Classical Chinese furniture — a desk, a cabinet or any other fine piece of furniture and often out of precious wood —impresses us with its delicate shape. The secret of its graceful form is less visible and lies in its complicated sunmao (榫卯) system, which allows the various components to be assembled neatly without glue or nails.

Suzhou, a scenic and peaceful city in Jiangsu, a province long known for its wealth, developed its own tradition of classical furniture design over the centuries. Examples of the Suzhou-style furniture are currently on display as part of Oriental Wisdom in Sun Mao, a group exhibition at the Prince Kung’s Palace Museum in Beijing.

Running until Sunday, the show demonstrates the way that the complex sunmao technique has been used in making furniture, as well as the variations that developed in different parts of the country. Also on display are models of different kinds, as well as the components of two chairs, which are disassembled and laid out to give museum goers a clear view of the inner structure of classical furniture.

The Suzhou style flowered during the Ming Dynasty(1368-1644), and once dominated the market in Jiangnan, the southern region along the lower reaches of the Yangtze River. It integrated input from the intellectual class, who put their ideals regarding living spaces and spiritual harbors into its design. According to Xu Jianping, one of the inheritors of classical furniture design in the city, the Suzhou style presents beauty in the same delicate way the city does, and represents the life philosophy of its people to achieve “refinement through careful calculations”.

Guangzhou style furniture is normally made out of tropical hardwood, and its forms and decorative patterns show the influence of European furniture styles resulting from Guangzhou’s history as an international trade port. The Beijing style, which is more splendid, incorporates aesthetic (美学) and stylistic elements from both Suzhou and Guangzhou.

“While the Suzhou style is light in weight and elegant in outline, furniture in the Beijing style is more magnificent, as it used to be made for royalty and aristocracy.” Xu says. “Ultimately, people live with their furniture, so the principle of quality furniture is that it should be appropriate to the space.”

The impressive collection of literature in the Library Cave at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, Northwest China’s Gansu province, ______ one of the most inclusive, advanced and open _______ of the ancient Chinese, says Dunhuang specialist Zhao Xiaoxing.

______ in the Hexi Corridor, the main line of the ancient Silk Road, the caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, have been promoting goods and cultural ______between the East and the West for more than 1,600 years.

While the Dunhuang wall paintings have recorded the glories of the past ______ , the more than 60,000 items of literature______ in the Library Cave, or Cave 17, dating from the 4th to the 11th centuries, have kept the ______ original quality through the written word, according to Dunhuang Academy.

The value of the ______ was thoroughly demonstrated during the launch of the Digital Library Cave, a gamelike program ______ enables users to virtually witness, and participate in, the_________ and fall of the Library Cave on the website Digital Dunhuang or via the WeChat miniprogram, Cloud Museum of Dunhuang Caves.

The Library Cave ______ in the mid-9th century and later______ unopened for almost 1,000 years ____ being accidentally discovered by Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu in 1900.The majority of its cultural relics, consisting of Buddhist manuscripts, ______ and economic documents and other delicate and ______items, are now kept in foreign museums.