Amazing Yungang Grottoes - and another amazing leg of lamb

We had heard that the Yungang Grottoes should be an amazing place. It's one of the three major Buddhist cave places in China. We have already seen one of the other cave places - Mogao caves - and then there's Longmen caves west of Xi'an which we won't see on this trip.

Yungang Grottoes is a complex of 252 caves with over 50.000 statues and it was built around 400-500 AD. It was a really great experience one of the best in China for us! The caves were amazing and with so much intact and original - they have been reconstructed several times throughout history but the majority weren't new reconstructions in the too polished  way the Chinese unfortunately seem to do it. So the place just seemed so much more "true" and impressive.

Some of the caves had hundreds of statues both Buddhas and also influences from other cultures including Greek, Persian and Indian. We saw a statue of Hermes with wings on his head.

What also added to the good experience was the fact that there were far less visitors than at the Mogao caves. We didn't have to wait in queue before entering the caves. All in all these were definitely more impressive than Mogao caves.

As written above when the Chines reconstruct unfortunately they make the things look like it's brand new. Another thing they do around their sights is to build new temples and park areas with lakes and boat rides, There was a whole new temple area we went through before coming to the actual caves and the guide did give Malene an honest answer to why they had built it - "so they could raise the ticket price". This is of course not only in China they do this but it's like history and an old sight isn't enough for them. They need more to show and more to sell. Including the ever presence of music at the sights.

In the evening half of the group just had to go back to the same restaurant as yesterday to have another lamb of leg BBQ. And it was equally good as yesterday. Really juicy and tender meat. Yummy.

The newly built temple at the Yungang Grottoes

They tore down a village so they could create an artificial lake instead

The amazing Yungang Grottoes

All the holes are big or small caves

There used to be wood in all the holes to strengthen the structure