"All beings are one, the universe is my dwelling place, I share it with the others." Hi Kang (3rd century)
After AD 180, the Han Dynasty reached its culminating point, only to begin falling apart. The peasant revolts fomented by the aristocratic Taoist sects were constant, while hoards of barbarians attacked the land's frontiers, and various natural catastrophes (floods) subjected the people to famine and epidemics. After forty years of internal strife, three parties were present on the scene: the Wei, the Shu and the Wu who, unable to come to any settlement, divided China into three kingdoms. This three-part division would endure until the year 618.
We shall restrict our description to the Northern Kingdom, belonging to the Wei, since the other two proved to be minor. The first Wei emperor, Cao Pei, called himself "Wendi," meaning "scholarly or cultivated emperor." He lived up to this promising name by focusing on the development of his kingdom's civilization, arts and culture. Eighty years later, the Wei Dynasty fell into the hands of the topas, cultivated and Buddhist Turko-Mongols, which will explain why the art of this period was predominantly in a spiritual vein. It bore the imprint of two sources of influence: on the one hand, Indian, and on the other, Hellenist, in relation to the art of Ghandara (Afghanistan), in view of the latter's conquest by Alexander the Great.
The most beautiful sites - Dunhuang, Datong and Luoyang - are situated along the Silk Road to the north of the terrible Taklimakan Desert. Dunhuang, which was occupied by monks from the 4th century, is a cliff pierced with caves and intersecting galleries. The walls are covered with paintings in remarkably fresh colors, which depict - in a part strangely reminiscent of the Roman tympanums (Christ in all His glory, surrounded by the tetramorph). Other frescoes relate certain events in the Buddha's life. The whole is extremely alive, the contours sharp, the figures underscored with black shadows, and the clothes vividly detailed.
Nine hundred kilometers more to the east, at Datong, the Yunkang caves feature the same motifs, but in the form of sculptures: over 4000 buddhas, with the giant of them all reaching up 19 meters! Covering the walls are works in Chinese style that owes much to the art of India (squat figures, heavy coat folds that leave a naked shoulder in Mathura style) and Ghandara (rounded scarf folds, acanthus leaves), and to court art. By contrast, the sinicizing of the Longmen caves at Luoyang is almost total, with the elements from Ghandarian art depicted most schematically: the creases have grown angular, the faces slimmer, the bodies longer. Everything converges to exalt a bare, almost ascetic spiritualism.