The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders in the People's Republic of China
10 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the greatest UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, Mogao Caves and Longmen Grottoes. The list covers 10 UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders. Last updated 6 October 2026.
The People's Republic of China has 10 of the 149 UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders in our collection. Ranked by how they look, the list opens with Terracotta Army, Mogao Caves and Longmen Grottoes.
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 The farmer who found the Terracotta Army wasn't looking for it. In March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his five brothers and a neighbor were digging a well during a drought, hoping only for water, when at about three metres down they hit a layer of charcoal and reddened soil, and past four metres one of them pulled up a life-sized pottery head.
Did you know? The paint on the figures is so fragile that, once exposed to Xi'an's dry air, its lacquer base can curl within seconds and flake off in minutes.
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 The Mogao Caves are among the richest treasure houses of Buddhist art anywhere. For roughly a thousand years, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, monks, merchants and officials cut shrines into a cliff face on the edge of the desert near Dunhuang, an oasis town on the Silk Road where traders and pilgrims prepared for, or recovered from, the crossing of the Gobi and Taklamakan.
Did you know? Aurel Stein left in 1907 with about 7,000 complete manuscripts and 6,000 fragments, paying only about £130.
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 At Longmen, the "Dragon Gate" south of Luoyang, the Yi River cuts between two limestone hills, and for four centuries emperors, officials and pious families hollowed out both cliffs to fill them with Buddhas.
Did you know? Work on the three Binyang caves commissioned by Emperor Xuanwu reportedly took 24 years and the labour of some 800,000 workers.
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 Leshan Giant Buddha is carved directly into a sandstone cliff at the point where the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers meet below the city of Leshan in southern Sichuan. At 71 metres high it is the tallest stone Buddha in the world and by far the largest pre-modern statue anywhere. It depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, seated with hands resting on his knees and gazing across the water towards Mount Emei.
Did you know? The statue was declared a protected cultural relic in 1956, four decades before UNESCO listed it.
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 Jiaohe is a city with no walls, because it never needed them. It sits on a long, narrow island of loess plateau, about 1,650 metres long and at most 300 metres wide, between two river channels that split and rejoin around it, and its edges drop more than 30 metres in sheer cliffs on every side.
Did you know? A precinct of 101 stupas stands in the north of the city: four groups of 25 small stupas around a central one modelled on the Mahabodhi type of Bodh Gaya.
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 At the foot of the Helan Mountains, on the dry plain west of Yinchuan, a line of great earthen mounds rises from the steppe like weathered beehives. They are the tombs of the emperors of Western Xia, a state founded by the Tangut people that ruled much of northwest China from 1038 until its destruction by Genghis Khan's Mongols in 1227.
Did you know? Chinese writers often call the site the "Pyramids of the East", a nickname earned by its tall, tapering earthen mounds rising from the plain.
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 The rock at Maijishan is too soft and crumbly to hold fine carved detail, so instead of cutting figures directly from the cliff the way sculptors did at Longmen or Yungang, Maijishan's artisans built their statues up from clay modeled over wooden or stone armatures and then painted them — a technique that let them produce more than 7,000 sculptures across some 190 caves despite the mountain itself being the wrong…
Did you know? In 2014 Maijishan was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Silk Roads network of sites along the Chang'an–Tianshan corridor.
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 In a side canyon of the Yellow River, where sheer cliffs rise above the water, hundreds of Buddhas look out from niches and caves cut into the cliff. The Bingling Temple grottoes stretch for about 200 metres along the north side of the gorge and end in a great natural recess, where wooden stairways climb the rock face to higher caves and to a colossal figure of the Maitreya Buddha more than 27 metres tall.
Did you know? The ink inscription of 420 CE in Cave 169 is the earliest precisely dated inscription known from any cave temple in China.
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 In the hills of Dazu, west of Chongqing, tens of thousands of figures look out from the rock: Buddhas, bodhisattvas, sages, demons, officials and ordinary people, cut into open cliff faces and shallow grottoes over some six centuries.
Did you know? A traditional pilgrims' saying ranks the site beside a sacred mountain: 'Go up to Emei, come down to Baoding.'
10 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · CC BY-SA 4.0 A limestone cliff leans out over a bend of the Ming River in southern Guangxi, and across its face, tens of metres above the water, march some 1,900 red figures. Most are human silhouettes with arms raised and bent at the elbow and knees splayed in a squat, a posture often compared to a frog.
Did you know? Most human figures are between 60 and 150 centimetres tall, but the largest rises more than 3 metres, the biggest figure in the whole World Heritage property.
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 UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Mogao Caves and Longmen Grottoes.
- How many UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 10 UNESCO-listed archaeological wonders.