The founding account begins with the monk Lezun arriving at the cliffs near Dunhuang. In the story, he sees a vision of a thousand Buddhas shining in golden light and decides to make a cave there. The image of a traveller pausing before a cliff gives Mogao a memorable beginning: a landscape becomes sacred through a human act of attention, labour and devotion. Later generations would enlarge that first gesture into a community of rooms and images.
From the journal
Lezun and the first cave: how Mogao remembers its beginning
A monk, a cliff and a vision of golden light form the founding story later recorded at Mogao, where legend and inscription meet.
In the same city · Jiuquan ↗A traveller stops at the cliff
A story written down later
The date commonly attached to this beginning is 366 CE. A stele made in 698 records the account, preserving how Mogao's community remembered its origin. The inscription belongs to a period when the cliff already held generations of devotional work; it gave the growing sanctuary a shared point of origin. It names Lezun and the monk Faliang, who arrived later and built a second cave beside the first. By the time the inscription was carved, the account also named later patrons who enlarged the sanctuary.
A beginning remembered by later generations
Across the next centuries, patrons, monks and artisans added rooms and images along the cliff. Each new commission brought another community into the sanctuary: a family remembering its relatives, a ruler expressing devotion or worshippers supporting a painted room. UNESCO dates Mogao’s long artistic span from the fourth to the fourteenth century. The caves visible today grew through this sustained work, far beyond the first chamber of the founding account.
