The International Dunhuang Programme (IDP), formerly the International Dunhuang Project, is an international collaboration dedicated to the digitisation, preservation and study of manuscripts, artefacts and visual materials from the central and eastern Silk Road, particularly those originating from the Western Chinese city of Dunhuang and the Mogao Caves.The programme provides free online access to digitised collections of manuscripts, printed texts, paintings, textiles and other artefacts held by partner institutions worldwide via its digital database on the IDP website. The IDP also supports scholarly research, conservation training and public engagement related to Silk Road heritage to promote understandings of the history and cultures of those regions.
The programme was established by the British Library in 1994, and now includes over forty institutions in fifteen countries and territories. The seven founding partners are the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the British Library, the Dunhuang Research Academy, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the National Library of China and Ryukoku University. the online IDP database comprised 154,919 catalogue entries, 114,332 of which have been digitised. Most of the manuscripts in the IDP database are texts written in Chinese, but more than twenty different scripts and languages are represented, including Brahmi, Kharosthi, Khotanese, Sanskrit, Tangut, Tibetan, Tocharian and Old Uyghur. These collections represent a valuable resource to scholars worldwide.
Stephen F. Teiser, the D. T. Suzuki Professor in Buddhist Studies and Professor of Religion at Princeton University has said that the IDP “is filling a huge gap in the research, teaching and knowledge-production industry. The international orientation of the project means that all objects are completely accessible to all people who have internet access, and that’s a tremendous advantage.”
As part of the events to mark the 30th anniversary of the IDP in 2024, a new name, International Dunhuang Programme (rather than Project), was adopted.
Activities
The main activities of the IDP are the conserving, cataloguing, and digitising of manuscripts, woodblock prints, paintings, textiles, photographs and other artefacts in the collections material from Dunhuang and other Eastern Silk Road sites held by participating institutions.
High-quality digital images of these materials are made available public through the IDP website, allowing researchers and the public to view and study fragile items without physically handling them. Scholars are still able to visit the objects in person at their respective holding institutions if they have a valid research justification and adhere to each institution’s specific requirements for on-site visits.
Victor H. Mair, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, has noted that there are many advantages of the IDP providing high resolution digital images of Dunhuang manuscripts online for access to all. Whereas in years gone by scholars often needed to travel long distances to access the original manuscripts, or could only access them by means of low quality reproductions, now anyone can access images from the convenience of their computer, wherever they are in the world. This not only makes research into these manuscripts easier, but helps in their conservation as there is far less need for them to be handled in person. Moreover, the high quality images provided by the IDP often show up details that would be difficult to see with the human eye. Some items have been imaged using multi-spectral imaging or high magnification, and these images are often published on the item’s online record.
In 2002, Lynne Brindley, former Chief Executive Officer of the British Library, put forward the IDP as a good example of the sort of complex, collaborative, and international digitisation projects that the British Library was increasingly engaged in. She explained that none of the individual institutions participating in the project had the resources or facilities to allow scholars full access to all of the manuscripts in their collections, but by joining together and sharing knowledge and resources the institutions would be able to offer access to the combined collections of all the institutions by means of high-quality digital images. She noted that a digitisation project such as the IDP benefits both the institutions involved, who are often able to obtain more substantial funding than they would for an internal project, and also the scholarly community, who are given access through the digital images to fragile and often inaccessible items that might previously have been difficult or impossible to view.
Cataloguing Catalogue records are stored in a relational database using the 4D database management tool. Records can be searched for by means of an online search form that allows users to filter search results by different criteria, such as type of artefact, holding institute, archaeological site, and language or script.
Each online catalogue record incorporates a physical description of the item, catalogue records from existing print sources, translations if available, and bibliographic references. The IDP also encourages scholarly users to submit their own catalogue entries and research results on individual items for addition to the database.
Conservation In order to better understand how to conserve the fragile materials that most of the items in the IDP database are made from (paper, textile, and wood), the IDP has developed techniques for the conservation and preservation of documents and artefacts. These techniques are often presented at conservation conferences and journals, or published on institutional blogs, such as the British Library’s collection care blog. The IDP hopes to foster good conservation practices and common standards amongst participating institutes, ensuring that artefacts are stored under the most suitable conditions, and are handled as little as possible.
The IDP has also supported a number of conservation projects (such as the analysis of paper and textile fibres) and has organised regular conferences on conservation issues at venues across the world. Between 1993 and 2007 seven IDP Conservation Conferences were held by various institutions that participate in the IDP Programme. Published conference proceedings have also been produced such as in the British Library’s The British Library Studies in Conservation Science series, as well as volumes published by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Library of China, and Ryukoku University.
In December 2022, the IDP and British Library completed the Lotus Sutra Manuscripts Digitisation Project which saw the conservation and digitisation of over 800 copies of the Lotus Sutra, held in the British Library’s collections. Many conservation techniques developed during this project, including a method for creating custom preservation cores for vulnerable manuscripts and their associated rollers, were published to increase knowledge surrounding the preservation needs of the collection. Digitation methodology and standards were also published to help future digitation projects for these materials.
Digitisation To facilitate the locating of items on the IDP database the project has also digitised a large number of catalogues and bibliographic sources, and made them available online, with links from the original catalogue publication to the corresponding online catalogue entry in the IDP database.
The IDP centre at the British Library set up a digitisation studio in 2001, and now similar studios have been established at IDP centres across Europe and Asia. In addition to making high-quality digital images of items, infrared photography is used for manuscripts with faded ink or which are otherwise hard to read in normal light. Other methods, such as multi-spectral imaging and high-magnification fibre analysis photography, are also used should there be a necessary research justification.
Education The IDP also organises and supports lectures, workshops and symposiums related to Dunhuang and Silk Road studies. These activities include academic conferences, professional training in conservation and digitisation, and online events intended to broaden access to current research. Recordings and educational resources from selected events are made available through the programme’s website as part of its commitment to open access and knowledge sharing.
Since the launch of the new IDP website in 2024, a series of educational learning resources have been published. Aimed at appealing to general audiences, these learning resources cover thematic topics such as Chinese Astronomy and Buddhism on the Silk Roads, making use of collection items held by partnering institutions and digitised to be available on the IDP website to explain these themes. The IDP also engages in various educational activities, organising exhibitions, workshops, and educational events for schools.
Collections held by the partner institutions that make up the IDP have been displayed publicly in numerous exhibitions since the launch of the IDP. In 2004 the IDP organised a major exhibition entitled "The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith", which was held at the British Library. At the time, this was the most successful exhibition ever held at the British Library, and attracted 155,000 visitors. Another exhibition at the British Library, “A Silk Road Oasis: Life in Ancient Dunhuang”, ran from September 2024 until February 2025. The IDP expanded this exhibition’s legacy by launching a digitally scanned 360 degrees virtual exhibition on the IDP’s website, allowing the exhibition to live on as a virtual education tool in both English and Chinese.
History The foundations for the programme were laid in October 1993 when an international conference on Dunhuang Cave 17 was held at Sussex University. This conference brought together curators and conservators from across the world, including the British Library, the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the National Library of China, and in its aftermath an IDP Steering Group was set up by Graham Shaw (Deputy Director of the Oriental & India Office Collection at the British Library), Frances Wood (Head of the Chinese Section at the British Library), and Peter Lawson (Conservator at the British Library). Susan Whitfield was appointed to edit the newsletter, which ran continuously until 2017, and was later appointed Director of the IDP. The first meeting of the IDP steering group was held on 11 April 1994, when the name International Dunhuang Project was adopted. The first newsletter was published on 16 May 1994.
The first logo of the IDP was adopted in 1994, which used a cursive rendering of the Chinese character chi 敕 (imperial dictate) that appears on a Chinese-language manuscript from Dunhuang in the British Library collections. This logo was in use up until 2024.
The IDP was initially founded with 3-year grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and had only one member of staff. The following year the IDP database was designed and implemented, and in 1996 a grant from the British Academy allowed the hiring of a part-time research assistant to input catalogue data into the database.
In 1997, with funding of £148,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the IDP started to digitise manuscripts held at the British Library, and in 1998 the database went online with an initial 20,000 catalogue entries and about 1,000 images of digitised manuscripts.