Mostly wanting to see the Hanging Monastery, the Yungang Caves were an addition to the day trip, and I was pleasantly surprised and amazed to find an incredible set of caves, filled with massive carved statues and murals of Buddha and his disciples. Most of these were carved around 460 AD, so it's quite impressive to see them still standing today. A few of them are riddled with bullet holes from Japanese soldiers trying to destroy the site, some of the heads of smaller statues have been stolen by thieves, some are faded away and still others are in great shape, presumably restored at some point. Apparently there are over 50,000 statues in 252 caves around this hillside. Not expecting much, I was very impressed by this site, and the size of some of these statues.
(Big Buddha in one of the first caves we found. The place felt a bit like Petra - the narrow canyon with carvings in Jordan where they filmed the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.)
(Many of the statues have incredible amounts of detail, like this one, surrounded by little tiny carvings of Buddha. I, on the other hand, was just surrounded by a lot of Chinese people.)
(Another cave, another thousand Buddhas.)
(Here you can see the extent of just one section of the caves. Huge, I tell ya.)
(The five pillars of Buddhism...good stuff, nicety, friendliship, making caves and carving them. Maybe something was lost in the translation.)
(This is something like the third or fourth biggest outdoor sitting Buddha...within 10 hours of Mongolia, that Derek Brace has visited in 2008, with 3 people in the vicinity of the picture...some of these sights have way too many disclaimers on their superlatives.)
(That's me again. On the right.)
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