The Era of Division 45
built inns along roadways offering meals and lodging to travelers. They
also opened pawnshops where poor people could deposit items of value
in order to secure loans that were often essential to keep families fed or
secure seed for a spring planting in hard times.
In north China, important political factors contributed to the rise of
Buddhism. The Chinese saw the invading nomadic tribes who competed
for the control of the Yellow River valley as uncivilized and uncultured.
These invaders were drawn to Buddhism precisely because it was not
Chinese and offered them a “high culture” and sophisticated religion
of their own. In the early fourth century, a tribe called the Tuoba—part
of the Xianbei, a larger group of nomads—occupied parts of northwest
China. They began to learn Chinese, to intermarry with Chinese, to use
Chinese advisors, and to implement Chinese-style political organiza-
tion. In 386, they proclaimed the Northern Wei dynasty in the Chi-
nese style. Establishing a permanent capital at Pingcheng (in today’s
northern Shanxi Province), the Wei rulers adopted a Chinese-style law
code and began taxing Chinese peasants under their control. By 430,
the Northern Wei was the largest and strongest government in China,
extending over the entire drainage area of the Yellow River.
From 425 to 494, the Northern Wei emperors and their court (with
private backing from offi cials, monks and nuns, and private families as
well) sponsored the carving of thousands of Buddhist statues in a group
of sandstone cliffs and caves at a place called Yungang (near their capi-
tal of Pingcheng and close to today’s Datong in Shanxi). These caves
contain fi ve massive sculptures of the Buddha (from twenty-six to sixty
feet high) that may have been modeled on the fi rst fi ve emperors of the
Northern Wei dynasty. Much of the work was completed in a few years
of very hectic activity, from 483 to 490, perhaps at the suggestion of
a monk as to how the court could express its repentance of an earlier
attempt to suppress Buddhist practices. In this short span of time, the
walls of fi fty-three main caves were fi lled with more than 50,000 carv-
ings. This was a massive undertaking that employed hundreds of skilled
craftsmen, who worked as slaves of the state. A donor’s list found at
Yungang is inscribed with the names of 120 donors.
In 494, the Northern Wei rulers moved their capital southward to
Luoyang, which they rebuilt into a fl ourishing city on the ruins of the
former Eastern Han capital. At a place called Longmen, ten miles out-
side of Luoyang, they commissioned artists to carve out another monu-
mental set of caves with fi ne limestone walls. Subsequent rulers of the
Tang dynasty continued to sponsor the creation of Buddhist sculptures
at Longmen for about four hundred years.