Click here to skip to content
IDP image 1 Printer booklet made by Islam Akhun Kintup the pundit Tang dynasty female dancer Cave 16 at the Mogao caves IDP image 2 Liao Xingwen, a five-year old prodigy at weiqi Photography in the IDP digitisation studio IDP image 3

IDP: The Silk Road Online

Following extensive excavations in the early twentieth century, tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings, textiles and other artefacts dating from 100 BC – AD 1200 were found at Dunhuang and archaeological sites along the ancient Silk Road. These constitute a unique and immensely rich source of information about art, history, trade, culture, economics, religion and social life in the first millennium.

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) was established in 1994 at the British Library to co-ordinate an international collaboration to conserve, catalogue, digitise and research this legacy. Its multilingual website http://idp.bl.uk now offers accurate information and high quality images from collections in Europe, Asia and America — allowing free access to scholars and the wider public throughout the world.

IDP is the largest and most successful project of its kind, containing information on more than 60,000 manuscripts, paintings, artefacts, textiles and historical photographs in addition to cataloguing and contextual information. The website serves 90,000 unique hosts and has been praised as an 'essential scholarly resource'.

Through its centres in London, Beijing, Dunhuang, St Petersburg, Berlin and Kyoto, IDP is ensuring each country can become self-sufficient in caring for its collections to the highest possible standards, by training local staff to use the latest digitisation and computer equipment and sharing conservation and scientific advances.

From its inception, IDP has been dependent on grants and donations. It is currently seeking financial support to expand its activities in digitisation, education and scholarship to build up greater awareness of Chinese and Eastern Silk Road history and culture throughout the world.

You can help by making a gift to IDP or one of its projects, for example to enable an interactive educational game for eleven-year-olds plus, The Silk Road Quest, to be made available on the internet in English and Chinese. For more information about specific projects please call +44 (0)20 7412 7647 or email info@idp.bl.uk, or you can use the project's secure website form to make a donation now.

Alternatively you can sponsor one of the tens of thousands of Buddhist manuscripts sutras from the Dunhuang Library cave. Your support will enable IDP to digitise these manuscripts thus making them available online. You can add your name and a message alongside your chosen sutra on the IDP website. For full details please see the IDP Sponsor a Sutra web page.