Fan Jinshi: the woman who guarded Dunhuang for a lifetime

In the autumn of 1963, a thin young woman from Shanghai stood with her suitcase in front of the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang.

Her name was Fan Jinshi. She was twenty-five, a graduate of Peking University's archaeology department, assigned to the Dunhuang Cultural Relics Research Institute. What met her was wind loaded with sand, mud-brick rooms people actually lived in, water so bitter and salty you could not drink much of it, and an oil lamp you had to lean close to at night in order to read. Between this place and the city where she had grown up and studied lay an entire world.

Not many people know that the woman later called the Daughter of Dunhuang almost did not stay.

Desert life wears a person down. She could not adjust, could not sleep, grew thin. Her fiancé, Peng Jinzhang, was far away, and for her first years at Dunhuang one chance after another to leave was placed in front of her — to Wuhan, to be with the man she loved; to cities with better conditions. She was not made of iron. In letters to her father she admitted how she struggled. But every time, the moment she walked into a cave, all of it changed.

Seven hundred and thirty-five caves. Forty-five thousand square meters of mural. More than two thousand painted figures. The first time she followed the older researchers into a cave and the flashlight beam swept across the ribbons of the flying apsaras on the wall, a world a painter had made a thousand years earlier came alive in front of her. She said later that in that moment she understood something: this was not a wasteland. It was a warehouse of a thousand years of civilization, and somebody had to keep it.

So she kept it, and did not leave.

In 1986 Peng Jinzhang made the most important decision of his life. He gave up the archaeology department he had founded at Wuhan University and transferred to Dunhuang to be with his wife. After nineteen years of living in two cities, the family was finally in one place. Years later, telling the story, her eyes still went red. "Old Peng said he came willingly. I know he did it because he understood me."

In 1998 she became director of the Dunhuang Academy. The problems in front of her got harder one after another. The murals were aging, irreversibly. Visitor numbers were climbing every year. Openness and protection had become a knot that could not be untied. She took teams around the world to learn how others did it, and finally committed to something that was criticized at the time as too far ahead of its time: digitizing Mogao.

Digital Dunhuang went from an idea to a construction site. Every cave scanned and archived at high precision, so the murals could have a kind of digital immortality. In 2016 the Digital Dunhuang resource library went online, and anyone on earth could walk through thirty caves in high definition without leaving home. She has a sentence that gets quoted everywhere: "In my whole life I have done one thing — guarding Mogao. Mogao's life is limited. Digital Dunhuang's life is unlimited."

A lifetime is short: only enough to do one thing seriously. A lifetime is also long: long enough to do that one thing as far as it can be done.

The honors came in like a tide. National Outstanding Communist Party Member, Pioneer of Reform, the national honorary title for outstanding contribution to the protection of cultural relics. People who know her also know that this director with all those titles lives so frugally it is almost stingy: the same old apartment, the same old furniture, one coat worn for a dozen years. In 2019 she gave the entire HK$20 million of her Lui Che Woo Prize to Peking University to set up a Dunhuang studies program. Before that she and Peng had already given money to the academy more than once.

By 2023 Peng Jinzhang had gone ahead of her. She edited and published the archaeological report they had written together, with a dedication to her husband on the title page. Someone asked whether she regretted spending her whole life at Dunhuang. "My life has been worth it," she said. "The country gave me something this important to do, and I did what I could."

Digital Dunhuang is still growing. There are crowds in front of the caves again. The wind still carries sand across the desert, but on the cliff face the ribbons of the apsaras are visible thread by thread in high definition — a thousand years held in trust for everyone who came later, by one old woman and several generations of Dunhuang workers.