Maijishan Grottoes
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The name is often translated as "Wheatstack Mountain": mai means grain, ji means stack and shan means mountain.
- The caves are cut into a cliff of purplish-red sandstone at heights of roughly 30 to 80 metres above the ground.
- 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.
- The earliest dated inscription at the site, from the year 502, records the excavation of what is now numbered Cave 115.
- 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.
- Because the area was under Tibetan control in 845, the grottoes escaped the great persecution of Buddhism that devastated monasteries elsewhere in China.
- The few stone sculptures, in caves such as 117, 127, 133 and 135, are of sandstone from an unknown source, and nobody knows how they were hauled up the cliff.
- Cave 133 alone holds 23 carved stone steles.
- The cave numbering still used today was devised by a team of archaeologists from Beijing who carried out the first modern survey in 1952–53.
- 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.
Why it is worth it
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 material for the job.
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.
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.
Getting there
26 km from Beidao. Tianshui Maijishan Airport (THQ) is about 27 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Maijishan Grottoes, formerly romanized as Maichishan, are a series of 194 rock-cut caves cut into the Maijishan hill in Tianshui, Gansu Province, northwest China. They contain over 7,200 Buddhist sculptures and over 1,000 square meters of murals.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
34.35014, 106.00597per Wikidata