The discovery in 1900 – and dispersal worldwide within little over a decade – of a Library Cave hidden for almost 1000 years in the Buddhist cave temples of Dunhuang was a catalyst for China’s positioning itself as a key player in a pre-modern ‘global’ world, the Silk Road. Dunhuang, a UNESCO world heritage site, remains at the forefront of China’s bid to consolidate this through the current international Silk Road nomination. In her talk, Susan Whitfield, curator, Central Asian manuscripts at the British Library, will introduce the collections, their discovery and dispersal and the role of China in the collaborative work of the past two decades to reunite the collections digitally, through the International Dunhuang Project, and Pat Berger of the Department of History of Art will also discuss the site.