Winds blow fierce in the Gobi Desert. So what was a film crew doing there?
Huju Opera film "Daughter of Dunhuang" centers on the efforts of archeologist Fan Jinshi's efforts to preserve the priceless Buddhist art and murals in the Mogao Grottoes.
Sidelights of the film (Provided by Teng Junjie)
The 1,600-year-old Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes in the wind-swept desert of northwestern China have attracted archeologists, art specialists, explorers and opportunists for more than a century.
The priceless treasures in the caves also captivated veteran film director Teng Junjie and Chinese opera star Mao Shanyu.
They combined their talent to produce a recently released movie based on the work of archeologist and heritage specialist Fan Jinshi who was born in Beijing but grew up in Shanghai.
Now 84, Fan is popularly known as the "Daughter of Dunhuang." She spent more than half a century researching and preserving the priceless Buddhist art and murals in the grottoes.
Mao portrays this remarkable woman in a film aptly titled "Daughter of Dunhuang." The story is told in traditional Shanghai Huju Opera style. The movie premiered in the city in early October and is scheduled for nationwide release later this year.
Fan Jinshi, the past president and current honorary president of Dunhuang Academy China, is more widely known as the "daughter of Dunhuang." She has spent more than five decades studying and preserving art in the 1,600-year-old Mogao Grottoes.
Fan at the Mogao Grottoes
Fan's lifelong dedication to her noble cause provided rich raw material for the film. After graduating from Peking University in 1963, she was assigned to work at Dunhuang in the Gobi Desert of Gansu Province.
The past president and current honorary president of Dunhuang Academy China said in her autobiography that Dunhuang was her destiny, although she confessed to bouts of loneliness and homesickness while living in an abandoned temple in the remote desert.
"On some windy days, I felt that I was forgotten by my family and the whole world," said Fan. "But when I entered the grottoes, I was overwhelmed by a sense of peace, awe and happiness. Step by step, Dunhuang became an integral part of my life."
The work of Fan and generations of Chinese antiquarians has been a race against time as the grottoes age and decay from the effects of weathering.
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Dunhuang in northwest China's Gansu Province is home to the Mogao Grottoes, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
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The UNESCO-listed World Heritage site is home to an invaluable collection of Buddhist artworks, including 2,415 colored sculptures and 45,000 square meters of murals spread across 735 caves. Often called "the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas," the artworks were created by ancient worshippers.
The cultural relics also include sutra manuscripts, silk paintings, embroidery and documents of Chinese philosophy.
Dunhuang, a stop on the Old Silk Road, played an important role in ancient trade between China and the outside world. At one point, it was a frontier military garrison town established to protect the trade routes.
In 1900, a sealed cave was discovered by Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu, a controversial figure in the history of the Mogao Grottoes. He stayed there for years, cleaning up, guarding and restoring parts of the caves.
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The Mogao Grottoes are home to the world's largest and richest treasure trove of Buddhist art.
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The caves' rich troves were a magnet for foreign treasure hunters. Wang's sin in modern eyes was selling some of the artworks to foreigners, including British adventurer Marc Aurel Stein and French sinologist Paul Pelliot. American explorer Landon Warner damaged the site by extracting over 10 ancient murals and stealing a colored sculpture from the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907). Today, some of relics are scattered in more than 10 countries around the world.
Fan spearheaded a project to digitalize the remaining treasures to preserve them for posterity as weathering slowly destroys them. Avant-garde technologies such as immersion display and virtual interaction have been applied to the database to render the grottoes and murals "alive."
Huju Opera artist Mao Shanyu portrays Fan in the movie from the age of 25 to 80 years old.
Enter a joint venture of Shanghai Huju Opera Theater, Dunhuang Academy China and Shanghai Media Group, which shot "Daughter of Dunhuang" with a 4K camera.
Drones were used to capture the spectacular setting of the grottoes and surrounding natural landscapes.
Huju Opera was specifically chosen for the film because it is a younger genre than traditional Peking and Kunqu operas and has a more contemporary approach to storytelling.
Teng explained that the challenge of making a Chinese opera film nowadays is to keep pace with the tastes and faster viewing rhythms of today's audiences.
He has already shot six acclaimed Peking Opera movies including "Farewell My Concubine" and "Xiao He Chasing Han Xin Under the Moonlight," said filming on location required considerable sacrifice by the film crew.
"Shooting took about 20 days, and all we had to endure strong winds, sandstorms and a shortage of water," Teng said. "But historians have already worked there for decades under such difficult environmental conditions. The grottoes there have a great healing power. They show the height of ancient civilizations and the role of the Silk Road."
Teng said the film has already received screening invitations from several film festivals and UN organizations.
Director Teng Junjie and his crew spent over 20 days filming on location in Dunhuang, where they had to endure strong winds, sandstorms and a shortage of water.
Teng, formerly a distinguished director of TV galas and ceremonies, has more recently made a name for himself by applying advanced modern technologies to produce movies based on Chinese opera.
In 2020, his Peking Opera movie "The Height of the Early Tang Dynasty" received the top opera movie award at the 33rd Golden Rooster Awards. It was cited for using traditional theatrical elements and modern 3D cinematography to tell the story of the prosperous reign of Emperor Taizong (AD 626–649).
"I worked as a magazine photographer for five years in the 1980s," Teng said. "Celebrated Chinese cinematographers of that era, such as Xie Jin and Wu Tianming, planted the seed of filmmaking deep in my heart."
Chinese opera and filmmaking are no strangers.
In 1905, China's first movie – "Dingjun Mountain" – featured Peking Opera master Tan Xinpei (1847-1917) in excerpts from the Peking Opera play "Romance of the Three Kingdoms."
In 1948, Fei Mu (1906-1951) directed China's first color film "Happiness Neither in Life nor in Death," which starred famed Peking Opera artist Mei Lanfang (1894-1961) in a Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) legend. During his career, Mei starred in 14 opera films, bringing the art form to international audiences.
Teng works with Peking Opera master Shang Changrong in the 2018 Peking Opera film "Cao Cao and Yang Xiu."
Yueju Opera films flourished after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Yueju Opera artists Yuan Xuefen (1922-2011) and Fan Ruijuan (1924-2017) starred in the popular 1953 color film "The Butterfly Lovers," produced by Shanghai Film Studio.
The 1962 Yueju Opera film "A Dream of Red Mansions," starring Xu Yulan and Wang Wenjuan (1926-2021), was also a box office sensation.
In more recent years, other traditional opera classics have been adapted for film, including China's first 3D Kunqu Opera movie "The Bell Tolls for a Dynasty" and the Cantonese Opera film "White Snake."
Elena Zhou, a 40-something Shanghai worker and movie buff, said she and her teenage son always enjoy a good opera film. Both liked the "White Snake," citing the scenes of Madam White Snake's daring theft of an herb to save her husband and the flooding of Jinshan Temple.
"Chinese opera films are worth watching over and over again," Zhou said. "They are rich in cultural connotations and vocal artistry. Even the delicate expression in an artist's eyes and posture can arouse the imagination."
Teng, who has compiled his expertise and experiences in "Director's Notes," which is soon to be published, said he hopes to "inspire more young people and foreigners to appreciate Chinese culture, history and amazing theater."
