Where is the Thousand Buddha Cave on the chessboard?

Pan Qi Thousand Buddha Cave belongs to the famous scenic spot of Kashgar cultural landscape.

Qipan Thousand Buddha Cave is located on the sand cliff of Qipan Valley in the southwest of Yecheng County. Some locals call it Girl Cave. According to legend, in ancient times there was a queen who gave birth to a princess. The fortune teller said that the girl was unlucky and wanted to go to the cave to avoid disaster, so the emperor dug more than a dozen holes in the sand cliff of the chessboard valley to let the girl live in the hole, hence the name of the girl hole.

This is just a legend. In fact, judging from the shape of the cave and the remaining murals in the cave, this is an ancient Buddhist site, which was excavated at the latest 10 century ago and has a history of at least 1000 years. There are 10 caves of different sizes in the Thousand Buddha Cave on the chessboard. It is one of the Thousand Buddha Caves in the westernmost part of China. Cave dwellings are single rooms, simple in structure, square or rectangular. The largest cave is 4.4 meters long and 3.9 meters wide, and the smallest is only 2 square meters. The four walls in the cave are flat and 33.5 meters high. The top is arched or barrel-shaped.

There are not many relics in the cave. In some caves, you can see incomplete niches, Buddha statues and murals painted in red, green, blue, black and ochre. This Thousand-Buddha Cave has certain reference value for studying the eastward spread of Buddhism. Copper coins, single-eared pots, red pottery double-eared pots and stone mills carved in Chinese and Arabic have also been unearthed nearby.