旅游英语阅读教程课件Unit 7.ppt

Unit7 Grottoes 新世纪高职高专 旅游与酒店管理类课程规划教材 Contents Lead-in Text Mogao Grottoes Dunhuang, a small city in Gansu Province, is located near the crossroad of the ancient Silk Road. It is made famous largely by its Buddhist grottoes, known as the Mogao Grottoes, which is one of the world’s most important sites of ancient Buddhist culture. The grottoes, also known as Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, preserve nearly a thousand years of Buddhist cave-temple architecture, clay sculptures, murals, and manuscripts, dating from the 5th to the 14th centuries. The Mogao Grottoes, together with the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang, Henan Province and the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, Shanxi Province are reputed as the three greatest stone sculpture treasure houses in China. Text The Mogao Grottoes is carved into desert cliffs overlooking a river valley about 25 km southwest of Dunhuang. The caves vary enormously in size from tiny single-room cells that served as living places for individual monks to huge cavernous worship halls housing monumental sculptures. The caves contain some 2,000 clay sculptures and more than 45,000 square meters of murals. The soft stone in the region is unsuitably brittle for carving, so the sculptures are mainly made of clay, coated with a kind of plaster surface that allowed finishing details to be painted on or engraved. Of the 1,000 caves cut between the foundation of the site in 366 AD and the last efforts in the 14th century, the Yuan Dynasty, 492 are still more or less well preserved. Text All have been subject to some degree of various kinds of damage, from the long term erosion of wind and water, to the smoke from fire made by camping troops. Despite all these damages, the murals are still brightly colored with clear lines. Through pictures of different styles and schools drawn in different historical periods, and a large quantity of Buddhist sutras and relics kept in the caves, you are provided valuable material for a study of ancie