Ancient Buddha statue

All right, we're from Monkey Steals Peach, and for today's video I'm in Datong in the north of Shanxi province, just up close to the border of Inner Mongolia, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Northern Wei dynasty, which were a Turkic people called the Xianbei who as I said were a Turkic or Mongol people which came from up north. They set up a small kingdom here around 400 AD, and initially they were devout Buddhists, hence all of the Buddhist caves here, but later they slowly adopted Chinese customs and became more and more like Chinese over time. But there are three main Buddhist grottoes in China, and this is the oldest one, and there's the other one which is where they moved their capital to later in Henan, which is in Luoyang. So in the Longmen caves which I visited before in Henan, although there's a lot more Buddhas there, a lot more caves, this one is just so much more impressive. It's just unbelievable the amount of detail, the size of it, and all of the paint, and all of the Buddhas all the way around. So this is one of the main the main Buddha halls here, and this is just absolutely stunning. If you look all the way around, there's Buddhas going all the way up the walls, all the way up, even the ceiling is painted, and then all the way around back down here, and all these smaller ones here are actually not even not even covered up. But the sad thing you can see is that if you look up close, a lot of people have graffitied them. So if you look at this wall here, one of the security guards was just telling me that this stone on this wall is only two centimetres thick, and on the other side of it is another cave. So we're now going to go around and see the cave from the other side of this wall. So just now I said the wall was only two centimetres thick, and here we are on the other side of it in the next cave, and just look at the detail of these ones. There's actually another Buddha up there if you look right up at the top. It's kind of hard to see, and the ceiling and everything is all... As I said, the Northern Wei were initially devout Buddhists, and it's really around this time that Buddhism took a hold in China. Buddhism was first introduced during the Han dynasty, but it wasn't until this time that Buddhism really began to develop culturally and became something uniquely Chinese. It's also interesting to note that after the Northern Wei moved their capital from here at Datong to Luoyang in Henan, they also commissioned the building of the Shaolin temple. Although at this time there was no connection to martial arts, it was purely a place for an Indian monk whose Chinese name was Ba Tuo to translate Buddhist scriptures. After the fall of the Northern Wei dynasty, the same people reappeared quite a while later up in the far northwest of China in modern Ningxia province, and there they founded the Western Sha dynasty, which I'm going to show you a little bit and tell you a little bit about in some future videos when I'm going up there next month. So up behind me there on the cliff is the Hanging Temple, which is one of the only one of its kind in the world. This was also built in the same time period that we're talking about, and supposedly it was built by a single man called Liaoran, so that's how the legend goes anyway. I'm not quite sure if one guy could build that in his lifetime. And the temple itself is dedicated to all three of the Chinese religions, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. So this mountain that we're in, temple aside, just the general mountain area, is Mount Heng, or Hengshan, which is one of the five sacred peaks in China. A lot of people say they're five Daoist mountains, they're not. It's when, it's in the myth of the creation of the world, in the beginning of sort of Chinese civilization, was that there was this guy called Pangu, and after he created the world he laid down, and the five peaks became his head, his head, his body, and the, oh sorry, no, his head and his limbs. And so this one being the northern peak was his head, and throughout ancient China, the emperors would always come to these peaks to offer sacrifices, but because this mountain was often in areas controlled by barbarians, such as the northern way, people, the emperor tended not to come here, you know, because it was out of control, so they set up a temple in Hebei province, where they would make the sacrifices instead. So yeah, we're not actually going to ascend to the peak of Mount Heng because of time restrictions, but because we have to get off to Datong this afternoon. But it is apparently only a, it's the shortest climb of all of the five peaks, it is only a, I think I read that it was a two-hour ascent, but I reckon I could probably do that in one hour. But like I say, we've got to get off because we've got to get to Datong. Okay, so that was the northern Wei dynasty, which is a much lesser known aspect of Chinese history than, you know, a lot of the stuff we we normally read about. So if you like that video, give us a like, yeah, subscribe to the channel so you don't miss any more, and if you want to support the channel, you can go on patreon.com slash monkeystealspeech, and there's some exclusive content over there.