As few remains of ancient buildings built during or prior to the Tang dynasty have been preserved until today, research on architectural color paintings has mainly focused on the official color paintings of the Ming and Qing dynasties. Research on color paintings prior to the Ming and Qing dynasties is severely lacking. The murals in Dunhuang Mogao caves are accompanied by many well-preserved architectural color paintings made between the middle Tang and Western Xia dynasties and can provide important historical material to enrich research on this genre of Chinese painting. This paper systematically analyzes the artistic characteristics of the architectural color paintings in Mogao cave 131 from the perspectives of compositional proportion, overall pattern, and color configuration, and then compares them with other extant architectural color paintings. The conclusion of this analysis is that the paintings in cave 361 show prominent Tibetan stylistic characteristics. These paintings are of great significance for studying the architectural art created in Dunhuang caves during the Tibetan Occupation period, and for improving our understanding of the shape and proportion of early Tibetan architectural color paintings in China.
