Day 1

Arriving in DunHuang… beautiful desert scenery!

Dunhuang is an oasis in Gansu province in the Gobi dessert connecting India, Tibet, Mongolia and southern Russia. It was an important route on the Silk Road in ancient times. It’s famous for its Mogao Cave, consisting of grottoes carved with Buddhist art on the wall.

DunHuang Airport

We stayed at The Silk Road DunHuang Villa 焞煌山莊

The hotel is beautiful at night, temperature dropped quite a bit but I loved it.

The zen surroundings at the hotel…

Day 2

Mogao Cave

The Mogao caves are located in Northwestern China in the Gobi desert outside of the town of DunHuang in Gansu province. This is close to Mongolia and in the same direction as the borders with Tibet, Russia and Kazakhstan. This is also an important part of the silk Road.

A little over 100 years ago, a local monk discovered something truly incredible, and the results of his discovery can now be seen in these caves.

Construction of the caves dates back to 366 A.D. when a Buddhist monk (Le Zun) built a cave for meditation in the cliff side. Cave building continued, especially through the end of the Tang dynasty in 906AD as many ruling families of Chinese dynasties constructed caves to tell the stories of their families and to serve as Buddhist shrines with numerous murals and carvings and statues.

There are almost 500 caves, we visited many of these and the sites are truly amazing, especially cave number 96 which has an exterior nine story tower, and inside houses a Buddha statue, which is 33 m high, almost exclusively within the cliff, truly amazing.

Another very interesting cave is number 17 because it is off to the side of cave number 16 which was originally sealed and hidden from outside view by cave number 16. Inside this cave were more than 50,000 manuscript items and relics which include tremendous amounts of information about Buddhist worship during the time.

Admission Tickets

There are three different types of tickets, the A tickets are highest priced and include a movie overview and admission to eight caves, the B tickets include cave admission, but no movie and C tickets only include a visit to one cave. The movie is pretty good and includes an English translation via headset for non-Chinese speakers, well worth the extra price for the movie. You will definitely enjoy these caves!

Mogao Museum

Outside the cave structures is the Mogao Museum, which was built in 1920 with a donation from the Japanese government. This museum includes many exhibits with covered artifacts and other relics, and also includes exact replicas of eight original caves, including interior sculptures, murals, and decorations. You can even take pictures inside these caves, whereas you can’t do this in the original caves.

Day 3

YuLin Cave 榆林窟

The drive to this cave is about 2 hours one way from DunHuang. I think the caves are similar to Magao Cave but experts will probably object to my assertions 😂.

太子之地 is on the way is on the way to YuLin Cave

太子之地

Statue of Han Wudi 漢武帝

Singing Sand Dunes 鸣沙山

This area of the Gobi desert covers the MingSha mountains where ancient Chinese caravans used to travel as they took goods along the silk road to Central Asia and Europe. The sand dunes in this area are called “The Singing Sand Dunes” because when the wind blows, they make a sound. The dunes are beautiful and right next to this specific area is the Crescent Moon Lake oasis. We went back in time and pretended we were ancient merchants traveling along the Silk Road as we rode on camel back for about an hour. The scenery was magnificent!

Riding the camel is a lot more fun than I originally thought, I’m glad we did it!!!

Crescent Moon Lake 月牙泉

Crescent Moon Pagoda

Day 4

We skipped the tour to Yadan Landform and the ruin of Han Great Wall. I wasn’t too interested in a 5-hour drive to see the landforms and the ruin, luckily, our friends shared some pictures we used so we could enjoy the scenery vicariously and not having to do the drive.

Yadan Landforms

So Kevan and I explored the resort after breakfast, enjoying their landscape and the zen garden. Weather was nice and we had a nice walk together❤️

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *