From Digital Mogao Caves to Digital Chi

Deeply hidden in the artistic treasury of Northwest China, the Mogao Caves is a green land in yellow sand and a shining pearl on the Silk Road. But, thousands of years’ damages from the nature factors and artificial destroy and over-load tours cause diseases for all the caves in different extents. Consequently, the speed of painted statues and fresco degenerate dramatically. In order to protect Mogao Caves effectively, a world cultural heritage, this paper brings forward the aims and tasks to build a project-Digital Mogao Caves. 3D reconstruction is an essential content in it, including the inside and outside of the whole 492 grottoes and 220 km places around them. And then all of the digital records are archived and a Virtual Demonstration System is constructed for researches of resuming and repairing, as well as for the tours instead of the locale. The Mogao Caves is an artistic treasure for architecture due to record a great deal of architecture form for different period by frescoes. According to the descriptions of the northern fresco in Cave No.172, the Hong Kong Chi Lin Nunnery realized the transfer from the fresco to reality by rebuilding its timber-frame building complex. In this progress, the 3D data of the wooden components are recorded in detail and used to research the arts for timberframe buildings of Tang Dynasty. Also, the exploitation for the Virtual Architectural Environments offered a novel way and technologies for the recovering, rebuilding, researching and protecting the timber-frame buildings. The two practices suggest that the Digital Cultural Heritage is an effective technology and methodology in the research, preservation, management, interpretation, and representation of cultural heritages. * The work described in this paper is supported by the National High Technology Research (2006AA12Z224) and the project titled Digital Architectural Information System of Timber-frame Buildings for Chi Lin Nunnery. ** Corresponding author: Zhiqiang Du ([email protected])