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The ruins of Gaochang city, near Turfan.
Manichaean Grottos
Manichaean Temple Grottoes of Toyuk
Tuyugou grottoes of Gaochang

"Manichaean art has left its mark also in the cave art of Central Asia. All the three temple complexes of Turfan, i.e.Toyuk, Bezeklik and Sangim, contain many Manichaean grottoes which have been studied in great details by Prof Chao (Zhao) Huashan of the Bejing University." - RADHA BANERJEE

Nobuyoshi Yamabe has convincingly proved in his "Practice of Visualization & the Visualization Sutra: An Examination of Mural paintings at Toyuok, Turfan" that cave 20 & 42 of Toyuk actually depict the meditational themes of this Sutra and its related meditation manuals. What is interesting about this is the fact that Cave 20 and Cave 42 are ancient Manichaean Cave Monasteries. This fact has been proven in a separate work by Chao Huashan in his "New Evidence of Manichaeanism In Asia: A Description of Some Recently Discovered Manichaean Temples In Turfan."
 
 

"Ruins of Gaochang City: Scattered over an area of two million square metes at the foot of Fiery Mountain about forty-five kilometers southeast of the town of Turpan, this site is divided into three parts: an outer city, an inner city, and the imperial palace. Most of the city walls are still well preserved, the highest section being twelve meters high. Within the city walls are the remains of broken houses, earth pagodas, and a network of streets. Most of the houses were built with rammed earth or mud bricks, with arched doorways and windows.  Gaochang City was the political and cultural center in China’s northwest for 1,500 years from the Han Dynasty, when the government began to station garrisons there, until the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when the city began to deteriorate. "

The caves are forty-three kilometers east of the city of Turpan and forty kilometers from Shanshan County. They are considered to be the earliest hewn caves in the Turpan area. This group of caves, hewn in the Gaochang Prefecture period between the Jin and the Earlier Liang dynasties, has a history of 1,600 years. There are forty-six caves in the group, nine of which have Buddhist murals still visible in them.

"The many cave-shrines and temples to be found along both sides of the gorge for a distance of about a mile above its mouth had suffered a great deal of destruction both from vandalism and from treasure-seeking operations, even before Dr. Klementz furnished the first brief description of them. Where, owing to the accumulation of heavy debris or for other reasons, manuscript remains and other antiques were likely to have escaped local exploitation of the kind practised at Idikut-shahri, the caves had, for the greater part, been carefully searched, with important results, in the course of Professor von Lecoq's Turfan expedition of I904-5. Subsequently, in 1907, Professor Grunwedel had devoted his expert iconographic knowledge and artistic skill to the study and record of whatever paintings had survived on the walls of the more important caves and temples. Since then destructive diggings by natives had proceeded unchecked in spite of the diminishing yield of antiques. They were said to have been particularly stimulated by Mahmud ' Jisa ', the Kara-khoja headman, who, before he fell a victim to Ahmad Mullah's emeute in the preceding spring, appears to have been collecting the proceeds in the shape of manuscripts, &c., for sale or as presents to Chinese officials at Turfan and Urumchi. The result of these operations was to be seen in the disturbed condition of some smaller ruins which in November, 1907, I had found still apparently untouched. I was therefore obliged to confine my own work to those few spots where heavy accumulation of debris or other difficulties of the kind appeared to have deterred the diggers, and to the rescue of such remains of mural paintings as still survived in a few accessible cave-shrines. Accordingly I decided to begin by clearing an area situated at the foot of the northernmost large group of ruined shrines on the left side of the gorge (Fig. 310). Niaz, an old frequenter of the site, said that in his youth he had seen at this spot remains of small structures, some vaulted, which had since been completely covered up and hidden by the debris thrown down on the fan-like slope in the course of the clearing of the big central temple above. Excavation was started from the foot of this slope, where it ends in precipitous cliffs of clay rising above the irrigation cut that carries water from the stream to the eastern portion of Toyuk cultivation...." http://idp.nlc.gov.cn/GetSiteDetails/28456/Toyuk/864

Mani from a Chinese Manichaean Temple Carving