Yungang: Three Campaigns of Cutting

The cliff runs east to west for a kilometre at the foot of the Wuzhou Shan, sixteen kilometres west of Datong, its face cut into rows of doorways. The numbering of the caves is a modern convenience; the cutting has an order of its own. The main work is dated to 453 to 495, in the Northern Wei, and the site is called the first large cave-temple in China cut under imperial patronage. Read that way, the rock is a sequence: five colossal figures first, then pairs of halls behind forecourts, then a long tail of smaller caves paid for by others. Walking it in that order, from the great figures to the crowded chambers, is the clearest way to see a century of change in the carving, since the order of the work is also an order of intent.

The first five caves are the ones to find before anything else. In 460, the Weishu records, the monk Tanyao asked Emperor Wencheng to cut five caves in the rock at Wuzhou Pass west of the capital, each with a Buddha image; they are numbered 16 to 20 today, and the first campaign of work ran until 465. Their scale is the point: seated figures filling the whole interior, and the largest figure at the site stands seventeen metres high. Cave 20 has no front wall. An earthquake in 512, estimated at magnitude eight with its epicentre in the Datong basin, brought the facade down, and the opening has looked like that ever since.

After the first five the work changes character. From about 471 to 494 the court supported a second campaign that produced the paired caves 5 and 6, 7 and 8, 9 and 10, along with 11, 12 and probably 13; cave 6 was built between 465 and 494 under Emperor Xiaowen. These are halls rather than monuments: a chamber behind a forecourt, walls divided into panels of small figures, a pillar in the middle to walk around. The eastern caves are mostly of this kind, cut around a pagoda. The shift from colossal bodies to crowded narrative relief is the thing a visitor notices first, and it follows a shift in who was paying.

The money behind the caves came from three different places. The first two campaigns were imperial: Tanyao's request went to the emperor, and the paired caves of the 470s and 480s were made under court supervision and support. The third was private. From the 490s, after the Northern Wei court moved its capital to Luoyang, carving at Yungang went on with the donations of individuals and families until 525, when local uprisings stopped the work for good. The state's interest did not end there. The site was listed in the first batch of national key cultural relics protection units in 1961, inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2001, and given a protection regulation that took effect on 1 August 2018.