, touring their vast country has become almost as natural as breathing. Both activities, it turns out, are harming the ancient Buddhist grottoes that make this place one of China's cultural wonders.
Carved directly into a cliff face in the Gobi Desert, the Mogao caves contain a millennium's worth of work by travelers along the old Silk Road who turned countless small caves into stunningly painted shrines between the 4th and 14th centuries.
Wind, rain, sand and Western plunderers have all damaged the caves over the years. But the greatest scourge these days comes from the tourists who swarm here by the busload, bringing destructive amounts of carbon dioxide and moisture into the caves along with their eagerness for a glimpse of ages past.
"If I didn't get to see this before I died, it would have been the greatest regret of my life," said Liu Rui, 57, a retiree who made the journey from Shanghai, hundreds of miles away. "They should let as many people see it as possible."
It's a nice sentiment, but totally insupportable if the art inside the 492 grottoes is to survive. Many of the murals are already sagging or peeling from the earthen walls, their delicate beauty faded away. Others have deteriorated beyond the repair efforts of Chinese and foreign experts, including workers from the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles.
The plight of the Mogao caves is a familiar one in China, where the breakneck rush toward freer markets and greater openness has resulted in an explosion of tourism and a corresponding erosion of some of the world's most precious cultural monuments, from the terra-cotta warriors in Xian to the mighty Great Wall itself.
After 20 years of economic reforms, the Chinese government is waking up to the need to preserve the nation's heritage in a systematic, comprehensive way before the sites themselves--and the revenue they rake in--disappear altogether.
"Asia's share of tourism growth is the fastest-growing in the world, and the lion's share is in China," said Richard Engelhardt, a regional advisor for the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as UNESCO.
"Unless we take some measures, we may be in danger of loving our heritage to death," Engelhardt told a conference on cultural conservation in Beijing last month.
