Yungang Grottoes
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The largest figure at Yungang, the seated Buddha of Cave 5, is about 17 metres tall, while the smallest carved figures measure only about 2 centimetres.
- The famous open-air Buddha of Cave 20 was originally enclosed inside a cave; its front wall collapsed, most likely in a powerful earthquake that struck the Datong basin in 512.
- 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.
- The robe of the great standing Buddha in Cave 18 is covered with rows of tiny relief Buddhas, a thousand-Buddha garment that is extremely rare in Chinese sculpture.
- The same Cave 18 Buddha has webbed fingers, a literal rendering of one of the thirty-two bodily marks traditionally attributed to a Buddha.
- Cave 17 sits about a metre lower than its neighbours, thought to mark the lower rank of the crown prince it honours, who died before reigning.
- Cave 16 was first planned farther west, but the rock there proved too poor for a giant statue, so the carvers moved it to its present site.
- The earliest statues show strong influence from Gandhara and Gupta India, with heavy features and deep-set eyes, while later caves dress the Buddhas in Chinese scholar-official robes.
- The painted walls of Cave 6 have been repainted as many as a dozen times over the centuries, making the original colour scheme hard to reconstruct.
- A Ming dynasty fort still stands on top of the cliff above the grottoes, and bullet marks from the Cultural Revolution can still be seen on some carvings.
Why it is worth it
Construction began under Emperor Wencheng in the 450s CE, right after a period of state persecution of Buddhism had ended, and the earliest group — the so-called Tanyao Five Caves, named for the monk who oversaw them — deliberately modelled their colossal Buddha statues on the faces of the Northern Wei emperors themselves. This wasn't incidental symbolism: carving an emperor's likeness into a Buddha fused religious authority with imperial legitimacy, in stone, for anyone who visited to see.
The Northern Wei rulers were the Tuoba, a clan of steppe origin whom the Han Chinese population they governed regarded as northern outsiders. Sponsoring an enormous, expensive religious monument that literally wore their faces was a calculated move to assert that their rule was sanctioned by something bigger than conquest. The scale backs up the ambition: over 51,000 Buddha statues were eventually carved across the site between 460 and 525 CE, by a workforce numbering in the thousands, over roughly forty years of continuous digging.
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 — 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.
Getting there
15 km from Datong. Datong Yungang International Airport (DAT) is about 31 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Yungang Grottoes, formerly the Wuzhoushan Grottoes, are ancient Chinese Buddhist temple grottoes built during the Northern Wei dynasty near the city of Datong, then called Pingcheng, in the province of Shanxi. They are excellent examples of rock-cut architecture and one of the three most famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites of China. The others are Longmen and Mogao.
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