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FROM DIGITAL MOGAO CAVES TO DIGITAL CHI LIN NUNNERY
Deren Li, Yixuan Zhu, Zhiqiang Du* **
State Key Lab of Information Engineering in Surveying Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 129 LuoYu
Road, Wuhan, Hubei, 430079, P. R. China - drli@whu.edu.cn, pw67@yahoo.com, duzhiqiang@lmars.whu.edu.cn
Commission V, WG V/2
KEY WORDS: Digital Cultural Heritage, LIDAR, 3D Reconstruction, Documentation, Visualization
ABSTRACT:
Deeply hidden in the artistic treasury of Northwest China, the Mogao Caves is a green land in yellow sand and a shining pearl on the
Silk Road. But, thousands of years’ damages from the nature factors and artificial destroy and over-load tours cause diseases for all
the caves in different extents. Consequently, the speed of painted statues and fresco degenerate dramatically. In order to protect
Mogao Caves effectively, a world cultural heritage, this paper brings forward the aims and tasks to build a project— Digital Mogao
Caves. 3D reconstruction is an essential content in it, including the inside and outside of the whole 492 grottoes and 220 km 2 places
around them. And then all of the digital records are archived and a Virtual Demonstration System is constructed for researches of
resuming and repairing, as well as for the tours instead of the locale. The Mogao Caves is an artistic treasure for architecture due to
record a great deal of architecture form for different period by frescoes. According to the descriptions of the northern fresco in Cave
No. 172, the Hong Kong Chi Lin Nunnery realized the transfer from the fresco to reality by rebuilding its timber-frame building
complex. In this progress, the 3D data of the wooden components are recorded in detail and used to research the arts for timber-
frame buildings of Tang Dynasty. Also, the exploitation for the Virtual Architectural Environments offered a novel way and
technologies for the recovering, rebuilding, researching and protecting the timber-frame buildings. The two practices suggest that the
Digital Cultural Heritage is an effective technology and methodology in the research, preservation, management, interpretation, and
representation of cultural heritages.
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Actuality of Mogao Caves
The Silk Road served as the most important thoroughfare in
ancient Eurasia linking up China, India, Persia, Babylon, Egypt,
Greece, and Rome, and showcased the major seven stages of
the history of ancient human civilization (Fan et al., 2004). The
Mogao Caves, a miracle remained after cultural collision
between east and west, is deeply hidden in the artistic treasury
of Northwest China and is a shining pearl on the Silk Road. But
thousands of years’ damage from the nature factors such as
earthquake, collapses of cliffs, ablation from fierce sand blown
by wind, contrived destroy and over-load tours, all together
cause fearful diseases for all the grottoes in different extents.
Consequently, the speed of painted statues damage and fresco
degradation is wondrously horrendous. Therefore . stable
repositories for digital cultural resources is becoming more
important and the lack of clarity in interpreting the digital world
comes to be a bottle-neck (Zorich, 2003) . In order to more
effectively protect the Mogao Caves, a world cultural heritage,
we need to bring forward the aims and the process to build
Digital Mogao Caves.
1.2 Our Aims and Methods
The Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) is to research and protect
the world history cultures and natural heritages by using
computer technologies (Li et al., 2006) . DCH emphasizes a
reasonable link to people in the virtual environment with human
culture tradition, who will realize function and orientation of
current culture in the human history and make an experience
from furthest foretime, present to future in the historical
corridor. Multi-dimensional information is represented by DCH,
which realizes the truth of history, has the cultural art, and
possesses the fidelity of real environment. The process of the
multi-dimensional information is not only supported by high-
performance hardware, but also involved in the developed
computer technologies, which include Virtual Reality (VR) as
one of the key technologies (Cameron et al., 2007) . It is an
important measure to apply and synthesize photogrammetry,
architecture and archaeology for collecting the multi
information. In the end, we’ll build a real three dimensional
digital Mogao Caves to satisfy the use of research in resuming
and rebuilding as well as for tourism instead of the real locale.
By all these methods above, we can introduce various digital
ways to well conserve this irreproducible information for
eternal.
1.3 Previous Works
Much has been done in the parts of fresco, painted statues and
building protection by the Academe of Dunhuang, and they
have come to many fruits as well. For instance, many cultural
relics in severe danger have gained effective protection. But,
considering the huge scale, the longinquity and largeness of its
gross of the Mogao Caves, many problems of fresco protection
in the international cultural relic protection field is still not
* The work described in this paper is supported by the National High Technology Research (2006AA12Z224) and the project titled
Digital Architectural Information System of Timber-frame Buildings for Chi Lin Nunnery.
** Corresponding author: Zhiqiang Du (duzhiqiang@lmars.whu.edu.cn)
