MORE than 5,300 pieces of Dunhuang manuscripts have been “returned” from France in digital form and are now available online, according to the National Library of China.

These digital resources are provided by France’s national library, which holds more than 7,000 original copies of Dunhuang manuscripts.

The Dunhuang manuscripts are documents discovered in the Mogao Grottos in China’s Gansu Province in the early 20th century. There are more than 50,000 of them covering content ranging from history, linguistics, art and religious documents.

Dating from the fifth to 11th century, the majority is in Chinese script, but some are written in other languages such as Khotanese and Hebrew.

At present, around 16,000 Dunhuang manuscripts are in the National Library of China, while the rest are scattered overseas in Russia, Britain, France and Japan.

In 1908, French sinologist Paul Pelliot took 7,000 Dunhuang manuscripts to France. They are widely recognized as the most important of the documents.

China launched the Ancient Books Preservation Project in 2007 and began to investigate and retrieve millions of overseas Chinese classics. In 2015, the National Library of China also launched a digital cooperation project using digital content or high-definition print to popularize Chinese ancient classics.

According to Lin Shitian, director of the National Center for the Preservation and Conservation of Ancient Books, France’s national library donated digital documents of the painting series “Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan” to the National Library of China in 2015 and suggested further cooperation on Dunhuang relics.

More than 50 volumes of “The Yongle Canon,” an ancient encyclopedia, were also retrieved in digital form from Harvard University, Oxford University, the British Library and other organizations abroad, Lin said.

Zhao Wenyou, also from the National Center for the Preservation and Conservation of Ancient Books, said that unless private collectors decide to donate or sell the pieces, most of the hard copies of Chinese ancient books scattered overseas are hard to retrieve.

“Digitization may bring back ancient works in digital form, which is a more realistic and feasible solution,” Zhao said.(Xinhua)