British Museum expert Anne Howarth gives a free drop-in, 45 minute talk on how the famed lotus flower is used in Indian and Chinese decoration - open to all levels of knowledge.
Mengfu advocated the mixture of old tradition into calligraphy and painting to create the Yuan style. This landscape painting is full of silent and natural grace, expressing the painter’s yearning for nature.
Today only 492 cave shrines survive and only around 30 are open to the public. They sit at the edge of the Gobi desert in the northwest of China at a key trading post and cultural hive along the Silk Road, 25km southeast of the center of Dunhuang.
The network of shrines contain some of the best preserved examples of Buddhist art and sculpture spanning a period of 1,000 years and is regarded as holding one of the most extensive collections of Buddhist paraphernalia in the world, with clay stucco murals adorning some 45,000 square meters of inner wall and ceiling, earning the complex the more popular name of 'The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas'.
Today, the site is the subject of an ongoing archaeological project.
