Cave 17 of Mogao Grottoes, located on the north wall of the tunnel in Cave 16, was built in the fifth year of Tang Dynasty to the third year of Xian Tong (85 1-862), which is the site of Xihe River in the late Tang Dynasty. Cinema.

The cave plane is nearly square, covering the top of the bucket-shaped cave. The cave is 3 meters high from the ground to the top of the cave and has a small area. There is a rectangular meditation bed on the ground near the north wall. Sitting on the Zen bed is a statue of a red monk, which is one of the representative works of Dunhuang colored sculptures. The statue is very realistic, and the monk is wearing a shoulder-length cassock and squatting.

There are more than 50,000 pieces of Buddhist scriptures, social documents, silk paintings, embroidery, utensils and other cultural relics from the 4th century to the 1 1 century, so it is also known as the "Tibetan Sutra Cave".

1 1 At the beginning of the century, due to the war and other reasons, a large number of religious and social documents such as Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist paintings and utensils were hidden here, and walls were built to seal the door, and the surface was decorated with murals. As time went on, the matter of closing the door was gradually forgotten. ...

On the west wall stands a monument to the confession of Hongbian in the fifth year of Dazhong (AD 85 1 year). The northern wall is painted with double trees in the late Tang Dynasty. On the west side of the tree is a maid (with a post and a towel), and a cloth bag is hung between the trees. There are no murals on the east and south walls. There is no aisle, no front hall.

1900 (May 26th, 26th year of Guangxu reign of Qing Dynasty), this secret room was discovered by road flyover Wang Yuanzhen when cleaning up accumulated sand. Sadly, from 1905 to 19 15, Britain's Stein, France's Buriot, Japan's Ju Ruichao, Yoshikawa Koichiro, and Russia's Odenburg came one after another, and they bought nearly 40,000 ancient documents from Taoist Wang at a low price.

The Dunhuang suicide note covers the political, economic, military, literary, historical, geographical, medical, scientific, technological, ethnic, religious and artistic fields in ancient China from the 4th century to the1century. In addition to the written version of Chinese, there are a large number of ethnic minority materials, such as ancient Tibetan, Uygur, Khotan, Sogdian, Turkic, Hebrew, Sanskrit and so on.

A large number of precious historical documents have attracted scholars from China, Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Japan and many other countries to study, and thus a new international discipline-Dunhuang studies has emerged.

Dunhuang suicide note, together with Oracle Bone Inscriptions in Yin Ruins, Ming and Qing archives and Juyan bamboo slips, was praised by scholars as the four major discoveries in the archaeological history of China at the end of19th century. The discovery of cultural relics in the Tibetan Sutra Cave provides extremely valuable documents for the study of Chinese and foreign history and culture in the Middle Ages, and Dunhuang studies has therefore become an international emerging discipline.