The latitude and longitude of Datong as per this sign on the tarmac at the airport.
Our day started at 4:00 AM when the wake-up calls were made. We had to scramble to pack up, grab breakfast that the hotel cooks came in at an ungodly hour to make for us and board the bus to the Beijing airport for our 7:30 flight to Datong, Shanxi. We all made it in plenty of time and had an uneventful 1.5 hour flight over the rather desolate region that is between Beijing and Datong.
Datong, like most of Sanxi Province, makes its living mining coal. It’s rather different from the glitz and nouveaux riche excess of Beijing. It’s dirty and dusty and everything looks about ten years beyond its prime. The people can’t help but suffer from chronic lung irritation but seem to be happy nonetheless. Drew, a group member who lives in Xi’an, and I turned to each other and said something like “now this is the real China” to each other.
Workers building new timber framed building at Yungang Caves site.
At the same time Datong seems to have plans. The mines are being cleaned up slowly, the entire city center is being cleared of residents (over 100,000 I’m told) who are being moved to new apartment blocks south of town. The remnants of old city wall is being rebuilt complete with watch towers and imperial gates in hopes of turning the area within into a historical park to draw tourists from around China and then hopefully the world. It is amazing to see. An entire city center is being razed, a new city being built and a Tang Dynasty era walled city is being recreated all at the same time. You have to hand it to the Chinese. When they decide to move on a project, they move and it doesn’t seem to matter the scale. They seem no more daunted by a large one than a small one.
One wall of caves and grottoes cut by Buddhist monks and their workers around 450 AD.
We visited a temple in the morning, which was interesting enough, but the highlight came in the afternoon when we visited the caves and grottoes of Yungang. In the middle 5th century Buddhist monks with the support of the Ming Dynasty set about to make caves and carve huge and intricate buddhas and other religious icons within them. They built hundreds in the cliffs. Many are rather small, say the size of a one-car garage, but others are enormous with statues up to 90 feet tall within them. I was awed by it all. The skill, dedication, imagination, resources and faith that went into making it all happen is nothing but inspiring. I don’t pretend to understand the tenets of the religion but I can’t help but think they have enormous value given what I saw today. It was much as I felt when I visited the Dafo in Leshan in July 2007. It is what one must feel when visiting the Sistine Chapel or any number of magnificent works done in the name of faith. I need to visit more.
Detail of carvings in one cave. There are literally hundreds of caves with these types of carvings and tens of thousands of individual carvings within those caves.
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