World’s most important sites of ancient Buddhist culture. The grottoes, also known as Caves of the Thousand Buddhas,preserve nearly a thousand years of Buddhist cave-temple architecture, clay sculpture, mural paintings, and manuscripts, dating from the 5th to the 14th centuries. The caves vary enormously in size, from tiny single-room cells that served as living quarters for individual monks to huge, cavernous worship halls housing monumental sculptures and mural cycles. The caves honeycomb a 1,600-meter-long cliff face running north and south, and contain some 2,000 clay sculptures and more than 45,000 square meters
wow gold(484,000 sq. ft) of mural paintings. The soft stone in the region is unsuitably brittle for carving, so the sculptures are primarily made of clay, coated with a kind of plaster surface that allowed finishing details to be painted on or engraved.