The world-famous Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, Gansu province. [Photo/Benliu News]

Since the late 1980s, Dunhuang Academy has been developing a comprehensive digital preservation system that covers the entire process of collection, processing, storage, and display of cultural relics.

To tackle challenges such as the complex structures of the caves and the vulnerability of murals to deformation, the team independently developed both automated and manual digital acquisition systems. Using positioning correction technology and algorithmic compensation, these systems accurately restore the original geometry of cultural artifacts, capturing even millimeter-level details. 

To date, Dunhuang Academy has completed high-precision 3D reconstruction of 212 caves and virtual tours of 169 caves. The total volume of digital data has reached 4 petabytes, and more than 50,000 historical archival films have been digitized.

A researcher at Dunhuang Academy digitizes mural images. [Photo/Benliu News]

In recent years, the Academy has actively promoted the digital recovery of Dunhuang cultural relics lost overseas, leading to the creation of the "Digital Library Cave" database platform. This platform brings together catalogs and images of lost relics and uses AI technology to enable automated text recognition, image stitching, and knowledge graph construction. It has already released more than 9,900 volumes of Dunhuang documents, over 60,700 images, and recognized more than 8.4 million words. 

From building digital archives to constructing an open global resource platform, Dunhuang Academy is using technology to empower the preservation of cultural heritage, allowing the millennia-old story of Dunhuang to transcend time and space and continue captivating the world.