Piyang and Dongga Cave Temple Site 皮央东嘎遗址

About Piyang and Dongga Cave Temple Site

The Xinhua feature describes the site's make-up: the Piyang cave group and the Dongga Zhaxi Qulin monastery site two kilometres away together form the Piyang and Dongga cave site, and the caves are cut over the front and back of the hill, where the number actually surveyed and counted approaches 1,000, with many more collapsed long ago and left out of the count. Both cited accounts date its discovery to May 1992, when a Tibetan cultural-relics survey team came to Zanda and, led by a shepherdess, archaeologists climbed the hill top covered in honeycomb-like caves and saw a long-sealed world of Buddhist art. The feature on the Ngari prefecture's site adds that the caves were not found by a cultural-relics survey until 1992 and that in 2013 the State Council listed them in the seventh batch of nationally protected cultural relics units.

The murals are what the caves are known for. Xinhua's reporter was shown a small cave whose walls are entirely covered, with foreign figures, patterns and forms and with images of lions, peacocks and elephants, the composition rigorous and the figures vivid. The guardian Renzeng Wangzha told the reporter that the murals are 1,300 years old and that those in another cave are about 1,000 years old, and said their colours have not faded in more than a thousand years because the pigments come from minerals. The item on the Ngari prefecture site records that by 2015 rescue copying had been completed for ten mural mandalas and more than 2,000 figures of Buddhas, deities and people, and that the Ngari Prefecture Museum holds several copied reproductions of the Dongga cave murals for study and viewing.

Both accounts place the site in the Guge world. The Ngari item says it lies nearly 70 kilometres from the well-known Guge Kingdom site and that research indicates it was at one time a principal city of the Guge kingdom; it adds that the caves and buildings there were mostly left by the Guge forebears, that the civilisation they built was founded by descendants of the Tubo and produced an artistic style distinct from that of the Guge Kingdom site, and that after the middle of the seventeenth century warfare, theft and natural erosion erased most traces of it, leaving a few caves and ruined palaces with their mural art. The Xinhua feature says the site lived through the Guge kingdom's rise and fall and now blends into the yellow-brown hills behind it, hidden among the layered earth forest of the Zanda geological park, and that it is less well known than the Guge Kingdom site. In 2018 a group of objects about 2,000 years old was found there, among them millet and tea suspected to be of Han to Jin date, and the archaeologist in charge considered that this might indicate that the area had close dealings with the Central Plains as early as the pre-Tubo period.

Protection has been continuous. The Ngari item records Chinese and foreign experts working together on the cave murals in 1996, consolidation of the caves and treatment of their water problems and murals between 1997 and 1999, a full re-survey and registration in the third national cultural-relics survey in 2009, and the completion by 2015 of the rescue copying. The catalogue's name for this entry, 皮央东嘎遗址, is the combined site the sources call 皮央和东嘎遗址, the same two place names with a conjunction between them. No cited source designates a viewing route, states which caves may be entered or states any access rule.

What to look for

• The small mural-covered cave the Xinhua reporter was shown, with foreign figures, patterns and forms and with images of lions, peacocks and elephants
• The murals the guardian dates to 1,300 years ago and, in another cave, to about 1,000 years ago, their colours still bright because he says the pigments come from minerals
• The honeycomb-like caves cut over the front and back of the Piyang hill, where the survey count approaches 1,000
• The Dongga Zhaxi Qulin monastery site two kilometres from the Piyang cave group, which together with it forms the Piyang and Dongga cave site
• The reproductions of the Dongga cave murals held at the Ngari Prefecture Museum for study and viewing

Location & getting there

Getting to Piyang and Dongga Cave Temple Site

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 皮央东嘎遗址 with 阿里地区 and 札达县.