The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in the People's Republic of China
10 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the greatest archaeological wonders in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, Mogao Caves and Longmen Grottoes. The list covers 10 archaeological wonders. Last updated 6 October 2026.
China's greatest archaeological wonders follow two threads: the tombs of its rulers and the spread of Buddhism along the Silk Road. Emperors were buried with whole worlds made for the afterlife, while monks and patrons, following the trade routes east from Central Asia, carved and painted cave temples into cliffs of sandstone and conglomerate for more than a thousand years. The dry northwest preserved earth-built cities and murals; the wet south left its marks in river cliffs.
The Terracotta Army near Xi'an guards the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor to unify China: thousands of life-size soldiers, each with an individual face, found by farmers digging a well in 1974. At Dunhuang, the Mogao Caves hold centuries of Buddhist murals and sculpture, and the sealed Library Cave yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts. The Longmen Grottoes line both banks of the Yi River near Luoyang with Buddhas from tiny niches to colossal figures, and the Leshan Giant Buddha, carved in the Tang dynasty, sits facing the meeting of three rivers.
Further along the old routes, Maijishan's caves and walkways cling to a lone rounded hill in Gansu, and Bingling Temple's carvings line a canyon beside the Yellow River. The Dazu Rock Carvings near Chongqing bring Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian imagery together in vivid, crowded scenes. Jiaohe, near Turpan, is an earthen city carved down into a narrow plateau between two rivers, the Western Xia tombs rise as great earth mounds below the Helan Mountains, and on the cliffs of the Zuo River in Guangxi, the Huashan paintings show hundreds of red human figures with raised arms.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Mogao Caves | Cave | ✓ |
| 3 | Longmen Grottoes | Rock-cut architecture | ✓ |
| 4 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | ✓ |
| 5 | Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto) | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 6 | Western Xia Imperial Tombs | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 7 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 8 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | Dazu Rock Carvings | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 10 | Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming | Cave | ✓ |
01 Terracotta Army
People's Republic of China · 24.5 km from Weinan34.385° N 109.273° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by artemtation from Pixabay What makes the find keep giving up new detail is that no two soldiers are alike. Heads were sculpted separately from the mass-produced bodies, which let craftsmen vary hairstyle, facial features, ear shape and expression figure by figure across a workforce of thousands — more than 8,000 figures are believed to exist in total, of which just over 2,000 have been excavated from three pits so far, leaving an estimated 6,000 still underground.
Did you know? Legs were built much like terracotta drainage pipes, and heads, arms and torsos were made separately before assembly.
02 Mogao Caves
People's Republic of China · 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037° N 94.804° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 4.0 Today some 735 caves survive, of which about 490 in the southern section are decorated. Together they hold around 45,000 square metres of wall paintings and some 2,400 painted clay sculptures. The murals trace changes in style across the centuries, from early figures influenced by India and Central Asia to the lavish paradise scenes, musicians and flying apsaras of the Tang dynasty, when Mogao was at its height. 5 metres tall, carved in 695.
Did you know? The oldest decorated caves still standing, numbers 268, 272 and 275, were cut under the Northern Liang between 419 and 439.
03 Longmen Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 10.1 km from Luoyang34.556° N 112.470° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by janeb13 from Pixabay The carving began in 493, when the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen moved his capital from Datong to Luoyang, and it peaked under the Tang in the seventh and eighth centuries; roughly 30% of the caves are Northern Wei work and 60% Tang. The two periods are easy to tell apart. Wei figures are slender, elongated and austere, with flat fish-tail drapery; Tang sculpture turns fuller, more naturalistic and more worldly.
Did you know? The Tang poet Bai Juyi, who spent his final years in Luoyang, is buried at Longmen.
04 Leshan Giant Buddha
People's Republic of China · 4.4 km from Leshan29.547° N 103.769° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by christels from Pixabay The statue was begun in the early eighth century by a monk named Hai Tong, who hoped the Buddha's presence would calm the currents that wrecked boats at the confluence. Tradition says that when funding for the work was threatened, he gouged out his own eyes to prove his sincerity.
Did you know? Seen from the river, the hills around the statue are said to form the outline of a reclining Buddha more than a kilometre long.
05 Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto)
People's Republic of China · 8.4 km from Turpan42.951° N 89.064° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Acstar · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the 2nd century BC to the mid-5th century AD Jiaohe was the capital of Nearer Jushi, a Tocharian kingdom, and an important stop on the Silk Road route leading west toward Karasahr and Korla. After Tang China took the region, the town became the seat of a new county in 640 and, until 658, of the Protectorate General of the Western Regions, the highest Chinese military command in the west. Tang records give it 7,000 inhabitants.
Did you know? More than 2,000 tombs lie on the plateau across the western ravine, and finds there include Persian silver coins alongside Tang bronze money.
06 Western Xia Imperial Tombs
People's Republic of China · 25.1 km from Yinchuan38.435° N 105.987° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The imperial mausoleums follow a common plan. A rectangular outer wall with paired gate towers on the south encloses stele pavilions, a barbican and an inner precinct with corner watchtowers. The tomb mound itself, made of rammed earth, stands off-centre in the north-west of the precinct and reaches up to 23 metres high and 30 metres across.
Did you know? Some bricks from a stele pavilion at Mausoleum 3 carry single Chinese characters, often surnames such as Li or Niu, evidence that Han craftsmen helped build the tombs.
07 Maijishan Grottoes
People's Republic of China · 29.1 km from Tianshui34.350° N 106.006° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
MarsmanRom · CC BY-SA 3.0 Work on the site began during the short-lived Later Qin dynasty (384–417 CE) and never really stopped: successive dynasties — Northern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Zhou, Sui, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing — kept adding, repairing and repainting for more than 1,600 years, making Maijishan less a single monument than a continuously updated project spanning most of imperial Chinese history.
Did you know? The poet Du Fu visited about 25 years after a severe earthquake of 734 and wrote "Mountain Temples", thought to describe Maijishan's cliffside cells.
08 Bingling Temple
People's Republic of China · 26.8 km from Linxia City35.806° N 103.044° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Thebrainchamber1 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Work here began in the early 5th century under the Western Qin dynasty. Cave 169 preserves an ink inscription dated to 420 CE, the earliest dated record at the site. Carving went on for more than a thousand years, through the Northern Wei, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and each period left work in its own recognisable style.
Did you know? Only the upper half of the great Maitreya Buddha is carved from the living rock; its lower half was built up from a mud-based mixture.
09 Dazu Rock Carvings
People's Republic of China29.713° N 105.707° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Gwydion M. Williams from Coventry, Great Britain · CC BY 2.0 The earliest carvings date from 650, early in the Tang dynasty, but serious work began in the late 9th century when Wei Junjing, prefect of Changzhou, sponsored the first carvings on Mount Beishan, close to the town of Dazu. After the fall of the Tang, local gentry, monks, nuns and ordinary donors kept adding niches, and Beishan became a gallery of finely carved figures, among them a Guanyin and the Wisdom King Mahamayuri riding a peacock.
Did you know? In Beishan's niche 125 stands a Guanyin holding prayer beads, so graceful that she is nicknamed the 'Charming Guanyin'.
10 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · CC BY-SA 4.0 The pictures were painted between roughly the Warring States period and the Eastern Han, some 1,800 to 2,500 years ago, by the Luo Yue, the people of the Zuo River valley who are regarded as ancestors of the Zhuang and of peoples now living in northern Vietnam.
Did you know? Inscribed on 15 July 2016, the Zuojiang Huashan rock art landscape became China's 49th UNESCO World Heritage Site.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the greatest archaeological wonders in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Mogao Caves and Longmen Grottoes.
- When was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- Farmers digging a well near Xi'an found the first fragments in 1974. The figures were buried with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of a unified China, who died in 210 BC.
- How tall is the Leshan Giant Buddha?
- The Leshan Giant Buddha is about 71 metres tall, making it the largest stone Buddha in the world. It was carved into a red sandstone cliff during the Tang dynasty over roughly 90 years in the 8th century.
- What are the Mogao Caves?
- The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang in Gansu are hundreds of Buddhist cave temples created between the 4th and 14th centuries on the Silk Road. They are famous for their murals and sculptures and for the Library Cave, sealed around the 11th century and found again in 1900.
- How many archaeological wonders are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 10 archaeological wonders.