Photo shows published reproduction of the French Collected Dunhuang Tibetan Documents, photo from chinanews.com.cn.

About 10,000 Tibetan documents drained overseas from the Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, Gansu Province, are being published in China in the form of books, according to Northwest University for Nationalities.

Since the Sutra Cave of the grottoes was discovered in the early 20th century, thousands of historical documents and cultural relics have been taken to foreign countries such as Britain, France, Japan and Russia.

The cave, considered as a treasury of literature, contains documents involving politics, economics, military affairs, religion, ethnic folklores, languages, science and philosophy.

Photo shows a view of the Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu Province, photo from CRIonline.com.

Tsering, an expert on tibetology of the Oversea Ethnic Document Research Institute of the university, noted that those Dunhuang documents in the ancient Tibetan language stolen by British explorer Marc Aurel Stein and French Sinologist Paul Pelliot are now collected in the British Library (BL) and the National Library of France (NLF), respectively.

It is hard to have the original scripts of these Tibetan documents drained overseas in large quantities return to China, so they have to be reproduced as prints, he added.

Dating back from 7 to 8 A.D. of ancient Tibet's Tubo Kingdom, these documents are regarded as probably filling a literature gap in a warring period in Tibet's history.

Since 2006, the university has been cooperating with the BL, the NLF and the Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House in the compilation and publication of these documents.