Building Mountains and Rivers: Gansu Volume

The core of "Building Mountains and Rivers: Gansu Volume" is Dunhuang—but not the Dunhuang of travel brochures. The protagonist Shi Nian is an engineer at the Digital Center of the Dunhuang Academy, daily using laser scanning to take "death photos" of murals. She scans the pigment layers, which are also layers of time: the lead white left by Tang Dynasty craftsmen came from mines in Afghanistan, the mineral pigments used in Yuan Dynasty restorations carry the sweat of Central Plains artisans, and the acrylic reinforcement glue from the 1980s is the last trace left by a youth interrupted by political movements. The physical Mogao Caves will eventually disappear, but what is true preservation? The core architecture of this volume is the Mogao Caves, but not only them. Whose compassion is embodied in the stone statues of Bingling Temple? Whose sighs are the clay sculptures of Maijishan Grottoes? Every scratch on the Jiayuguan city wall is a memory of the Silk Road. The eastward transmission of Buddhism is not just scriptures and statues, but also the flesh and blood of craftsmen, pigment merchants, and donors. When Shi Nian discovers a signature possibly surnamed "Wang" among the donor portraits in Cave 217, she does not know that this signature connects to the secret network of the Tang Dynasty Dunhuang Wang family and the Western Region pigment trade—a code guarded by temple keepers for a thousand years.