The 1,500 year old Yúngāng Grottoes are caves and recesses which were filled with 51,000 Buddhist statues, the largest being a 56 foot Seated Buddha while the smallest is only a few inches tall. In addition to the carvings of the Buddha, there are also scenes depicting Buddhist teachings and famous monks and are mostly ancient/original and not reconstructed. This was of special interest to me as it could be seen that the sculptures had been carved from the rock and were still part of the rock while holes in some of the sculptures showed where wooded dowels had been used to fix the plaster onto the sculpture before painting the external parts. I was also surprised to see that the original stone had features carved on the sculpture when I would have expected that the stone would have been plain and the features only added with the plaster.
The construction of the caves was started by the monk Tan Yao in 453 and took 50 years to complete. Some 40,000 people, including the Buddhists from what is now Sri Lanka, contributed to the building of the caves.
Views of the caves
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There were a number of temples on an island leading up to the caves and I do not think that they were anything to do with the temples but were just to improve the look of the area and draw in more tourists. That guess was correct as I was to find out later.
Views of the island temples
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After travelling for seven and a half hours, getting near Beijing, we then went away from Beijing to Jinshanling which was near a section of the Great Wall that could be walked on. This section was a fantastic place, well into the mountains and quite a feat to walk. I did manage to walk to nine guard towers, and then back again. This was part of the original wall and although it had and was being repaired it was very much in the original state when built in 1368 (and repaired in 1567). The date is known because a number of the bricks in this section, The Houchuan Pass, are engraved with various markings over its 10.5 kilometre length. The Wall starts at the east coast of China and extends for 8000 kilometres. The whole length has been walked once, by a foreigner, and it took him three years to complete the walk.
Some of the photographs show a whitish substance on the wall, looking like cement. It is actually a mixture of sticky rice juice and lime which is used as cement/mortar to hold the stones together. For those of us who know old houses then this will be very similar to the lime wash used to protect the clay houses at home. It is used here because it will last over 100 years while cement in the same situation would only last for about 15 years.
The Wall goes up and down and round mountains and valleys so how would someone tell which side faced the Moguls. It’s the side where the cut-outs in the battlements (crenellations) are tapered so that archers are protected when they aim their arrows and are able to shot right or left in safety. Also, the Mongol invasion side has large holes with a sloped floor on the top off the walls where hot oil, stones or anything else could be poured down on the invaders. The other side of the battlements have much smaller holes to help in keeping the soldiers cool (ventilation).
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Our stay in he Jinshan Hotel ended on the morning of 23 July with most people walking out of breakfast in disgust after being offered a Chinese breakfast again. Some sort of weak tasteless porridge, pickled something's and smelly tofu did not go down too well but the boiled eggs were aright and oddly enough, the best steamed dough we have had up to now. We are in China after all! After Jingshanling we made our way to Beijing for the last two days of the trip.
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