6-Day Dunhuang Art Study Programme: the Mogao Caves & Conservation

Morning — Arrival and Check-in
Fly into Xi'an and transfer by private vehicle to the study base for check-in.

Afternoon — Opening Ceremony and Silk Road Lecture
Opening ceremony and the lecture 'The Silk Road: A Road of Civilizations', covering the historical background of the programme and the framework you will use.

Evening — Icebreakers
Silk Road themed team games so that everyone meets their classmates and the group starts working as a study team.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Study base: standard twin room with private bathroom, air conditioning and hot water

Morning — The Mausoleum with a Researcher
Visit the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, where a museum researcher walks you through Pits 1, 2 and 3 and the Bronze Chariots. The focus is archaeological: the design logic of the mausoleum, the arrangement of the military array, and what the excavation record can and cannot tell us.

Afternoon — Cultural Relic Restoration Workshop
Enter the restoration workshop and work alongside professional conservators: reassemble pottery fragments, clean corrosion from bronze. You learn quickly how much patience heritage preservation takes.

Evening — Seminar: The Significance of Qin's Unification
Group discussion on the historical significance of Qin's unification of China, analysing the rise of the Qin empire and what it left behind, guided by your instructors.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Study base: standard twin room with private bathroom, air conditioning and hot water

Morning — Study Review and Departure from Xi'an
The Xi'an module closes with a short review session: the students lay out the notes and sketches from the Terracotta Army and the restoration studio, agree which questions they are carrying west, and hand in a one-page summary. Your guide and driver then collect the group and transfer you to Xi'an Xianyang International Airport.

Afternoon — The Flight West
The flight from Xi'an to Dunhuang runs north-west across the Hexi Corridor, the strip of watered ground between the Qilian mountains and the Gobi that every Silk Road caravan had to follow. From the window the Guanzhong plain gives way first to the Qilian range and then to gravel desert with almost nothing in it. Dunhuang arrives without much warning: a wall of poplars, then fields, then the town. Your guide meets you at the airport and transfers you to the hotel.

Cultural Insight
Dunhuang existed because of water. Meltwater from the Qilian mountains surfaces here as a string of springs, which is why a garrison town - and then a monastery with several hundred painted caves - could be built in the middle of a desert. The caves are fifteen kilometres from the town and the day after tomorrow belongs to them.

Evening — Welcome Dinner
A welcome dinner introduces the oasis kitchen: Dunhuang lamb grilled over charcoal, Liangzhou noodles, apricots and the dates the region is known for. Your guide confirms the timed entry for the Mogao Caves and explains how the visiting slots work.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Dunhuang.

Morning — The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas
A full morning at Mogao with a dedicated guide: the Tang meditation cave with its alpine landscape mural, the flying apsaras of the Western Wei, the commissioned donor portraits that run down the walls like a ledger of Silk Road trade. Entry is timed and capped; the morning is structured around the scheduled cave openings.

Afternoon — Conservation and the Dunhuang Museum
After lunch, the exhibition centre's replica caves and the story of the Library Cave — the manuscript hoard Stein and Pelliot carried off, and the digitisation programme that is now returning it to the world. Then the Dunhuang Museum's Silk Road galleries in town.

Evening — A Silk Road Dinner
A themed dinner that walks the corridor in courses — lamb, apricot wine, camel-milk toffee — and closes the day's study.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Morning — Mingsha Mountain
The dunes stand several hundred metres above the town and shift with the wind, which is how they came to be called the singing sands: dry sand sliding down a steep face produces a low, resonant hum. Climb the ridge early, before the surface heats and the light flattens, and work the slope the way the students have been taught to read a site - note the grain, the angle of rest, and the direction the crest is travelling. Board access to the crest is arranged for the group.

Afternoon — Crescent Lake and the Oasis Edge
Below the main ridge a spring sits in a crescent, fed from the same groundwater that brought the town into being and recorded on the site for two thousand years. The restored pavilions on its bank are the standard view of Dunhuang. The group then walks the margin where the water table, the irrigated fields and the dunes meet - the line that has decided where this town could be built for two millennia - and records how close the sand has come to the oasis in each direction.

Evening — Shazhou Night Market and a Working Session
The Shazhou night market is the town's main evening street and a short walk from most hotels, with street grills, cold drinks and craft stalls along the length of it. The group eats there, then holds a short working session: the students are expected to have their Mogao cave notes written up before the Western Caves tomorrow.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner included.

Accommodation
Hotel in Dunhuang.

Morning — The Western Caves or the Oasis
Option one: the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, a quieter cousin of Mogao cut into the river cliff west of town. Option two: a slow morning — the Dunhuang Museum, or the last of the apricot groves. Your guide arranges either.

Afternoon — The Flight to Xi'an
Transfer to Dunhuang Airport for the flight back east, about three hours. Watch the desert give way, in one flight, to the green Guanzhong plain.

Evening — Farewell Dinner in Xi'an
Land in Xi'an and gather for a farewell dinner — from the Terracotta Army to the caves of the western deserts, the whole arc of the Silk Road's first thousand kilometres ends at one table.

Meals
Breakfast, Dinner included.