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Female Donors in Dunhuang: Focusing on Mogao Cave 61

  • Sun-ah CHOI (Art History at Myongji University)
  • Published : 2025.12.31
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Abstract

This article examines images of female donors in the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, focusing on Cave 61 to foreground issues of gender, spatial practice, donor agency, and historiographical bias. Cave 61 is renowned for its monumental mural of Mount Wutai and is commonly identified as a "Mount Wutai Cave" or a Mañjuśrī Hall, leading scholarship to emphasize its iconography and religious meaning. Yet a striking feature of its visual program has received little attention: the main chamber contains fifty-two female donors and no male donor images. Although inscriptions explicitly name Lady Zhai as the donor, the cave has conventionally been attributed to her husband, Cao Yuanzhong, the Military Governor of the guiyi Army-reflecting persistent male-centered assumptions in modern scholarship. To reassess Lady Zhai's role, this study surveys the types and spatial placement of female donors in earlier Mogao caves and compares Cave 61 with three large-scale tenth-century caves (98, 100, and 108). Drawing on spatial analysis and manuscript evidence from the Library Cave, it argues for the possibility that Lady Zhai's agency was instrumental in shaping the thematic program and spatial organization of Cave 61, including the representation of Mount Wutai and the monumental Mañjuśrī image.

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References

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