Landed in Urumqi this evening, flying in from Dunhuang. Greeted at the airport by our guide and driver both of Uighur origin. Our driver is quite the cutest guy I have seen in a long time with typical Uighur faintly exotic eurasian features. Something different to dwell on for the long car ride to Turpan tomorrow other than my book...
But first, a more intellectual pursuit - Caves. This morning (our last day in Dunhuang) was spent at the Mogao Caves 莫高窟, commonly recognised to be the highlight of the city. This is, if you've been counting, Cave Four for me starting with Maiji Mountain Caves 麦积山石窟 in Tianshui, then Binglingsi Caves 炳灵寺石窟 in Wuwei, Yulin Caves 榆林石窟 near Dunhuang and now the world famous Mogao Caves. And a couple of years ago, I had also visited the Ajanta and Ellora Caves in India. Yep, I have a bit of a cave mania.
The Yulin Caves and the Mogao Caves are said to be sister caves, each with Buddhist-themed wall paintings and sculptures the earliest of which date from more than 1500 years ago. Both sets of caves operate on a system where there is a fixed admission fee for viewing the "standard caves" 标准窟 and additional fees per cave per person for visiting "special caves" 特窟. Special cave fees can range from RMB 100-500 per person per cave. Pretty steep. But now that these sights are no longer government-funded, it's all about finding enough funding to support conservation work and, frankly, to discourage ordinary tourists (the 走马看花 kind) from crowding into the special caves and accelerating the oxidisation of colours on the paintings and sculptures. The special caves are those which contain the best art and I highly recommend doing a bit of research ahead of time to select a few of them to visit. It would be incredibly expensive and tiring to visit all of the special caves and unless one is a historian or devout Buddhist, it's diminishing marginal returns after the 15th cave.
Most of these sights don’t allow you to meander on your own and require that you be accompanied by an official “Explainer" (they call this person a 讲解员 as opposed to a 导游 which is the guide provided by your own travel agent, if you have one). I suspect this is partly for monitoring reasons (stop snap-happy tourists from taking photos of cave paintings) and partly to ensure that correct information is given (Buddhism has a complex structure of deities and beliefs). We managed to get a pretty good Explainer at the Yulin Caves although inexplicably she had quite a fixation on Lotus Babies (莲花宝贝), a child that bursts forth from a lotus flower and remains a virgin child to serve the Buddha, and kept pointing them out to us on each wall painting. In the Mogao Caves, we got really lucky as our guide managed to get the local office to allocate a very senior Explainer to us who patiently led us through 14 caves (10 standard caves and 4 special caves) over 3+ hours (the normal tour is 8 caves in one hour) and the Explainer also gave up his lunch hour so that we could tour uninterrupted and in relative peace when most of the other visitors had left for lunch.
If you have a group of 2+, I would also highly recommend hiring your own Explainer. This requires a bit of finagling with the local administration office as these sights normally only offer Explainers for large groups as they don't have enough of them, so the office will try to push you into joining a larger group. If you want to spend a bit more time at each cave and be able to ask questions, then you won't be able to do that in a large group as they move pretty quickly and the Explainer only gives a very cursory explanation for each cave. Our Explainer at Mogao Caves cost us RMB 50 pp extra and we also gave him a RMB100 tip.
The Mogao Caves are world famous with attention from historians around the world and contain more excavated and conserved caves, whereas the Yulin Caves have clearly been the poor stepsister receiving less attention and consequentially with fewer caves open for exhibition. If you will be going to Dunhuang, I would urge you to visit both of them. While each boasts of rare and beautiful art, the Yulin Caves has also a quiet serenity perhaps because of its location in a dried-up river valley (entering the Yulin Caves site is a bit like suddenly coming upon a hidden city). Its current lack of fame also means it is not overrun by marauding tourists. I was quite lucky to get into the Yulin Caves myself as the winds had suddenly strengthened into almost a sandstorm on that day and the local office wanted to close the site but seeing we had driven for 3 hours to get there, they took pity on us; we ended up having the entire site to ourselves for 2 hours.
Ratings: Yulin and Mogao Caves (a must). Maiji Mountains (second and not for vertigo suffers). Binglisi (can drop if you're in a time crunch).
