Datong: Coal, Carvings, and the City History Forgot

What drew me there, and what made the train journey worthwhile in the way that retrospect makes most discomforts worthwhile, is something you wouldn’t immediately associate with a coal city in northern China: the Yungang Grottoes. They sit about sixteen kilometres west of the city centre, carved into the sandstone cliffs of the Wuzhou Mountain, and they represent one of the most extraordinary feats of sustained artistic ambition in human history, which is a sentence I would not have been able to write before visiting them and which still feels insufficient.

The grottoes were created over a period of roughly sixty years beginning in 460 AD, during the Northern Wei dynasty, a period when the rulers of northern China had recently converted to Buddhism and set about commissioning religious art on a scale that expressed both piety and political authority in the way that grand building projects tend to do. The work was carried out by tens of thousands of labourers and craftsmen over multiple generations, carving directly into the cliff face to create chambers and niches containing more than fifty-one thousand individual Buddhist figures. The largest of the central Buddha statues is seventeen metres high. It sits in a cave that was once enclosed by a wooden temple, long since gone, the plughole marks still visible in the rock where the roof beams fitted.

The Northern Wei were not Han Chinese. They were Xianbei, a nomadic people from the steppes who had conquered northern China and then faced the question that conquerors who intend to stay always face: how to rule a population that vastly outnumbers you and has a substantially more developed sense of its own cultural identity. The answer they arrived at was a version of the answer that many conquerors have arrived at, which is to adopt the culture of the conquered with enough sincerity that the distinction becomes irrelevant, while using large-scale religious patronage to establish legitimacy on new terms. The Yungang Grottoes were part of that project. They were also, separately, extraordinary art, which is how the best political commissions tend to work.

Standing in front of the largest Buddha, which has a face the width of a reasonable room, you think about the people who made it. There are no individual names. The records that survive are administrative rather than biographical, the kind of documentation that tracks quantity and cost rather than the specific human beings who spent their working lives with hammers and chisels on the scaffolding. The figures themselves are immediately distinguishable from the Chinese Buddhist art that came later, carrying the influence of Central Asian and Gandharan styles that arrived along the Silk Road trade routes from the Indian subcontinent through Afghanistan and into China. The faces have a different quality from what you see in Chinese Buddhist temples built several centuries later, something more open and less stylised, still carrying the influence of the people and ideas that brought Buddhism to China in the first place before China made it entirely its own.

Datong has another chapter that doesn’t get as much attention as the grottoes. The city was the first capital of the Liao dynasty in the tenth century, and then a secondary capital of the Jin, and it accumulated through those periods a number of significant buildings, including a cluster of temples that contain some of the oldest surviving wooden architecture in China. The Huayan Monastery dates from 1038. The country around it has been producing coal ever since humans developed a practical use for the substance, and the economics of fuel extraction have not always been kind to the cultural inheritance sitting above the seams.

The day was long and the video I took on the iPhone looks about as good as a video taken on an iPhone in 2011 looks, which is to say: you can tell what the things are, roughly, and the sound cuts in and out. But the grottoes are there in it, the Buddhas patient and enormous in the dim light of the caves, looking the same way they have been looking since the Northern Wei dynasty put them there fifteen hundred years ago, when coal was just a rock and China was a different kind of question.