The Mogao Grottoes

As the third stop on the Silk Road part of my tour, I spent about 2 days in Dunhuang, a very small oasis town that was an important stop along the silk road for two precious commodities: water and protection- this was one of the first places within the protection of China, and merchants didn't have to worry so much about being attacked once they arrived there. Because this was an important stop on an international route, many different religious and cultural artifacts have been found here, including the Mogao grottoes, which are a collection of hundreds of caves carved by hand from the cliff face and decorated as shrines to Buddha. I was prepared to be underwhelmed, as I'm a skeptic, but the caves were really just as impressive as they were made out to be. Pictures were very emphatically forbidden inside the caves, so I have a few pictures from the replicas at the museum nearby, but they don't begin to describe the massive nature of the caves, the thousands of buddhas painted on the walls and ceilings of each location, or the massive nature of some statues that stood 35.5 meters tall!