[caption id="attachment_6138" align="alignright" width="466" caption="Sketches of Mudras - SRE Cat. no. 217, Late 9th century, Found in Dunhuang, Cave 17, Ink on paper, The Trustees of the British Museum, 1919,0101,0.83* (Ch.00143)"][/caption]

The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is a ground-breaking international collaboration between institutions in China, Europe and Japan bringing information and images from the Silk Road online.

IDP aims to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.

The 2010 Casa Asia Prize was awarded to IDP in recognition of work undertaken to conserve and digitise documents and materials from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites, and for making them accessible to all students and researchers worldwide. For more information, see the Casa Asia website.

IDP partner institutions which both provide data for and act as hosts to the multilingual website and database are:

• The British Library, London IDP Directorate (English Version)


• The National Library of China, Beijing (Chinese version)


• The Institute for Oriental Manuscripts, St Petersburg (Russian version)


• Ryukoku University, Kyoto (Japanese version)


• The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities (German version)


• The Dunhuang Academy, Dunhuang (Chinese version)


• Bibliothèque nationale de France (French version)

Major IDP partners providing data include:

• The Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest


• The British Museum, London


• The Victoria & Albert Museum, London


• The Museum for Asian Art, Berlin


• Guimet Museum, Paris