The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in the People's Republic of China
9 places · updated 6 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable archaeological sites in the People's Republic of China are Terracotta Army, Mogao Caves and Leshan Giant Buddha. The list covers 9 archaeological sites. Last updated 6 October 2026.
China's archaeology reflects both the power of its emperors and the long journey of Buddhism along the Silk Road. Imperial tombs were furnished as complete worlds for the afterlife, while monks and patrons cut cave temples into cliffs from the oasis towns of the northwest to the mountains of Sichuan. Dry desert air at the western end of the route preserved murals, manuscripts and mud-brick cities that would have vanished elsewhere.
The Terracotta Army near Xi'an guards the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of unified China, with thousands of life-size soldiers, horses and chariots. The Mogao Caves near Dunhuang hold hundreds of decorated grottoes painted over roughly a thousand years, and a sealed library cave found there yielded tens of thousands of manuscripts. Jiaohe, near Turpan, is an earthen city carved out of a narrow plateau between two rivers.
Gansu adds the Maijishan Grottoes, cut into the face of a sheer, haystack-shaped hill, and Bingling Temple, whose caves and statues line a gorge of the Yellow River. Further south, the Leshan Giant Buddha was carved from a cliff where three rivers meet, and the Dazu Rock Carvings near Chongqing fill hillsides with Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian figures. The Western Xia Imperial Tombs stand as earthen mounds below the Helan Mountains, and the Huashan Rock Paintings in Guangxi cover a river cliff with red ochre figures.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Terracotta Army | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 2 | Mogao Caves | Cave | ✓ |
| 3 | Leshan Giant Buddha | Sculpture | ✓ |
| 4 | Jiaohe Ruins (Yarkhoto) | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 5 | Western Xia Imperial Tombs | Necropolis | ✓ |
| 6 | Maijishan Grottoes | Cave | ✓ |
| 7 | Bingling Temple | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 8 | Dazu Rock Carvings | Archaeological site | ✓ |
| 9 | 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 All of it was built for one purpose: to accompany the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, into the afterlife. Construction began around 246 BCE, right after he took the throne as king of Qin, and continued past his death in 210 BCE — and the army is only the excavated fraction of a mausoleum complex that is, by most accounts, still largely unopened, on the theory that archaeologists don't yet have a reliable way to preserve what's inside once it's exposed to air.
Did you know? Each workshop had to stamp its name on its figures, an early form of quality control that lets archaeologists trace who made what.
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 caves also gave the world one of its greatest archival discoveries. In 1900 a Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, found a sealed chamber — now called the Library Cave — 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.
03 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 Together with Mount Emei, the Buddha became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996, and the scenic area around it on Lingyun Hill includes temples, Han dynasty cliff tombs at Mahao and many walking paths. A steep, narrow walkway on the cliff beside the statue lets visitors descend past its body for close views; it is much busier at weekends, on public holidays and around Chinese New Year. The alternative is to see the whole figure from a sightseeing boat on the river, the best way to take in its full size.
Did you know? The instep, about 8.5 metres wide, can hold around a hundred people, and even the smallest toenail is big enough for a person to sit on.
04 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 was destroyed during the Mongol wars of the 13th century and never reoccupied. The explorer Aurel Stein visited the ruins, the site was partly excavated in the 1950s, and it has been under state protection since 1961. Since 1992 Japanese and Xinjiang conservation bodies have worked together to preserve the earthen ruins, and in 2014 Jiaohe became part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Silk Roads.
Did you know? The largest monastery, at the northern end of the central avenue, measures roughly 90 by 60 metres and dates from the Uyghur period.
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 Building moved northwards reign by reign, and the last three emperors have no mausoleums of their own, probably because the Mongols destroyed the state before they could be built. Excavations since the 1970s found the underground chambers looted, but they still yielded remarkable finds, among them a gilded bronze ox 1.2 metres long and weighing 188 kg, recovered from the passage of Tomb 101, and stele fragments in the intricate Tangut script. Early 20th-century explorers such as Pyotr Kozlov, Aurel Stein and Sven Hedin passed through the region without finding the site; the Tangut civilisation is still only partly understood, which makes these tombs one of its most important records.
Did you know? Of all the burials, only two occupants are firmly identified: Mausoleum 7 belongs to Emperor Renzong, Li Renxiao, and Tomb 182 to the Tangut prince Weiming Anhui.
06 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 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 — 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.
07 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 The site has borne several names. It was first called Tangshu Cave, from a Qiang word for "demon cave"; in the Tang it was the Longxing Temple and under the Song the Lingyan Temple. The present name dates from the Ming, and is usually explained as a shortened Tibetan expression meaning "ten thousand Buddhas", though some scholars trace it instead to an old place name of the region. In 2014 Bingling was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor.
Did you know? The famous inscription was found only in 1963, during a 50-day survey sponsored by the Gansu government that finally reached the high cave.
08 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 At Baodingshan's Great Buddha Bend the cliff becomes a continuous sequence of large tableaux that follow the curve of the hillside. A huge reclining Buddha shows his passing into nirvana, a Thousand-Armed Guanyin spreads its gilded hands across a wall, and a great Wheel of Rebirth and a panorama of the hells mix doctrine with vivid, sometimes grim, scenes of human behaviour. A sequence on the taming of an ox illustrates the stages of spiritual training. Carved texts accompany the images throughout. The carvings were long remote: until 1975 only a muddy path linked Dazu town with the main cluster, and they were opened to foreign visitors only in 1980.
Did you know? The Great Buddha Bend is a horseshoe-shaped gorge whose carved cliffs, up to about 20 metres high, curve for some 500 metres.
09 Huashan Rock Paintings, Ningming
People's Republic of China22.248° N 107.042° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Yumeto · 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 — 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 remarkable archaeological sites in the People's Republic of China?
- On our list, Terracotta Army ranks first, followed by Mogao Caves and Leshan Giant Buddha.
- How tall is the Leshan Giant Buddha?
- The seated Buddha is about 71 metres tall and was carved into a red sandstone cliff during the Tang dynasty, in the 8th century. It is the largest stone Buddha in the world.
- What was found in the Library Cave at Mogao?
- Sealed around the early 11th century and rediscovered in 1900, the cave held tens of thousands of manuscripts, paintings and printed texts in many languages, including a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed in 868, the oldest dated printed book.
- Who is buried with the Terracotta Army?
- The army was placed in pits east of the burial mound of Qin Shi Huang, who unified China in 221 BC. The emperor's tomb itself has not been excavated.
- How many archaeological sites are on this list in the People's Republic of China?
- The list covers 9 archaeological sites.