After Wutai Shan, I continued my Shanxi journey to the city of Datong, one of the ancient capitals of China and where my second world heritage site of this trip, Yungang Shiku or Yungang Grottoes which roughly translated as cloud ridge caves located. Before coming to Datong, I had heard many reports on how dusty and ugly city was, but even prepared to be open minded, Datong was quite exactly what I heard, and the worst of all was its smell, whole city smelled like a burning coal.

Since the grottoes were almost 20 kilometers from the city center, I decided to hire a taxi for whole day to take me there. My driver took me pass a few large coal mines, then he turned right in one junction and use a very new road that cut though a truly waste zone of nothing, and then suddenly I was in front of the large dusty construction site and with surprised the driver told me that "we finally arrived Yungang Shiku!" Reluctantly to admit, Yungang were the worst World Heritage Site in terms of its location as it was in the middle of ugly and dusty industrial coal mine complexes.

After paid a reasonable price of 60 Yuan for a ticket, I entered another wonderland of hundreds of grottoes. In my opinion, Yungang was one of the greatest laboratories of art in the whole world; this was the place where for almost 70 years ancient artists acted like scientists who made experiments to assimilate South and Central Asian arts into local arts which later developed into what we thought of mainstream Chinese arts were.

Unlike Longmen where I visited four months ago, Yungang was built by sandstone which made all these countless blondish Buddhist statues looked seedy and more fragile than the one in Luoyang. Although I was not favoring the Northern Wei Buddhist style as you can see in my Longmen review, I had to admit that the colorful interior rock cravings in many caves of Yungang especially in caves 5 and 6 were truly magnificent compared to the colorless Longmen, I was not surprised to see why many people preferred to appreciate Yungang more than Longmen.

So what was my final verdict for Yungang, As I written Yungang was the greatest art laboratory I have ever seen and highly appreciated, in such a short period of time, the genius of artists were clearly testified and the result of theirs experiment were invaluable; however in truly typical of many great laboratory which always located in ugly industrial zone, Yungang was by far suffered the environmental issues beyond my imagination which quite ruined whole visiting experience. Later I had been informed that Yungang was under major redevelopment, the new road I used was the road that designed to bring tourists to Yungang directly bypassing many ugly coal mines, and the construction site I saw will be a future tourist complex. The grand plan was intended to transform this dusty land to be a scenic landscape, so I just maybe visited this site too early to make any comments.