Buddhist Culture Thrives Despite the Coal Dust

  Datong, China
Saturday, November 25, 2006

The last time Jim was in Datong, he had a bad bout of the flu and it was pouring with rain, we hoped it would be better this time. We left Beijing mid morning on a soft sleeper train bound for the industrial town. We relaxed in our private compartment and watched the grey, windswept landscape pass by - rather slower than we've been used to recently (especially compared to Japan). Six hours later we arrived in Datong and it started to snow.

07 Sian and the Great Leaders

We didn't have any accommodation booked and so we headed straight for the CITs tourist office - we weren't alone, it turned out the only other foreigners on the train were three Brits who joined us and booked on the same sightseeing tour the following day. Our hotel was central, cheap and reassuringly Chinese - portraits of Mao, Deng Xiaoping, Hu Jintao and another Chinese Communist luminary we couldn't name, graced the lobby. After dinner with one of our new friends, John, a software engineer from Virginia Water, we retired to pray the snow would clear by the morning.

01 Hanging Monastery

Datong in itself, is not a tourist draw - it's a modern mining city, the second largest in Shanxi province, which produces a third of all China's coal. So as you can imagine the dirt and pollution. The real reason for stopping off here is to visit the beautiful Hengzong Si or Hanging Temple and the stunning Yungang Caves.

02 Precarious

The temple, whose name translates literally as "Temple Suspended in the Void", clings precariously to the side of a cliff about 50 metres above the valley floor. The river no longer runs beneath it as a dam was built some years ago, but the original structure was built in the 4th or 5th century by craftsmen hanging by ropes from the top of the cliff and driving beams into the rock. What you can see now is mainly Qing (1644 - 1911) architecture which largely survived the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Apparently the Red Guards were too afraid to decapitate the larger statues of Buddha and Confucious.

06 Yungang Caves

After a delicious and very cheap lunch with John and another couple, Craig and Helen, who've also jacked in their jobs to travel for a year, we headed to the real attraction in the area - the Yungang Caves.

05 Thousand Buddhas

There are 50 or so of these grottoes open to the public (you can see only about 1km of them - the whole site is about 15kms long!) and they differ hugely in size and artistic accomplishment. The oldest of them dates to 453AD when Datong was the capital of the Wei Dynasty. They were made by hollowing out the sandstone rock - it's thought that as many as 40,000 craftsmen worked on the project - a figure which seems incomprehensible until you appreciate the scale of this place. There are numerous gigantic carved Buddhas and Bottisatvas - the biggest is seventeen metres high! The sight is really arresting and definitely worth the overnight stay in dark, Dickensian Datong.