Do it yourself budget daytrip to Yungang Grottoes

The Yungang Grottoes are ancient Chinese Buddhist temple grottoes near the city of Datong in the province of Shanxi. The Yungang Grottoes, with their 252 caves and 51,000 statues, represent the outstanding achievement of Buddhist cave art in China in the 5th and 6th centuries and are one of the three most famous ancient Buddhist sculptural sites of China.

Park opens 8:30am and for us two hours was enough to walk around. It takes another 30min to come back to town and you have plenty of time to visit Hanging Monastery, walk around the town and catch the train back to Beijing/ or different onward destination. We caught 16:40 overnight train to X’ian, but since this journey is 16hours, we booked hard sleeper (207CNY/$32/£22) to compensate the poor last night sleep. Regular seater was 113CNY/$17/£12) but I wouldn’t advice to go that extreme on a such a long journey.

How to get there:

We took overnight train from Beijing to Datong regular seater 47CNY ($7/£5) and arrived 7am. You can take sleeper for an extra 50CNY but since we wanted to minimise all costs we sat up all night.

From Datong Rail station take bus no 4 (1CNY/$0.15/£0.10) and get off at Xin Kai Li stop, which is next to big bus terminal, so you wont miss it.

Then transfer to bus no 3 around the corner and get off at the Yungang Grottoes. Return journey will cost you 4CNY ($0.60/£0.40).

Entrance to Grottoes cost 125CNY ($19/£13)/ 80 low season. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a student discount on this one.

People at the station will try to sell taxi for ridiculous prices or give you wrong bus directions, so turn on your tunnel vision and follow my lead.

Also my advise would be to book tickets a few days in advance, as with the amount of people China carries on trains each day no surprise tickets get sold out quickly.

It was a great day trip on our way to X’ian. A little bit off the beaten patch and worth a sleepless night and extra planning. I would highly advise visiting site as early as 8am to be the first one at the door and try avoid weekends if possible.