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Capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty 535-557. Graced with several beautiful old temples and the nearby Yungang Caves. The Tobas were a Turki-speaking nomadic tribe who arrived, like so many others, out of the great blank emptiness of Central Asia in the 4th century AD. By the middle of the 5th century they had conquored all of northern China and for a while their capital was in Datong. One of their emperors ordered the construction of the Datong caves in a fit of remorse. Later the Tobas moved further south and established another capital at Luoyang near the Yellow River. Sometime in the 7th century they vanished into the stepps and disappeared as a separate people. The Chinese refer to them as the Northern Wei Dynasty, giving them a Chinese name, although they were anything but Chinese, drawing their religion and art from the Indo-European Gandharn cuture of northern India. From the Chinese they borrowed their system of administration and invented their own script using characters loosely based on Chinese

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