Time was starting to become a valuable commodity, so I booked an organised tour with the CITS to visit the Hanging Temples and the Datong caves in one day.
This was by far the best tour I have been on in China. For one, it was full of English speaking foreigners and we had an English speaking guide, an essential ingredient to a successful tour! There were six French people, four Americans, three of us Brits and an Irish bloke. We had an absolute ball.
Hanging Temples
Like I told my brother these look better on a postcard than in real life. For once the name is apt, these are hanging from a sheer cliff face. They’re attached to the cliff by means of wooden beams set into the rock. Underneath is a river, or should I say there was a river before the Chinese dammed it, surprise, surprise. The story goes the river used to flood and each time they built the temples higher and higher up the cliff face. It’s narrow, long and there are shrines to China’s three main religions of old – Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.
Yungang Caves
Chinese started building these Buddha grottoes around 400AD for about 70-80 years when the Northern Wei’s made Datong their capital. The capital was later moved to Luoyang and they moved their grotto building to Longmen instead abandoning Yungang. Unlike the caves at Longmen, these are not UNESCO rated even though they have not been subjected to the vandalism and date from an earlier period.
I think there are a couple of reasons for this, the first that 300 years ago an Emperor decided to repaint the carvings to how they looked when they were originally created which incidentally makes them far more stunning than those in Longmen. Secondly the carvings are built in sandstone and are thus more susceptible to the effects of weathering. In order to protect them they were covered in plaster. Of course the plaster has fallen away and holes remain in the carvings where wooden pegs were placed to hold the plaster in place.
According to my book the Buddhas and associates look more Indian than Chinese - though I can't corroborate this as I don’t remember what they looked like in Luoyang. Feel free to compare the pictures.
Nine Dragon Screen
This is in Datong town centre, I checked this out as I had oodles of time to kill between finishing my tour and getting the night train to Pingyao. It is older than the one in the Forbidden City and its dragons only have 4 toes per foot, of course the one in the Forbidden City has 5 as it belongs to the Emperor. It took all of 2 minutes to check it out and it was alright, good use of gaudy tiles. I did try to take a picture as I thought it would make a great panoramic photo but quickly came to realise I have no idea how to use my brother’s camera.
