Datong

Northern Shanxi gateway to the Yungang Grottoes (UNESCO) — the 5th-century Buddhist cliff carvings — and the cliff-side Hanging Temple at Mt Heng.

Datong is a city in northern Shanxi near the Inner Mongolia border, historically significant as the first imperial capital of the Tuoba-Xianbei Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 CE), the state that reunified northern China after the fragmented centuries following the Han. The Northern Wei emperors were responsible for commissioning the Yungang Grottoes, which is the primary reason to come here.

The Yungang Grottoes, 16 kilometres west of the city, are one of the three great Buddhist cave-temple complexes in China alongside Longmen and Dunhuang. The main construction period was 460–525 CE, when the Northern Wei emperors sponsored the carving of 252 caves and niches containing 51,000 Buddhist figures in a two-kilometre sandstone cliff. The five early caves (Caves 16–20), commissioned by the Emperor Wencheng and designed by the monk Tan Yao, each contain a single colossal Buddha — the largest is 13.7 metres — whose calm, archaic features represent some of the earliest Chinese Buddhist sculpture. The later caves show the gradual Sinicisation of Buddhist iconography as the Northern Wei court adopted Han Chinese dress and culture. The site was UNESCO World Heritage listed in 2001.

The Hanging Temple (Xuankong Si), 65 kilometres southeast in the Hengshan Mountains, is a wooden temple complex of eighteen halls and pavilions built into the side of a vertical cliff face at a height of around 50 metres. The construction, dating to the Northern Wei period and repeatedly rebuilt, achieves its impossible appearance through wooden brackets drilled horizontally into the cliff and a set of carved rock shelves — the downward load is taken by the rock, not by the seemingly insufficient wooden pillars. The temple houses Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian shrines within the same structure.

The city itself was heavily demolished and reconstructed through the 2000s and 2010s under the so-called Datong model of urban renewal: the old city walls were rebuilt around their original footprint, historic temples and streets were reconstructed, and the coal-industry heritage that had made Datong a functioning if grimy industrial city was partly cleared. Opinions on the result differ. The Huayan Monastery, with its large Tang-dynasty main hall and an extraordinary late Liao-dynasty wooden scripture library, is original and significant. The wooden pagoda at Yingxian, 75 kilometres south, is the oldest and tallest surviving wooden pagoda in China (67 metres, built 1056 CE), reachable as a day extension.