Dunhuang Sidelights: "Sweeping Monk"

When it comes to Dunhuang, many people think of the murals in the caves, but when it comes to understanding Dunhuang, it's not as familiar as the plot in Journey to the West.
Not long ago, the title of "Dunhuang Sweeping Monk" on the Internet was eye-catching. It was a bit like a day for ten years. Xing Yaolong, a scholar of the Dunhuang Research Academy, was the one who was crowned with the title. The world only knows the name of Dunhuang, but does not recognize its various forms. This is his greatest feeling of living and working in Dunhuang for a long time.
In his early years, Xing Yaolong met a migrant couple on a train from Wuhan to Fujian. While chatting, he learned that someone had never heard of Dunhuang. At that moment, he began to realize what to do to popularize Dunhuang culture.
In December 2022, Xing Yaolong published the Big History of Dunhuang as the author. He not only popularized the history and culture of Dunhuang, but also told the voice of the guardians of Dunhuang. In his words, "Dunhuang is a small border city in History of China, like a seemingly insignificant spinning wheel, but many clues of Big History are here."
Indeed, in ancient times, Dunhuang was closely related to the four counties of Hexi, connecting Xinjiang to the west, Qinghai, Tibet, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan to the south, and reaching the Inner Mongolia border to the north. It connected countless cultural and economic arteries together, gathering a microcosm of different eras of China.