Records & People

Nepal Has 10,000 Hand-Carved Caves in a Cliff Face — and Nobody Knows Who Built Them

Five storeys high and packed with ancient remains, manuscripts and monastic cells, Upper Mustang’s sky caves are still one of archaeology’s open…

By Dawa Sherpa · Aug 25, 2026

Climb the switchback trail above the village of Chhoser in Nepal's Upper Mustang and a cliff face opens up riddled with square black windows — floor after floor of them, running roughly 50 metres straight up a wall of wind-carved mud rock. There is no…

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Who dug them

Nobody living in Mustang today claims to know who first dug them, and that isn't for lack of asking. Archaeologists from Nepal's Department of Archaeology and the University of Cologne began the first serious excavation campaigns in the mid-1990s, working…

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Inside the Jhong cave

The physical scale is what surprises most first-time visitors. The Jhong Cave complex at Chhoser has roughly forty interconnected rooms across five storeys, cut entirely by hand into compacted mud-sandstone and linked by wooden ladders rather than any single…

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What this means for trekkers

What this means for you Most of the sky caves are closed to entry or simply too fragile and remote to visit, but Chhoser's Jhong Cave and the nearby Nyphu meditation cave are open on the standard Upper Mustang trekking route and can be visited with a licensed…

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The question nobody has answered

What nobody has recovered yet is a name. No inscription in any excavated cave identifies who ordered the earliest chambers cut, or why a community chose vertical cliff faces over ground-level building in a valley with plenty of flat land. The leading theory…

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