• Geography and Climate

• History

• Economy

• Travel and Accomodation

• Datong City

• Lower Huayantemplet

• Upper Huayantemplet

• The Nine Dragon Wall

• The Shanhua tempel

• The Drumtower

• The City Wall

• Yungang Caves

• The Guanyin temple

• The Great Wall

• Datong's Volcanoes

• The Xuankong temple

• Hengshan

• Links and references

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Datong is a quite unknown Chinese city to most foreigners, but do have a lot of nice sites that makes it worth going there. The city has a lot of historical relics from the time when Datong was the capital of the Northern Weidynasity (北魏). Most tourists coming to Datong wants to see the Yungaggrottoes  (Yungangshiku 云冈石窟), which is also on the UNESCO's world heritage list, the hanging monastery Xuankongsi (悬空寺), Huayantemplen (华严寺) and the Nine dragon's wall (九龙壁). Except for these sites, there's a lot more to see as well.

Some nice sites are lower and rupper Huayan temples, The Nine Dragon Wall, The Shanhua temple, The Drum Twoer and The City Wall with it's Wild Goose Pagoda. 

Geography and climate

Datong is situatate in the northern part of Shanxi Prvoince(山西省), about 6 hours on train west of Beijing. North to Datong is Inner Mongolia (内蒙古) and The Great Wall. A map over Shanxi Province can be found hear.

Datong is surrounded by mountains in three directions. The most important mountains are North Yueheng mountain (北岳恒山)，Cailang mountain (采凉山) in north east and Leigong mountain (雷公山) and Wuzhou mountain (武周山) in north west (李彬 2001).

English map over Datong can be found hear, chinese maps hear and hear. A chinese map over Datong (大同地图) is needed if you want to travel around in the city and need to ask someone for the way. Maps can be bought in most book stores and news paper stands etc.

The population in Datong is 2,82 million, where of Datong City has 1,1 milion inhabitants. Datong is divided into seven counties (县), 154 towns (镇) and 2283 villages (自然村) (李彬 2001).

Datong is an important industry and mining town, especially having large coal resources. Unfourtenately this also means that the air quality in Datong is rather poor, and the city has got the nickname "Coal City". Datong is also an important transportation hub, especially for the railway. The main industries in Datong are, after mining, power, train, maschinary and building materials (中国地图册 2002).

Datong has an incland climate and its yearly average temperature is 6,4˚C. During summer times the temeperature can be as hot as 37,7˚C, but is averaging only between 19 and 22 ˚C, while in the winter it can get as gold as  - 29,9˚C, with a winter average temerature of  - 13,8 ˚C. The temperature differences are large between winters and summers, but they can also vary substantially between day and evening temperatures. Datong gets rain about 135-140 days/year. The four seasons are very clear in Datong. (李彬 2001, 徐世信 1997).

© Eskil Fredriksson 2006-2010. E-mail: eskilfredriksson at gmail.com

            Last updated: 2010-10-25