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Zhou Bing: [in Chinese] "Doing the play led me to think about what really interests people, and I think it is the details of history, not the big picture. For instance, Wang Yuanlu and Aurel Stein were also presented in some of the other documentaries about Dunhuang, but they were just treated as mere names. We, on the other hand, tried to explore the mental activities of them."
The whole first episode of the ten-part documentary series is about the rediscovery of Dunhuang in the early 1900s.
Wang Yuanlu, the self-appointed guardian of the Dunhuang caves, and Aurel Stein, who bought one-fifth of Dunhuang's numerous scrolls for the price of just one, were the focus of the episode.
The director also tells me that he tried not to stereotype the two and pose them simply as the shameless looter and the greedy trafficker.
Instead, he let the characters speak for themselves, and thereby gave them the chance to defend what they did.
This approach is partly inspired by a book by Susan Whitfield entitled Life Along the Silk Road, in which the historian tells the life stories of ten ordinary people who once lived in Dunhuang. Recounting the lives of ten individuals who lived at different times during this period, Whitfield draws on contemporary sources and uses firsthand accounts whenever possible to reconstruct the history of the route through the personal experiences of these characters
Susan Whitfield, director of the International Dunhuang Project, says the paintings of Dunhuang
Susan Whitfield: "She's not in history otherwise. We only know her from history because of this wonderful court case, and the document survived purely by accident, and it was a wonderful opportunity."
The International Dunhuang Project is an ever-growing free online library of information and images of all the manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artifacts from Dunhuang and other archaeological sites along the Eastern Silk Road.
The paintings, she says, are particularly revealing.
Susan Whitfield: "The paintings of Dunhuang tell us a lot; they are the reflections of life at the time, and of people living at the time. And the artists of Dunhuang would draw the things he knew and people he saw. So we can see a lot from that. You get a piece from this part of the picture, and this part of the picture, and another piece here, and then you have to try to imagine, what the whole picture is."
