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.

Number of Images in IDP Database as of 28/01/2012

What's New

IDP Field Trip 2011

Members of the IDP UK team recently travelled to Xinjiang to visit the ancient sites of Niya and Karadong. In collaboration with the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology and local guides IDP spent time documenting the sites. We are working to make this material available on the IDP database as soon as possible but general photography of the trip can already be seen on our Flickr group page and several Audioboos can be heard here.

The photograph above was taken at the house of Kaysar Mahmut, guardian of Niya site, in Kapak Askan village. It shows him (third from left) with members of his family, the IDP UK team and the Xinjiang Institute of Archaeology.

New manuscripts from the Royal Library of Copenhagen on IDP

16 Dunhuang manuscripts in 14 rolls are now available on IDP. Donated by Arthur Bollerup Sørensen (1880–1932) in 1915, the collection contains a Daoist manuscript and a text believed to be unique. MSS 12 and 16 have colophons.

View the catalogue online or search for 'Holding Institute = Det Kongelige Bibliotek' on our Advanced Search page.

IDP News Issue No. 36–37 now online

IDP News Issue No. 36–37, Winter/Spring 2010–11 is now available online. This issue covers the launch of the IDP Seoul website featuring the keynote address by Professor Mair and articles from Korean scholars.

In this issue we also report on links being developed with institutions in Afghanistan to make resources held in the British Library accessible to all.

What's On

Site Info

Site last revised: December 2011.
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Site Credits

Website design by Vic Swift of IDP.
Database development and web integration by Michael Kaye of sendmetospace with additional support for Chinese version by Mark Mitchenall, using 4D database software and Active4D.
General text written by Susan Whitfield with additional input from other members of IDP staff and translation by IDP staff in China, Russia, Japan and Germany.
Some areas of the site such as Educational Projects, Resources, Research and Conservation Papers and My IDP projects are individually authored and accredited. IDP is not responsible for their content.