The five of us dithered around the ticket booth at the entrance to the Mogao caves, trying to come to a consensus about whether we wanted to shell out the extra 20 yuan for an English-speaking guide. We had only met fifteen minutes before, so no one wanted to push too hard, but it was obvious where the fault lines lay.
Our prospective guide marched up to us. “Make a decision now,” she said, and stomped off a few feet to let us confer.
In fact, the group made two decisions. We decided to pay the extra money for the guide, as much to avoid being tacked onto a Chinese tour group as anything else; and we decided to take an instant, intense dislike to the woman who would be leading us around for the next several hours. People grumbled openly about her manner and her tone, despite the fact that she was within easy earshot and spoke good English. When she curtly announced, “We go now,” one person in the back of the group audibly replied, “OK, beeyatch.” (Guess the nationality.)
Personally, I loved her. She wore fake Fendi sunglasses, a little pink cardigan, a knee-length skirt, pantyhose, and two-inch heels. A leather purse bounced against her hip. She walked a full twenty paces ahead of us, stepping briskly in her pointy shoes. She looked as though she should be showing townhouse apartments to prospective renters, rather than Buddhist treasures to tourists.
I re-emphasize: this woman was a cave guide by profession. She should have been wearing a pith helmet, a rock-climbing harness, and, I don’t know, maybe some crampons and a scuba tank. Her only nod to safety was the surgical mask covering her mouth. I thought she was great.
And anyway, the Mogao caves weren’t those kind of caves. In fact, they did look a little like townhouses from the outside, or maybe like condominiums designed by survivalists. The entire cliff face had been coated in concrete to protect against erosion, and the 492 cave entrances were connected by walkways and sealed behind locked metal doors.
Dug into the desert sand centuries ago, the Mogao caves fell into obscurity until, in 1900, a wandering monk followed a crack in the cliff wall. The crack led to a sealed alcove that contained a trove of over 50,000 ancient Buddhist scrolls, badly crushed but protected from moisture.
The majority of the scrolls were quickly snatched by the English, French, and Russians. Most now reside in the British Museum or the Louvre. But the 492 caves at Mogao still contain countless murals and statues, and that’s what we had come to see.
The guide unlocked the door to the library cave, the one that had once enclosed the scrolls. Even in the dim light, the artwork was astonishing. Despite being over 1,000 years old, the murals and statuary had retained much of their original color. Gilt-edged Buddhas wore multi-hued robes of pink, pale green, deep purple. Angels floated in fields of blue. Orange tigers and white-skinned maidens danced about the walls.
We were impressed by the artwork, but we had an additional agenda in Mogao. After a few hours, we began egging our guide to take us to the Tantric caves, the ones with the murals deemed too racy for tourists.
“Not open to the public,” she said.
“Why not?” we pressed.
“To protect and research.”
“That’s what we want, to do research.”
“You are scholars?” she asked.
“Yes. We’re scholars,” I said.
“Especially of Tantric?” she asked.
We were all giggling at this point. She claimed not to have a key for the naughty caves, although I suspect that that’s where the guides all have their lunch break.
In the last cave, the guide ended by narrating one of the stories depicted on the wall. A group of journeying brothers, all princes, came across a tigress starving and too weak to nurse her cubs. The princes argued over how the tigers might be saved, until finally the youngest proposed a radical solution: he offered his own body to the tigress so that she might eat. But she was too weak even to accept this gift, so the youngest prince cut his own throat and allowed the tigers to lap his blood. The king grieved the loss of his son, and built a monument to honor his sacrifice.
This sort of environmentalism is a bit extreme for my taste, but the prince was eventually reincarnated as the Buddha, so everything worked out in the end.
