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New research on bamboo paintings found in the Dunhuang grottoes in northwest China's Gansu Province shows the art form may be dated back to the fifth century.

In the past, bamboo painting was thought to have appeared no earlier than the Tang Dynasty (618 A.D. - 907 A.D.), when some renowned painters, poets and emperors painted bamboo images with black inks, said Professor Yang Xiong, of the Dunhuang Research Academy.

However, research on the Dunhuang paintings showed that many of the bamboo paintings found were painted long before that period, said Yang.

"Judging from the painting styles of the bamboo at Dunhuang, we can find some of the paintings are by painters as late as the Yuan Dynasty (1271 A.D. - 1368 A.D.) and some as early as the Northern Wei (386 A.D. - 534 A.D.)," he said.

In the 1970s, archeologists found images of bamboo in a fresco featuring a servant girl and bamboo in a Tang prince's tomb and declared it to be the earliest bamboo painting.

The work now identified as the earliest was found at the No. 254 cave and is considered a masterpiece and valuable material for the study of China's bamboo painting history.

The paintings at Dunhuang were the earliest and best preserved found so far and of high artistic and research value, said Yang.