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.
Read more about IDP…
What's New
IDP News 34
The latest version of IDP News is now online. Articles include The Iconography of Buddha on a Wooden Panel from Khotan, Stars on Earth — De Filippi’s 1913-4 Karakorum Expedition and a report of the St. Petersburg Dunhuang Studies Conference held in September 2009.
IDP Awarded Annual Casa Asia Prize
The 2010 Casa Asia Prize was awarded to IDP in recognition of work undertaken to conserve and digitise documents and materials from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites, and for making them accessible to all students and researchers worldwide. For more information, see the Casa Asia website.
Major British Academy Grant for Tibetan Zen Project
The British Academy has awarded Sam van Schaik a grant of over £100,000 to develop a major project on the Tibetan Zen texts discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts. The project (running from 2010 to 2013) will result in transcriptions of all the manuscript sources for Tibetan Zen, as well as translations of key texts, and research into significant issues in this field of enquiry. Updates on the progress of the project will be posted on the IDP blog.
Database Work on Archaeological Site Information
We are currently updating the information on archaeological sites and making some structural changes to improve the searches. This will mean that 'Find by site' searches on the site overview page will not function correctly until we have finished the changes and mounted a new interface. Apologies for any inconvenience and please be patient with us in the meantime.
What's On
Click here to see details of Conferences, Lectures, Exhibitions and other events.
Site Info
- Site last revised: August 2010.
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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.