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The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

IDP partner institutions which both provide data for and act as hosts to the multilingual website and database are:

Major IDP partners providing data include:

IDP’s many other collaborating institutions provide data and work on joint projects.

The IDP Blog

The IDP hosts a blog featuring articles written by staff on various topics, including recent research, project updates, and more. Visit our blog here.

Project Publications

Team members working on IDP materials have recently published several new articles on project workflows and conservation techniques employed by the Lotus Sutra Project. These articles include:

Lotus Sutra Project: Storage Solutions by Paulina Kralka and Marya Muzart, published in the Library's Collection Care blog (07 December 2020) and the IFLA Journal (21 July 2021).
Conserving Dunhuang manuscripts at the British Library: how do we avoid dissociation? by Marya Muzart, published in Contemporary Issues in Book and Paper Conservation, Proceedings of the Icon Book & Paper Group Third Triennial Conference 2021.
The Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project: the collaborative work between the Heritage Made Digital team and the International Dunhuang Project team by Francisco Perez-Garcia, published in the Library's Digital Scholarship blog (14 March 2022).
Conserving paper: reflections on cultures of conservation in Europe and East Asia by Paulina Kralka, published in The Journal of the Institute of Conservation (24 May 2022).

China-UK Library Knowledge Exchange and Forum 2021/2022

Throughout 2021, the British Library, the National Library of China, and other library-related organisations in China have been hosting a knowledge exchange programme featuring insights on conservation issues related to their collections. In March 2022, the organisations hosted an online forum where presenters were able to answer questions on their research. The knowledge exchange will continue until July 2022.

The Georgetown-IDP Lecture Series: Following the Silk Roads to North America

In July and August 2021, the IDP and Georgetown University co-hosted a lecture series celebrating the upcoming completion of the Georgetown-IDP project, which has worked to incorporate images of Silk Road items in North American collections into the IDP’s public database and to expand the IDP's partnership with North American institutions. Generously supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Dunhuang Foundation, the project began in 2016 and will virtually bring together manuscripts and various types of objects dispersed widely in North America through over 1000 images. Learn more about the project here: The Georgetown-IDP Project.

The Georgetown-IDP Lecture Series: Following the Silk Roads to North America included talks from:

Dr Miki Morita and Dr Michelle Wang: ‘The Georgetown-IDP Project: Prospects for Collaboration and Research’.
Dr Amanda Goodman: ‘The Many Lives of a Buddhist Devotional Print: A Dated Dunhuang Document in the Royal Ontario Museum Collection’.
Dr Xin Wen: ‘A Traveler’s History of the Silk Road: Revelations from Dunhuang Materials’.
Dr FOONG Ping: ‘Dunhuang in Seattle’.
Dr Fan Jeremy Zhang: ‘Exploring Eastern Silk Roads: A Journey Through the Collection at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco’.

These videos are now available to view on our YouTube channel here.

What's On

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