Dunhuang manuscripts refer to a wide variety of religious and secular documents in Chinese and other languages that were discovered at the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang, China, during the 20th century. The majority of the surviving texts come from a large cache of documents produced between the late 4th and early 11th centuries which had been sealed in the so-called 'Library Cave' at some point in the early 11th century. The Library Cave was discovered by a Daoist monk called Wang Yuanlu in 1900, and much of the contents of the cave were subsequently taken to England and France by European explorers, such as Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot. Knowing that the Dunhuang manuscripts were priceless treasures, Stein and Pelliot swindled Wang and bought them for very little money. They took the majority of these treasures from China to Europe.

The Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, form a system of 500 temples 25 km (16 mi) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis located at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road, in Gansu province, China. The caves may also be known as the Dunhuang Caves; however, this term is also used as a collective term to include other Buddhist cave sites in and around the Dunhuang area, such as the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, Eastern Thousand Buddha Caves, Yulin Caves, and Five Temple Caves. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of 2,000 years.