The Most Beautiful Caves in the People's Republic of China
6 places ยท updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful caves in the People's Republic of China are Mogao Caves, Yungang Grottoes and Reed Flute Cave. The list covers 6 caves. Last updated 6 October 2026.
China combines two great cave traditions. The south holds one of the largest karst regions on Earth, where warm rain has dissolved limestone into towers above ground and long galleries below. In the north and west, Buddhist monks arriving along the Silk Road cut cave temples into sandstone and conglomerate cliffs, painting and sculpting them for a thousand years. One kind of cave was made by water, the other by faith, and both reached a scale found almost nowhere else.
The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang hold some 45,000 square metres of murals, from the fourth century to the fourteenth, in hundreds of decorated grottoes at the edge of the desert. The Yungang Grottoes near Datong were carved under the Northern Wei in the fifth century, with seated Buddhas more than ten metres tall facing out from the cliff. Maijishan in Gansu sets its niches and statues high on the side of a rounded hill, reached by stairways fixed to the rock.
In Guilin, Reed Flute Cave is a limestone cavern of stalactites and pools, with inscriptions on its walls left by visitors since the Tang dynasty. Furong Cave in Wulong, part of the South China Karst, is known for its rich and varied dripstone, from crystal flowers to calcite curtains. On the Zuojiang River, the Huashan Rock Paintings cover a sheltered cliff above the water with red ochre figures of people, animals and drums.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mogao Caves | Cave | โ |
| 2 | Yungang Grottoes | Cave | โ |
| 3 | Reed Flute Cave | Show cave | |
| 4 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | โ |
| 5 | Furong Cave, Wulong | Cave | |
| 6 | Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming | Cave | โ |
01 Mogao Caves
People's Republic of China ยท 16.9 km from Dunhuang40.037ยฐ N 94.804ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Zhangzhugang ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 The caves also gave the world one of its greatest archival discoveries. In 1900 a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, found a sealed chamber โ now called the Library Cave โ packed with around 50,000 manuscripts, paintings and printed texts in many languages, walled up in the early eleventh century. Among them was a copy of the Diamond Sutra dated 868, the oldest dated printed book known. Much of the collection was taken abroad by Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot and others in the following years. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. Only a rotating selection of caves is open on any given day, so every visit is slightly different.
Did you know? The Library Cave, now numbered Cave 17, was originally a memorial shrine for the monk Hongbian, who died in 862.
02 Yungang Grottoes
People's Republic of China ยท 15.3 km from Datong40.110ยฐ N 113.122ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Marcin Biaลek ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 One story claims that when Emperor Wencheng commissioned a Buddha statue modelled on his own face, a natural dark patch in the stone appeared at exactly the spot where the emperor had a mole โ read at the time as evidence the resemblance, and by extension the emperor's spiritual authority, was destined rather than merely commissioned. Whether or not you buy the mole story, it tells you exactly what the project was for: making political power look inevitable.
Did you know? In 1992 archaeologists found over 130 carved blocks buried before Cave 20, pieces cut away to repair a damaged statue and left untouched for some 1,500 years.
03 Reed Flute Cave
People's Republic of China ยท 2.5 km from Guilin25.304ยฐ N 110.276ยฐ E
Dennis G. Jarvis ยท CC BY-SA 2.0 The cave's name is more literal than either of those: reeds that once grew thickly around its mouth were cut and made into flutes, giving the site its name centuries before anyone added the colored lighting that fills the chambers today โ a modern touch that has nothing to do with the cave's original draw, which was always the inscriptions and the shapes carved by water in the rock.
Did you know? The cave is about 240 metres long and up to 93 metres wide and 18 metres high, with a visitor route of roughly 500 metres.
04 Maijishan Grottoes
People's Republic of China ยท 29.1 km from Tianshui34.350ยฐ N 106.006ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
MarsmanRom ยท CC BY-SA 3.0 Getting to the caves is itself part of the experience: they're strung across a near-vertical cliff face and linked by wooden plank walkways bolted directly into the rock, a scaffold-like route with no separating wall between visitor and open air in places โ not a museum corridor, but a structure you have to trust to hold as you walk it, at real height, to see sculpture that was never meant to be reachable any other way.
Did you know? Between 420 and 422 the monk Tanhung founded a community here; another monk, Xuangao, soon arrived with 100 followers, and the group grew to about 300.
05 Furong Cave, Wulong
People's Republic of China29.229ยฐ N 107.903ยฐ E
Brookqi ยท Public domain The country above the cave is just as remarkable. Within roughly 20 square kilometres of plateau nearby there are more than fifty vertical shafts deeper than 100 metres, among them the Qikeng shaft, which drops about 920 metres and is counted as the deepest in Asia. In 2007 Furong Cave was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Three Natural Bridges and the Qingkou tiankeng as the Wulong Karst, one of the components of the South China Karst; it is often described as the first cave in China to be named a World Natural Heritage site.
Did you know? A 19-member Chinese, British and American team spent June 2001 exploring the underground rivers that drain the plateau around the cave.
06 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248ยฐ N 107.042ยฐ E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto ยท CC BY-SA 4.0 The name comes from the Zhuang words pay laiz, "the mountain with patterns" or "painted mountain". Chinese writers mentioned the red "ghost shadows" on river cliffs as early as the Song dynasty, and boatmen are said to have honoured them as images of their ancestors. In 2016 Huashan and 37 other painted sites spread along some 105 kilometres of the Zuo and Ming rivers were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape.
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 โ 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 most beautiful caves in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Mogao Caves ranks first, followed by Yungang Grottoes and Reed Flute Cave.
- Why is it called Reed Flute Cave?
- Reeds growing at the entrance of the cave in Guilin were traditionally cut and made into flutes. The cave has drawn visitors for more than a thousand years, and over seventy inscriptions from as early as the Tang dynasty survive on its walls.
- When were the Yungang Grottoes carved?
- Most of the caves were cut in the second half of the fifth century under the Northern Wei dynasty, whose capital was at nearby Pingcheng, today's Datong.
- Who made the Huashan Rock Paintings?
- They were painted by the Luoyue people of the Zuojiang valley between about the fifth century BC and the second century AD. They were inscribed by UNESCO in 2016 as the Zuojiang Huashan Rock Art Cultural Landscape.
- How many caves are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 6 caves.