DUNHUANG TO JIAYUGUAN
29 Sep 2014
Dunhuang
was a major stop and important oasis town on the ancient Silk Road, and the
town was also call Shazhou. It is best known for the nearby Mogao Caves. Besides
the trading of goods, the Silk Road was also a conduit for religion like Islam and
Buddhism to be carried to China.
This morning
we went to the Mogao Caves or Grottos. Short notes from Wikipedia below.
The Mogao Caves, also known as the Thousand
Buddha Grottoes or Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, form a
system of 500 temples[1] 25 km
(16 mi) southeast of the center of Dunhuang, an oasis located
at a religious and cultural crossroads on the Silk Road,
in Gansu province,
China. The caves may also be known as the Dunhuang Caves; however,
this term is also used as a collective term to include other Buddhist cave
sites in and around the Dunhuang area, such as the Western Thousand Buddha Caves, Eastern Thousand
Buddha Caves, Yulin Caves,
and Five Temple
Caves. The caves contain some of the finest examples of Buddhist art spanning a period of
1,000 years.[2] The
first caves were dug out in AD 366 as places of Buddhist meditation and worship.[2][3] The
Mogao Caves are the best known of the Chinese Buddhist
grottoes and, along with Longmen Grottoes and Yungang Grottoes,
are one of the three famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites of China.
An important cache of documents was discovered in 1900 in the
so-called "Library Cave", which had been walled-up in the 11th
century. The contents of the library were subsequently dispersed around the
world, and the largest collections are now found in Beijing, London, Paris and
Berlin, and the International Dunhuang Project exists
to coordinate and collect scholarly work on the Dunhuang manuscripts and other material.
The caves themselves are now a popular tourist destination.
Photography
inside the caves is not permitted.
After lunch,
the bus journey to Jiayuguan was almost 4 hours over 375 km. The
landscape was drier and more rocky with hardly and vegetation.
We went to
the night market in Jiayuguan
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