Postcard from Dunhuang
The Marco Polo Drive of Peace, Culture, and Sustainable Development Dunhuang, China — Days 34–36, Dateline: July 19, 2026
On the thirty-fourth day of our journey, we arrived in Dunhuang. It is less known than other great meeting points of humanity — Rome, Constantinople, Samarkand — but Dunhuang has earned its place in their company. For much of two thousand years, this oasis town was a key gateway between China and the rest of Asia. The Polos passed through here twice: Niccolò and Maffeo in the 1260s, on their first journey to the court of Kublai Khan at Khanbaliq — today's Beijing — and then Niccolò, Maffeo, and young Marco in the 1270s, when the triumvirate returned east to the Great Khan's capital.
Let us begin, as always, with the physical geography, and then turn to the human-made account. The great ancient Silk Routes heading to China converged on Dunhuang, and the reason is written plainly on the land. Dunhuang is the western doorway to the heartland of China. It is the Westernmost oasis along a corridor of oases with mountain ranges to the north and south. To go from Europe, Central Asia, or India to China, one arrived at Dunhuang and continued eastward. There was no other practical way.
And where the roads converged, so did the cultures and faiths. Dunhuang in its golden age was one of the most cosmopolitan places on the planet: Han Chinese, Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, Persians, South Asians, Europeans, with all the faiths they held — Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, Daoism, Judaism, and others — met, traded, prayed, and painted here. Especially under the patronage of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907) — and notably of the redoubtable Wu Zetian, the sole female emperor (r. 690 – 705) in China's long history — patrons of Buddhism funded hundreds of elegantly carved cave shrines, the Mogao Caves, painted with dazzling frescoes that survive in their glorious colors and textual brilliance to this day. Wu Zetian herself is said to have had her likeness rendered in the 35-meter Buddha that she commissioned, and that now sits behind the famous nine-story pagoda — divinity and statecraft joined in her face gazing over the desert.
Then there is the Library Cave, one of the most remarkable archaeological finds in history. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a monk discovered a sealed chamber packed with tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts — Buddhist sutras, contracts, letters, calendars, paintings, texts in a dozen languages — preserved by the desert air for ten centuries and more. Not surprisingly, Harvard professors and assorted European adventurers soon arrived and helped themselves to a good share of the loot, which may now be viewed at The (Stolen by the) British Museum and the Harvard Fogg Art Museum. The manuscripts, and the scholarship they have inspired, have opened an unmatched window onto the daily life, commerce, and faith of the medieval Silk Road.
We toured the complex with a gifted guide, Neil Schmid, who has devoted his brilliant career to Dunhuangology — yes, that is a real field, and gloriously so — including pathbreaking work deciphering the ancient images, and who devotes himself as well to promoting the much-needed goodwill between China and the not-so-old-or-wise United States. To walk the caves with a scholar who can read a thousand-year-old fresco the way the rest of us read a webpage is to feel the centuries collapse into the present.
In the afternoon, we had a twenty-first-century treat to match the morning’s tenth-century splendor. We visited the concentrated solar thermal plant outside the city, where 12,000 heliostats — highly sophisticated mirrors of 115 square meters each — track the desert sun and focus its rays on a central tower, generating 100 megawatts of clean, green power for hundreds of thousands of households. The same fierce desert light that glows on gilded Buddhas and brings forth the sweet fruits of the Dunhuang oasis, now powers the homes of Gansu Province. China's great civilization: ancient and modern, in a single day's viewing.
Dunhuang has reminded us of what this whole drive celebrates: the meeting of peoples is not a threat but a treasure. For nearly two thousand years, the wonders that connected Eurasia — silk and paper, sutras and star charts, pilgrims and merchants, holy men and their patrons — passed east and west through this narrow corridor bordered by the mountains and the world was vastly richer for each crossing.
Today, on our thirty-sixth day, we continue our onward eastward journey by electric vehicle — this time on China’s 50,000-km network of fast electric rail. (We in the U.S. still await our first km of fast rail!) Our destination tonight is Xi’an, the ancient capital of China for much of the era from the Qin dynasty (221 BC) until 904 AD, when the capital was shifted eastward. Emperor Qin’s terracotta soldiers await us!
From the ancient heartland of China, with the sands of the Mogao dunes still on our sandals — our warmest greetings, and our fondest yearnings for peace among all the meeting-places of the Earth. May the new Silk Roads, powered by the sun, continue the great sharing of cultures and wisdom.
Jeff and Sonia
www.jeffsachs.org