Maijishan Grottoes

Listen first. Wind moves through the pine and oak on the hillsides around you. Somewhere above, footsteps ring on a metal walkway, small and far away. Then look up. A single rounded mountain of reddish rock rises out of the green forest. Its face is pierced with dark doorways, hundreds of them, linked by narrow galleries that cling to the cliff like threads. You are standing below the Maijishan Grottoes, one of the great Buddhist cave sites of China.

The name tells you what the early locals saw. Maiji means wheat stack. To farmers in this valley, the mountain looked like a heap of harvested grain, piled high and rounded at the top. Look at the outline against the sky and you will see it too. Steep sides, a soft dome, and almost nothing else around it of the same shape. In the Chinese imagination, a mountain this distinct was a natural place to build something sacred.

You are south-east of the city of Tianshui, in Gansu Province. This corner of China sits on an old crossroads. Traders, monks and armies moved through here on the routes that linked the old capital at Chang'an with Central Asia. Those routes are what the world now calls the Silk Roads. Buddhism travelled along them from India, carried by monks, pilgrims and merchants. Maijishan is one of the places where that faith settled into stone and clay.

The first caves date to around the late fourth and early fifth centuries. That was a time of many short-lived kingdoms in northern China. Work continued for well over a thousand years. Artists added new caves, repainted old ones and restored damaged figures under dynasty after dynasty — the Northern Wei, the Western Wei, the Northern Zhou, the Sui, the Tang, the Song, and on into the Ming and Qing periods. So when you walk the galleries, you are walking through many centuries at once.

Here is the first surprise. Most of the figures at Maijishan are not carved. They are modelled from clay. The rock of this mountain is a coarse conglomerate — a mix of pebbles and sand pressed together. It crumbles under a chisel. So the artists cut the cave chambers into the cliff, then built the statues inside from wooden frames, straw and layers of fine clay. They painted them afterwards. This is why the site has a softer, warmer feeling than caves cut into hard stone.

The numbers are large. Around two hundred caves survive, and they hold more than seven thousand sculptures. Some are tiny, small enough to sit in your palm. Others rise many storeys high. The walls also carry roughly a thousand square metres of murals, though much of the painted surface has faded. Many visitors call the site a museum of sculpture, and once you are on the galleries the reason becomes clear.

Now look at the shape of the cliff itself. It is divided into an eastern section and a western section, with a scar of open rock between them. Historical sources describe a strong earthquake in the Tang dynasty, in the eighth century. It brought down the middle of the cliff face, and with it, the caves that stood there. What you see today is what survived. The gap in the middle is a record of that collapse.

How did anyone build caves halfway up a sheer cliff? Locals have an old saying for this. According to the popular tale, workers stacked timber from the ground upward, climbed the pile to cut each cave, and then took the wood away as they came down. Whether it happened exactly this way, nobody can prove. What is certain is that wooden beams were set into the rock to support plank walkways. Today, modern steel stairways follow those same lines.

On the eastern cliff, watch for the large triad of figures — a seated or standing Buddha with an attendant on each side. They are among the largest sculptures here, more than a dozen metres tall. From the ground they look calm and simple. Up close, the scale becomes physical. You stand at the level of a knee or a hand, and the faces rise far above you. These large figures were made to be seen from the valley floor.

The second surprise is the expressions. Many figures from the sixth century have slim bodies, long necks and a small, gentle smile. Look for young attendants and novice monks who seem almost to be whispering to each other. The sculptors gave them human faces, not distant ones. Over the following centuries the style changes. Tang figures become fuller and rounder. Song figures turn more realistic. Comparing faces from cave to cave is one of the quiet pleasures here.

There is also a human story inside the mountain. Historical texts record that Empress Yifu of the Western Wei dynasty was forced to take her own life in the sixth century, during the political struggles of that time. She was buried at Maijishan, in a cave on the cliff. Her story gives the site a personal layer. It was not only a place for prayer. It was also a place of grief and remembrance for a royal family.

Many of the caves are protected behind grilles or wooden doors. You will often look in through a lattice rather than step inside. This is for the clay. It is fragile and sensitive to breath, humidity and touch. Some special caves open only with an extra ticket or a guided visit. In 2014, Maijishan became part of a UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Silk Roads, alongside other sites along the old corridor.

Before you leave, stop on a lower gallery and turn around. Look outward instead of inward. The forested hills roll away in every direction, often softened by mist. Monks who lived and worked here saw this same view. Then look back at the cliff, at the doorways and the thin lines of the walkways. As you walk down, listen again — wind, birds, footsteps on metal — and notice how small the caves look from below.