[Another panorama]

Tucked away in the Flaming Mountains, at a breathtaking site high above the Murtuk River gorge (56 kilometres northeast of Turpan), are 80 or so nos of Buddhist caves dating from the Northern & Southern Dynasties (317-589 AD) to the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1279-1368) of China. Some of the caves were hewn into the rock face, others constructed of sun-dried bricks – a unique feature of Bezeklik.

Bezeklik was an important centre for Buddhist worship in the early days, before Islam came to the fore. In the Uyghur language, Bezeklik means ‘place where there are paintings’. The caves were excavated in the early 1900s by the Germans Von Le Coq and Grunwedel, who discovered thousand-year-old murals inside the caves in superb condition, their colors rich and fresh; some showed Indian monks in yellow robes, their names inscribed in Brahmin script; others were clad in the violet robes of East Asia. They also found huge portraits of Buddhas at different periods of time throughout history, and figures of foreigners presenting gifts ot the Buddhas, among other artefacts. Von Le Coq and his assistant, Theodor Bartus, removed many of the best murals, carting and shipping them to Europe where they were housed in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. Allied bombing during the Second World War destroyed some of these, and the remainder are now on display in the Museum of Indian Art in Berlin. A few large, beautiful murals from Bezeklik are kept in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Today, sadly, most of the remaining cave paintings in Bezeklik are in terrible shape and very little is visible, most having been defaced by the Uyghur Muslims themselves, and the view of the impressive cliffs and the valley below in the heart of the Flaming Mountains may be more of an attraction than the actual contents within the caves.