This volume presents proceedings of The British Library's conference "The Preservation of Material from Cave 17", which brought together conservators, chemists, and curators of all the major collections of documents from Dunhuang and Turfan, sites on the Silk Road in Chinese Central Asia.

The proceedings of The British Library's conference "The Preservation of Material from Cave 17", which brought together conservators, chemists, and curators of all the major collections of documents from Dunhuang and Turfan, important sites on the Silk Road in Chinese Central Asia, are published here. Contributors from China, India, Russia, France, Germany, the UK and the USA describe the material in the various collections and consider the new scientific techniques that have been developped for the preservation of pre-tenth century documents. As a direct result of the conference, the International Dunhuang Project (based in The British Library) was set up to co-ordinate and foster futher international collaborative efforts, with the specific aim of aiding conservation and scholarship by making the documents available in digitized form.