The Yungang Grottoes: cave temples of the Northern Wei near Pingcheng

Yungang followed the first great persecution of Buddhism in China. Emperor Taiwu, the unifier of the north, had come under the influence of the Taoist master Kou Qianzhi and of his minister Cui Hao, who scorned Buddhism. In 444 he ordered everyone who kept monks or shamans in their households to hand them over by the fifteenth day of the second month on pain of death, and in 446, after weapons were found in a Chang’an monastery during the rebellion of Gai Wu, he had the monks of Chang’an killed and ordered every province to destroy Buddha images and bury monks alive. The crown prince delayed the edict, so that many monks escaped. After Taiwu’s grandson Wencheng came to the throne in 452 the ban was lifted; a stone image was made in the emperor’s likeness, and in 454 five standing statues of Shakyamuni were cast for the five emperors from the dynasty’s founder onward. Long before, the monk Faguo had called the founder “the Tathāgata of today”, saying that in bowing to him he was worshipping the Buddha.

Tanyao, summoned to the capital from Zhongshan in the year after the restoration, succeeded the Kashmiri monk Shixian as head of the clergy at the beginning of the Heping era (460). According to the Book of Wei he proposed to the emperor “to cut into the cliff at the Wuzhou pass west of the capital five caves, carving in each a Buddha image, the tallest seventy chi, the next sixty”, with decoration unequalled in his age. These are Caves 16–20, finished by about 465; their colossal seated and standing Buddhas are 13.5–16.8 m high according to the Russian Wikipedia, and many scholars take them to represent emperors of the dynasty. In a second phase, about 471–494, the court added the great paired caves 5–6, 7–8 and 9–10 and several others. Tanyao also created “saṅgha households”, whose yearly grain went to the Buddhist office and was given out to the hungry in lean years, and “temple households” of convicts and state slaves to serve the monasteries.

Imperial patronage ended when Emperor Xiaowen moved the court to Luoyang in 494; smaller caves were still cut at Yungang by private donors until about 525. Some 51,000 statues survive in the caves and niches — 53 major caves by the count of the English Wikipedia, 252 caves and niches by that of the Russian — and in 2001 the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.