20 Yuan 100th Anniversary of finding Dun Huang Grottoes

The Dunhuang Grottoes — more precisely the Mogao Caves — were not "found" in 2000 but rediscovered in a scholarly sense following the 1900 opening of the sealed Library Cave (Cave 17) by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu. That single cache contained tens of thousands of manuscripts and paintings dating back to the 4th century, and its contents were subsequently acquired — critics would say extracted — by Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot for European institutions before Chinese authorities grasped the full magnitude of the collection.

This commemorative marks the centenary of that 1900 discovery. The 62-gram format places it in the large-format bullion commemorative series China favored heavily through the 1990s and early 2000s for UNESCO-adjacent cultural subjects.