A lifetime devoted to Dunhuang's cultural heritage

Beijing-based CITIC Press Group recently published One Life, One Dunhuang: The Autobiography of Chang Shana, an authorized oral autobiography of the renowned Dunhuang art scholar, chronicling her 95 years of life.

The book's content spans a century, weaving together Chang's bond with Dunhuang in Gansu province, the changing times, and the joys and sorrows of her family.

Dunhuang is home to the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage site that comprises 735 caves built between the 4th and 14th centuries, housing 45,000 square meters of murals and more than 2,400 painted sculptures.

Chang's personal recollections in the book reveal little-known details of how two generations of Dunhuang guardians protected the site, record episodes in the development of New China's arts and crafts, and tell the story of how one woman carried forward cultural heritage and shouldered her mission amid the tides of history.

Chang is the daughter of Chang Shuhong, founding director of the National Research Institute on Dunhuang Art, the predecessor of today's Dunhuang Academy. Born in Lyon, France, in 1931, she followed her father to the Gobi Desert at 12 and received her initial artistic training in the Dunhuang caves. After returning from studying abroad at 20, she devoted herself to organizing patterns from the Dunhuang murals and incorporating them into modern design. Following retirement, she took an exhibition of Dunhuang art around the world. From entering the caves as a child to preserving their heritage in her later years, Chang Shana has devoted her long life to one conviction: a lifetime for Dunhuang.

In 1935, Chang Shuhong accidentally discovered an album of Dunhuang cave art at a secondhand bookstall in Paris. Deeply impressed by the art, he resolved to return to China to explore it. In the 1940s, he finally brought his whole family to the desert, where he set about establishing the National Research Institute on Dunhuang Art, thus forging his daughter's lifelong bond with Dunhuang.

In the book, Chang Shana recounts, as a witness, the hardships her elders endured in Dunhuang. Building walls, repairing roads, constructing bridges, planting trees, and tackling shortages of fuel, rice, oil, salt, clothing, food, housing and transportation — beyond their research and copying work, they had to cope with every challenge of daily survival amid severe funding shortages. At the age of 12, Chang Shana entered one cave after another with the adults, learning to copy the murals. The caves were her schoolroom, and her father and the institute colleagues were all her teachers. Unconsciously, she had already put down roots in Dunhuang. "Shana, don't forget you are a Dunhuang person." Her father's words stayed with her for the rest of her life.

"Looking back on this life now, what can be said, what should be said, what is worth saying is really just this one thing: a lifetime for Dunhuang," she says in the book.