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The collections of manuscripts and works of art discovered by Paul Pelliot in 1908 on the site of Dunhuang in China, become available in French on internet:

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The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is born in 1994 in the will of the institutions depositories of vast collections coming from archaeological sites of the Silk Road to catalog and to digitalize the dispersed throughout the world often works exceptional. A site in English has thus been created since 1998 that stopped evolving since, including some information on thousands of paintings, objects, clothes or digital manuscripts. In order to make more visible the French collections, the British Library - where is the seat of the IDP - the National Library of France and the associated Guimet Museum to create a site entirely dedicated to these prestigious funds. He will be on line from Wednesday April 29, 2009.

For Bruno Racine, president of the BnF, "this event demonstrates the will of the Library to digitalize some specialized collections unique to the world and to reconstitute a potentially dispersed together."

For Jacques Gies, president of the Guimet Museum, "The modernity of the medium: the largest known opening today, answers the purpose of the museum to offer to the consideration of an universal public one of his leading collections."

It is from the end of the nineteenth century and the numerous European and Japanese expeditions, that of Central Asia and of the mythical Silk Road, the manuscripts, paintings and objects were brought back today kept in Paris, London, Beijing, Tokyo or St Petersburg .

For the French institutions, one of the most important expeditions was led between 1906 and 1908 by the French sinologist Pelliot Paul through the Central Asia, along the former Silk Road of northern. He explored the underground cave No. 17 of the Rupestrian Buddhist sanctuary of the Underground cave Mogo ", situated in the oasis of Dunhuang, sealed and overlooked since the end of the first millennium of our era where was an extraordinary library.

The result of this mission was exceptional: the Museum of Natural History received first-class geological, plant and animal samples, more of 200 banners and paintings, the thousands of currencies were deposited in the Louvre (before being transferred to the Guimet Museum in 1945 -- 1946); finally, the department of the Manuscripts of the National Library collected more than 6000 handwritten and some printed matters previous to 1035, in Chinese, Tibetan, koutchéen, Sanskrit, Uighur, and sogdien Khotanese.

They testify in a vivid manner of the wealth of the cultural, religious and commercial exchanges that enlivened the Road of Silk. She was at a time a way of penetration of the religions (notably of the Buddhism) to the confluence of the civilizations complicates, Indian, Tibetan, Persian and a place of blossoming of a culture whose wealth does not surprise us to quit and to dazzle us.

The political storms and the wars of the twentieth century delayed the conservation and the cataloging of the collections of Dunhuang, and returned the even more complex access of it. The International Dunhuang Project (IDP) is born in 1994 in the will of the institutions of depositories to work together to federate the collections. They decided to throw a vast high-quality digitalization program, to coordinate the works of the international teams of curators, cataloguers and researchers, and finally to use the technologies (then all news) of the Internet.

This program made the object, notably, of a help of the Andrew W. Foundation Mellon, that financed the digitalization of the manuscripts and objects, the cataloging and the creation of the data base and the web site.

It is in the setting of the missions of the IDP that the British Library, the National Library of France and the associated Guimet Museum in October 2007 to deposit an European project, IDP-CREA title, by the European Commission in the setting of the call to proposals of the Culture Program 2007-2011.

The priority objective was to give more visibility to the pictures of the BnF and the Guimet Museum, in the digital setting of the International Dunhuang Project with the help of the American Foundation Andrew W. Mellon. 60,000 euros have been cleared thus for the creation of a website dedicated to the collections of Dunhuang kept in France. This server is joined in network with those of London, St Petersburg, Berlin and Peking, and permits to have access simultaneously to the set of the data concerning the heritage of the Silk Road henceforth.