大同

Datong's Yungang Grottoes are the reason serious travelers put this Shanxi city on their list. Carved into a sandstone cliff face during the 5th and 6th centuries under the Northern Wei dynasty, the site holds 252 caves and roughly 51,000 Buddhist statues, ranging from centimetres-tall figures to towering multi-storey Buddhas — a scale and artistic range that rivals the more famous Mogao Caves at Dunhuang, with a fraction of the visitors. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in December 2001, recognising it as one of China's great Buddhist grotto sites.

About an hour outside the city, the Hanging Temple pushes the same era's ambition even further. Built into a cliff on the west side of Jinxia Gorge in the late Northern Wei dynasty (491 AD), the temple's halls are suspended roughly 75 metres above the gorge floor, held up by a system of just 27 wooden support beams. It's the only surviving Chinese monastery that combines Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian halls under one roof, and walking its narrow cliffside walkways remains genuinely vertiginous even for visitors who've seen the photos beforehand.

Inside the city itself, the Nine Dragon Screen is the oldest and largest glazed-tile screen of its kind in China — a 45.5-metre wall built in 1392 for a son of the first Ming emperor, three times the size of the more famous version in Beijing's Beihai Park. Between the grottoes, the temple, and the screen, Datong packs an unusual density of major heritage sites into a city most international visitors still skip entirely. May through October gives the most reliable weather for the half-day trip out to the grottoes and Hanging Temple.