Digital Tianlongshan Grottoes toured Egypt. Photo: Screenshot from website

A highly anticipated exhibition, digital restoration Tianlongshan Grottoes toured Egypt on Saturday in Cairo Chinese Cultural Center, captivating a large number of guests.

The Tianlongshan Grottoes (Mountain of the Heavenly Dragon) are caves located in Taiyuan, North China’s Shanxi Province, noted for their Buddhist temples. Excavated in the Eastern Wei Dynasty (534-550), Northern Qi Dynasty (550-577), Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907), the Mountain of the Heavenly Dragon comprises 25 caves and more than 500 stone Buddha statues. This period of excavation was known as China’s peak of the art of grottoes
 
This touring exhibition utilized phantom imaging, holograms and other technological means to digitally reproduce the Tianlongshan sculptures scattered in several countries, showcasing the magnificent Tianlongshan Grottoes art for the Egyptian people to learn about, while also promoting cultural exchanges between the two countries.

Zhang Chaoyang, minister of the Chinese Embassy in Egypt, said that in recent years, China-Egypt relations have been to the moon and experienced fruitful exchanges in the field of humanities, and this exhibition will show the beauty of the fusion of Chinese and foreign art exchanges in front of the Egyptian people in a more real and palpable way.  

It will “enhance the mutual understanding and traditional friendship between the people of China and Egypt,” the minister noted. 

Since its launch in 2014, Taiyuan Tianlongshan Grottoes Museum cooperated with domestic as well as foreign academic institutions over a period of five years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum, the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts and other 21 museums in 10 countries. The museum collected 94 pieces of Tianlongshan loss of statues of the three-dimensional data, completed the three-dimensional scanning and data modeling of the grottoes ontology, and realized the professional digital restoration of the 11 caves.

It not only launched a touring exhibition project, but also opened an international cooperation model for researching and displaying the art of grotto temples, through digital restoration to enable the digital restoration of statues that have been lost for hundreds of years, and reproduced the exquisite Tianlongshan grottoes art.


This exhibition project was the first combination that precious artifacts separated by historical reasons with the original environment in a comprehensive virtual way. It is also the first case of a large-scale international digital restoration of this type of cultural relics touring exhibition. 

Additionally, the exhibition has toured Taiyuan, Nanjing and Paris with great success.