The Silk Road (Japanese: 敦煌, Hepburn: Tonkō)

 

In 1026, students in western China are shanghaied into the forces of crown prince Li Yuanhao of Xi Xia, who wants to control the length of the Silk Road.

The film was released in Japan and China on June 25, 1988. It was chosen as Best Film at the Japan Academy Prize ceremony. It is one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of all time.
The discovered in 1900, yielding a treasure of ancient Chinese books, scrolls, drawings, paintings, and sutras (writings on Buddha). Dun-Huang was the desert city that was the last Chinese outpost on the route. The film shows amazing scenes of the desert and the cave area. Just over a thousand years ago, someone sealed up a chamber in a cave outside the oasis town of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China. The chamber was filled with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts.

Dunhuang manuscripts sat there, hidden, for the next nine hundred years.

Since their discovery a century ago, the Dunhuang manuscripts have revolutionized the study of Asian religions. Until recently, however, the rich materials relating to esoteric tantric Buddhism have been largely ignored.

The Dunhuang manuscripts are a historic of important religious and secular documents .discovered in the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, in the early 20th century. Dating from the late 4th to early 11th centuries, the manuscripts include works ranging from history and mathematics to folk songs and dance. There are also many religious documents, most of which are Buddhist, but other religions including Daoism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism are also represented. The majority of the manuscripts are in Chinese. Other languages represented are Khotanese, Kuchean, Sanskrit, Sogdian, Tangut, Tibetan, Old Uyghur language, Prakrit, and Old Turkic.

The manuscripts are a major resource for academic studies in a wide variety of fields including history, religious studies, linguistics, and manuscript studies so when the room, which came to be known as the Dunhuang Library, was finally opened in 1900, it was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, on par with Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

By 1910, the Chinese government ordered the remaining documents to be transferred to Beijing, only about a fifth of the original hoard remained, after the collection mirrors the remarkable power of Europeans, compromising tens of thousands of texts, written in over twenty different languages.

The books make a contribution to the study of cultural and linguistic interaction along the Silk Roads.