Mustang Caves
Interesting facts
- On some cliffs the caves are stacked eight or nine storeys high, forming a vertical honeycomb of chambers.
- In places the Kali Gandaki gorge below the caves is deeper than Arizona's Grand Canyon.
- One cave held a mural about 8 metres long with 42 finely painted portraits of great yogis of Buddhist history.
- Another cave yielded a trove of about 8,000 calligraphed manuscripts, most of them some 600 years old, including a treatise on settling disputes.
- The earliest bodies were laid on wooden beds and adorned with copper jewellery and glass beads made elsewhere, a sign of long-distance trade.
- Seven centuries ago Mustang was probably one of the easiest routes for carrying Tibetan salt to the cities of the Indian subcontinent.
- A coffin from a Samdzong tomb was made in sections to pass through the narrow shaft and then assembled inside; it is painted with a rider on horseback.
- The Samdzong burial caves lie at about 4,200 metres, only some 16 km from the Tibetan border.
- Researchers ruled out cannibalism for the cut-marked bones, and early DNA results suggest the dead in each tomb were related.
- A few families still lived in the caves into the 21st century; one man born in a cave in 1959 lived there until 2011.
Why it is worth it
High on the eroded cliffs of the upper Kali Gandaki valley, rows of dark doorways are cut into the bare rock, sometimes stacked several storeys above one another and far out of reach from the ground below. These are the Mustang Caves, also called the Sky Caves of Nepal: an estimated 10,000 man-made chambers dug into the valley walls of Mustang District, in a dry, eroded landscape north of the main Himalayan range. Who first carved them, and how people climbed up to them, is still not understood.
Archaeologists have found that the caves served different purposes over a very long span. The oldest were used as burial chambers from as early as about 1000 BC. Around the 10th century, when the region seems to have been fought over repeatedly, families moved into the caves as living quarters, valuing safety over convenience, and by the 15th century many had become places of meditation. Since the mid-1990s, teams from Nepal and the University of Cologne, and later American, Italian and Nepali expeditions, have recovered partly mummified bodies at least 2,000 years old, Buddhist murals and sculptures, pottery, and manuscripts — some of them illuminated, mixing Buddhist and Bon texts — dating from roughly the 12th to the 14th centuries. In 2010, 27 skeletons from the 3rd to 8th centuries found near Samdzong showed cut marks that researchers link to a forerunner of sky burial, a practice still followed in Mustang.
The caves lie in what was once the Kingdom of Lo, with its capital at Lo Manthang. Lo was annexed by Nepal at the end of the 18th century but kept its own king until 2008, and Upper Mustang remained a restricted area until 1992, which helped preserve its villages, monasteries and Tibetan-speaking culture. The site has been on UNESCO's Tentative List since 1996. Finds from the caves, including beads, bones and pendants, are displayed at the Mustang Eco Museum in Jomsom.
Getting there
The caves are spread along the Kali Gandaki valley in Mustang District, north of the main Himalayan range. The town of Jomsom has the nearest airport, Jomsom Airport (JMO), about 25 km south of the central cave area and linked by short flights to Pokhara. Pokhara, the nearest city, lies about 74 km away in a straight line, on the south side of the Himalaya, and its domestic airport (PKR) about 81 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mustang Caves or Sky Caves of Nepal are a collection of some 10,000 man-made caves dug into the sides of valleys in the Mustang District of Nepal. Several groups of archaeologists and researchers have explored these stacked caves and found partially mummified human bodies and skeletons that are at least 2,000–3,000 years old. Explorations of these caves by conservators and archaeologists have also led to the discovery of valuable Buddhist paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and numerous artifacts belonging to the 12th to 14th century. The caves lie on the steep valley walls near the Kali Gandaki River in Upper Mustang. Research groups have continued to investigate these caves, but no one has yet understood who built the caves and why they were built. The site has been listed as a UNESCO tentative site since 1996.
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