Datong - Yungang Caves and Hanging Temple

Datong (大同) in northern Shanxi (山西) province was established as the capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty in the year 398 by the Turkic Toba people. The Northern Wei people became Buddhists and during their reign built constructed the Yungang caves just outside Datong. A second period of capital status for Datong came in 907 when the Liao Dynasty made it their capital, this period created the Huayuan and Shanhua temples within the city and the oldest wooden pagoda in China at nearby Yingxian.
Datong is a dusty, coal producing city, which providing over 30% of China's coal. There are also lots of outdoor markets selling fruit, strange bits of meat and a surprisingly large amount of money. These notes look like perhaps old Dynasty notes, or maybe it's for Chinese monopoly, I really don't know and could not understand the explanation of what it was for. But it was strange to see at one night market, stall after stall selling nothing but this money, something I have seen nowhere else in China before nor since.

Yungang caves (Yungang shiku, 云冈石窟), whose construction began in 453, are a set of Buddhist grottoes carved into the side of a sandstone cliff. They are the first of the three major Buddhist caves in China, the others being the Lonmgmen caves in Luoyang and the Mogao Caves in Gansu. See my visit to Mogao Caves in Dunhunag, Gansu here. The caves were made by first digging out a section at the top of the cliff, then digging into the rock down to the ground and outwards. Craftsmen from India and Central Asia were involved in the work and this can be seen in some of the carving's foreign influences. There are around fifty caves in total, but numbers 21-45 were closed for repair, which is a shame, though these are supposedly the least interesting among the site. I saw twenty caves including the most famous of all, number 20, which sits in the open for everyone to see and because of its popular use in marketing of Chinese tourism has become known as "China's Minister of Foreign Affairs".


Left: Yungang Cave 20, "China's Minster of Foreign Affairs".
Right: Hanging temple at Hengshan mountain.

Next site was the "Hanging Temple" (Xuankong Si, 悬空寺) of Hengshan (恒山), which is one of the five holy Taoist mountains in China. Built on the side of a sheer cliff face and anchored with wooden beams into the rock, the temple does look rather precarious for sure. There has been a temple here since the Northern Wei Dynasty but the present structure is more recent. The temple was destroyed a number of times due to flooding of the Heng river below and so each reconstruction was built higher than the previous temple. Inside are halls containing shrines to all three major religions in China, Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Originally a Buddhist temple, the other religions were later incorporated after the destruction of the temple as they believed that that would help to prevent future disaster.