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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)