Yungang Grottoes
云冈石窟
Yungang Grottoes was carved on the north cliff of Wuzhou Mountain , 16km west of Datong City, Shanxi Province. The caves were carved in the mid-5th century, North Wei Dynasty, stretching about 1km from east to west as one of the largest clusters of grottoes in China. With an enormous size and rich contents. Yungang Grottoes ranks side by side with Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang of Gansu Province and Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang of Henan Province as the three great clusters of cave temples in China.
云冈石窟雕刻在武周山北麓,山西省大同市西郊16公里处。洞穴雕刻,五世纪中期北魏,从东到西约1公里,是中国最大的石窟群之一，规模宏大和内容丰富。云冈石窟与甘肃敦煌莫高窟、河南洛阳龙门石窟为中国三大石窟艺术宝库。
Of the three, Yungang Grottoes stands out for its rich contents and refined carving Preserved to the present in the Grottoes are 53 caves and over 51 000 statues. Li Daoyuan, a famous geologist of ancient China, described the Grottoes in his well reputed work Annotated Book of Waters that "cracked the rocks and hewed open the mountain, constructed with the topography： enormous,grandiose, and rare to find elsewhere： halls, temples, waters,and woods around the mountain rush in sight one after the other”，which is indeed the true picture of the Grottoes of that time.
在这三大石窟中，云岗石窟以其丰富的内容和精致的雕刻脱颖而出，石窟的53个洞穴和51 000雕像保存至今。郦道元,中国古代著名的地质学家,他在工作水经注中描述了石窟”劈开山石,构筑巨大,宏伟的地形,在其他地方很少找到殿堂、庙宇、水域和周围山上的森林一个接一个地映入眼帘,而这的确是那时的真实写照。
。