Oracle Bones and Cliff Temples

Five Thousand Years in China's Shanxi and Henan Heartland

From the Buddhist cliff temples of Datong to the oracle bone pits of Anyang, this tour descends through China's northern heartland where the earliest Chinese writing was scratched onto turtle shells, warrior monks invented kung fu, and fifty-one thousand Buddhas were carved into sandstone cliffs by emperors who wanted heaven on earth.

Itinerary

1. Clinging to the Cliff — Built into the face of a sheer cliff near Datong, the Hanging Temple has defied gravity and earthquakes for fifteen hundred years, its halls supported by nothing more than oak crossbeams driven into the rock.
2. 51,000 Buddhas in Stone — Northern Wei emperors commissioned an army of stone Buddhas carved into sandstone cliffs near Datong -- fifty-one thousand statues in 252 caves, the largest standing seventeen meters tall, their faces modeled on living emperors.
3. The Oldest Wooden Pagoda — Built in 1056 without a single iron nail, the Fogong Temple Pagoda is the oldest and tallest surviving wooden pagoda in the world -- sixty-seven meters of interlocking timber that has weathered earthquakes, wars, and nine centuries of northern Chinese winters.
4. 155,000 Souls — A memorial to the approximately 155,000 Chinese forced laborers who perished in Japanese-operated coal mines near Datong during World War II -- a history the city's Buddhist monuments cannot tell but the landscape still holds.
5. Where Buddhism Came to China — In 68 CE, two Indian monks arrived in Luoyang on white horses, carrying sutras that would transform Chinese civilization. The temple built to house them is the oldest Buddhist temple in China and the starting point of a religion's migration across an entire continent.
6. China's Oldest Capital — The ruins at Erlitou may be the capital of the semi-legendary Xia dynasty -- the oldest organized state in Chinese history, predating the Shang by centuries and pushing the origins of Chinese civilization back toward the third millennium BCE.
7. The Warrior Monks — Founded in 495 CE at the foot of Song Mountain, Shaolin became the birthplace of Chan Buddhism and Chinese martial arts -- a monastery where meditation and combat were understood as two expressions of the same discipline.
8. The Oracle Bones — In 1899, a scholar with malaria noticed writing on the 'dragon bones' in his medicine. The bones turned out to be three-thousand-year-old Shang dynasty records, and their discovery rewrote the entire timeline of Chinese civilization.
9. The Warrior Queen's Tomb — Oracle bones at Yinxu recorded a Shang queen who led armies of thirteen thousand soldiers. No one believed she was real until 1976, when her undisturbed tomb was opened and yielded 468 bronzes, 755 jades, and the proof that history had been underestimating women for three thousand years.