It’s about 60km from Zanda to Dungkar, located north from Toling at the small village of Dungkar and about 3 km away from Dungkar to Piyang. Dungkar and Piyang are famous for the wall painting and meditation caves, records shows there were more than 4,000 caves in the valley that was once inhabited. Nowadays, there are about 2000 caves remained at the Dungkar and Piyang. Actually seldom of tourist knows about this remote place, so if you are a fans of ancient relic, you may find Dungkar and Piyang are nice place to explore.
Climbing up to the Piyang Cave Temples
Caves and wall painting in Dungkar and Piyang are possibly the oldest caves and paintings in Ngari Region, which was discovered in the early 1990s.
Dungkar Meditation Caves
It’s said that three of the older caves temples, which may possibly contain the earliest murals in far west Tibet, the best preserved is the mandala cave with nine large painted mandalas. More interesting is the style similarity of the paintings with those in Dunhuang where lies in the eastern edge of the Silk Road in China. A couple of kilometers north from Dungka, at the foot of the valley are the numerous ruins of Piyang. thousands of meditate caves can be found in that area, at the same time, there were thousands of mediators, rare mediators appear nowadays, and ruined monastery trails also are good spots in this area. The oldest building was the Karsak Lhakhang, owned to King Yeshe-o.
Mandala Paintings on the wall inside the cave temple.
Getting to there, you need a introduction letter to the keeps from the Cultural Affsirs Bureau in Zanda first. As the rare of people know this area and in bad road condition, so it’s better to leave a full day to explore the caves.
Dungkar Caves from distance
