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Xinjiang

Chinese ancient architecture and grottoes in Xinjiang: 2 entries, including Kizil Thousand-Buddha Caves, Kumtura Thousand-Buddha Caves, and more.

001 Grottoes Kizil Thousand-Buddha Caves Researchers date the earliest excavation of Kizil to the end of the third century CE, yet no stele bearing a direct date survives. Buddhist imagery from India, Gandhāra, and the Iranian plateau reached Kucha along the Silk Road and was painted onto the cave walls; Xuanzang's westward journey and Wukong's return east with Sanskrit scriptures made Kucha a way-station where monks and texts met in passing. More than a thousand years later the Huijiang Tongzhi still records that there were “several hundred caves,” only by then the five-colored buddhas on the walls had grown “blurred and peeling.” Western Jin Dynasty · Xinjiang · Kizil Township, Baicheng (Bay) County, Aksu Prefecture, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

002 Grottoes Kumtura Thousand-Buddha Caves On both banks of the Muzat River, the caves of Kumtura spread high and low along the cliffs. Dating of the wooden armature inside the statues of Cave 20 falls between 413 and 571; during the reign of Emperor Zhaozong of the Tang, Han Chinese monks were still carving pilgrimage vows in the Arhat Cave; and from the late ninth to the early tenth century, Uyghur donors and inscriptions in multiple scripts appeared among the cave complex. By 1906, some antechambers and cave doorways had already slid down with the cliff face; twenty-two years later, Huang Wenbi climbed into the Arhat Cave with a rope tied at his waist and copied out, one by one, such shallow engravings as “the fifth year of Dashun of the Great Tang” and “reverence to the Arhat's bones.” Eastern Jin Dynasty · Xinjiang · East bank of the Weigan River, Kuqa City, Aksu Prefecture, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

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