① Dunhuang
DUNHUANG: READING A CIVILIZATION THROUGH ITS WALLS (Grades 9-12)
For four years, I've studied the Dunhuang murals through three lenses: faith and color, food, and music. I’ve put everything I’ve learned into an interactive website.
FAITH & COLOR: HOW THE BUDDHA BECAME CHINESE
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How does an imported religion learn to look local? I spent a lot of time tracing Buddhist sculptures at Dunhuang from the Sixteen Kingdoms all the way to the Tang Dynasty. It was fascinating to see how the figures slowly took on Chinese facial features, body proportions, and clothing. I spent hours decoding the hidden meanings behind different mudras (hand gestures), ritual objects, and the animals the gods rode. I also looked into how natural mineral pigments—like cinnabar and lapis lazuli—were blended with shading techniques to make people feel like they were standing in a truly sacred space. This part of my project eventually led me to build a 3D reconstruction of Cave 217 and write a deep dive into the Contemplation Sutra mural on the north wall of Cave 217.
FOOD ON THE WALL: EATING ALONG THE SILK ROAD
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What did normal people in Tang-dynasty Dunhuang actually eat? To answer this, I paired mural scenes of grand banquets, street taverns, and religious offerings with actual ancient scraps of paper found in the Library Cave. I managed to piece together a picture of a very multicultural diet: lots of wheat-flour foods, exotic imported spices, and dairy and meat processing brought in by nomadic cultures. Official history books rarely tell you what people had for lunch. Looking at these murals and manuscripts side-by-side helped me fill in those blanks, showing how food wasn't just fuel—it was a huge part of people’s faith, identity, and community.
I also tried recreating one of these foods myself: sanzi, a fried twisted-dough snack, pulled by hand into thin, noodle-like strands.
MUSIC: INSTRUMENTS THAT CROSSED A CONTINENT
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I went through the murals and analyzed over 100 images of musical instruments, covering more than 40 different types painted over a thousand-year span. I traced how foreign arrivals—like the bent-neck pipa, the konghou, and the bili—slowly became localized right alongside native Chinese instruments like the ruanxian and sheng. It shows a really cool shift in ancient Chinese music from simple to incredibly complex, and from purely functional to deeply artistic. My absolute favorite part was studying the "self-sounding" instruments that float through the painted skies playing themselves. Even though they're religious symbols, they actually preserve highly accurate details of how musicians played back then, which is super useful for music history and digital heritage restoration.
These three strands came together in an essay I wrote titled "The Sacred in Small Things: Material Religion in Dunhuang Murals and The Canterbury Tales" (which I submitted to the Immerse Essay Competition). I also wanted to look at Dunhuang's modern-day challenges, so I started a project on tourist feedback—you can check out "Visitor Voices" on the Community page..
