The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Sacred Places in the People's Republic of China
6 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful UNESCO-listed sacred places in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, Potala Palace and Temple of Heaven. The list covers 6 UNESCO-listed sacred places. Last updated 6 October 2026.
Sacred places in China reflect several overlapping beliefs: the cult of heaven and imperial ancestors, Buddhism carried along the Silk Roads, and the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of the high plateau. Emperors built altars and tombs designed to align the ruler with the cosmos, while monks carved cave temples into river cliffs and raised palaces of worship on mountain ridges. UNESCO has recognised the most complete of these, many of them preserved by dry climates or long burial.
The Terracotta Army, found in 1974 near Xi'an, guards the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, with thousands of life-size warriors, each with an individual face. The Temple of Heaven in Beijing, where Ming and Qing emperors prayed for good harvests, is crowned by a round hall with a triple blue-tiled roof. In Lhasa, the Potala Palace rises in white and red tiers above the city as the former winter residence of the Dalai Lamas, and the Jokhang Temple, founded in the 7th century, houses the most revered statue in Tibetan Buddhism. The Western Xia Imperial Tombs near Yinchuan preserve the burial mounds of the Tangut emperors, and Bingling Temple in Gansu carves Buddhist grottoes and a giant seated Buddha into cliffs above the Yellow River.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Potala Palace | Palace | ✓ |
| 3 | Temple of Heaven | Temple | ✓ |
| 4 | Jokhang | Temple | ✓ |
| 5 | Western Xia Imperial Tombs | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 6 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | ✓ |
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 Potala Palace
People's Republic of China · 2.2 km from Lhasa29.658° N 91.117° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by nrxfly from Pixabay The hill the palace stands on has been sacred longer than the palace itself. Tradition holds that in 637, Songtsen Gampo — the Tibetan king credited with unifying the plateau — built the first palace on this outcrop, known as Marpo Ri, or the Red Hill, to mark his marriage to the Chinese princess Wencheng.
Did you know? Copper was poured into the foundations to help the palace withstand earthquakes, and its sloping walls are about 5 metres thick at the base.
03 Temple of Heaven
People's Republic of China · 2.4 km from Beijing39.882° N 116.407° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by ccxcn from Pixabay The Temple of Heaven is less a single temple than a walled ceremonial landscape in the south of central Beijing, laid out so that architecture itself would read as a statement about the cosmos. It was begun under the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, the same ruler who built the Forbidden City, with construction dated to 1406–1420.
Did you know? UNESCO notes that the temple's symbolic plan shaped architecture and city planning across East Asia for centuries.
04 Jokhang
People's Republic of China · 3.2 km from Lhasa29.653° N 91.132° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by VY from Pixabay The Jokhang is the most sacred temple in Tibet, the place every Tibetan Buddhist hopes to reach at least once, and the old heart of Lhasa grew up around it. It was founded in the 7th century under King Songtsen Gampo, the first ruler of a unified Tibet, to house a Buddha image brought by his Nepalese queen Bhrikuti; its design is attributed to Nepalese craftsmen.
Did you know? In front of the temple stands a pillar inscribed with the Sino-Tibetan treaty of 821–822, which fixed the border between the two empires.
05 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.
06 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.
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 most beautiful UNESCO-listed sacred places in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Potala Palace and Temple of Heaven.
- How was the Terracotta Army discovered?
- Farmers digging a well near Xi'an in 1974 found fragments of clay figures, which led archaeologists to the pits around the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.
- What was the Temple of Heaven used for?
- Ming and Qing emperors performed ceremonies there to worship heaven and pray for good harvests, most famously in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, first built in the early 15th century.
- Who were the Western Xia?
- The Western Xia was a Tangut state that ruled parts of northwestern China from the 11th to the 13th century until it was destroyed by the Mongols. Its imperial tombs near Yinchuan were listed by UNESCO in 2025.
- How many UNESCO-listed sacred places are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 6 UNESCO-listed sacred places.