Longmen Grottoes: A Cliff Carved for Four Hundred Years

A Cliff of Ten Thousand Figures

Two hills face each other south of Luoyang with a river running between them, and both hills are carved. The west hill holds most of it: 2,345 niches and caves cut into the limestone along a stretch about one kilometre long. Inside them are more than 100,000 Buddhist figures, over 2,800 inscriptions cut into steles and cliff faces, and close to 80 stupas.

The scale runs in both directions. The largest figure is the Vairocana Buddha of Fengxian, 17.14 metres from base to crown. The smallest sits on the south wall of Lotus Cave and stands two centimetres tall.

The published counts differ slightly between official sources — some give the figures as "nearly 110,000", some as "over 110,000", and UNESCO's own summary says "almost 110,000" with "more than 60 stupas". Where versions diverge, this page follows the figures published by the site's own research institute.

Why Here, Why Then

Carving began around 493 AD, when Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei moved his capital to Luoyang. The timing is not a coincidence. A court that relocates builds its monuments where the court now sits, and this river gap lay a short distance from the new capital.

What made the site unusual was who paid. Longmen became the most concentrated place in China where emperors and the nobility commissioned Buddhist images — the State Council Information Office's English pages call it "the only royal grottoes in the world". That is a claim about patronage, not about size.

Four Hundred Years of Chisels

The cliff was not carved in one campaign. The main period of work ran over 400 years, from the Northern Wei through to the Tang — that is the figure China's National Cultural Heritage Administration and the state broadcaster use. The site's own municipal heritage bureau uses a longer one, over 1,400 years, counting the whole span from the Northern Wei down to the Qing. Both are correct; they measure different things. The 400 years is the period that produced the art, and it is the period this page describes.

Within it, the Northern Wei accounts for roughly 30 per cent of the caves and the Tang for about 60 per cent, with the remainder spread across the Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi, Sui, Five Dynasties and Song.

The Faces Change with the Dynasties

This is the part worth stopping on. The same cliff, carved by the same tradition, produces figures that look nothing alike depending on when they were cut.

The Northern Wei figures are slender, with clear bony features and wide robes over broad sashes — the Chinese description is xiugu qingxiang, "elegant bones and clear features", worn with baoyi bodai, the loose scholar's dress. UNESCO's English summary calls this the Central China Style.

The Tang figures reverse it: full-bodied, rounded in the face, dignified. UNESCO calls this the Great Tang Style.

The change is not decoration. It records a foreign religion being redrawn in Chinese terms — robes, bearing and proportion all moving away from the Central Asian models that arrived with Buddhism. The site's research institute calls the result a milestone in the transformation of Chinese cave art; the state broadcaster's phrase is that Longmen is where that transformation was completed.

The Great Buddha of Fengxian

Fengxian Temple is the largest group of cliff images at Longmen: nine colossal figures — a central Buddha flanked by two disciples, two bodhisattvas, two heavenly kings and two guardians. The bodhisattvas stand around 13 metres; the guardians are over 10 metres.

The central figure is the Vairocana Buddha, 17.14 metres tall, with a head 4 metres high and ears 1.9 metres long. An inscription on the north side of the pedestal records that the shrine was built by Emperor Gaozong. In 672, Wu Zetian — then empress, not yet ruler — donated 20,000 strings of cash from her own cosmetics allowance toward the work. It was finished in the twelfth month of 675.

One thing often said about the statue is not in the official record. The idea that the Buddha's face was modelled on Wu Zetian is described by official sources as folk legend, and this page treats it that way.

In 2022 the temple's images completed their first major conservation in fifty years. Testing during that work found traces of gold and silver on the Vairocana Buddha's face, and remnants of green, red and black pigment on the body — evidence that the figures were painted, not left as bare stone.

How a Cliff Becomes a Buddha

The rock is limestone, which cuts cleanly and takes fine detail — and which also weathers. The site's own description notes both sides: the stone suits precise carving, and it makes the carver's work harder to preserve.

Almost nothing survives of how the work was organised, with one exception. Binyang Middle Cave is the only case at Longmen with a documented sequence. Cutting began in 500, high near the ridge — and stalled, the record says, because the mountain was being cut too high to finish that way. In 505 the operation moved down to level ground, where it was completed. The cave took about 24 years and 802,366 man-days of labour.

That single record is the clearest window the site offers into how these cliffs were made. UNESCO's summary of the whole property settles on the phrase "the high point of Chinese stone carving".

A World Heritage Site

Longmen was listed as a national key cultural relic in 1961, in the first batch China designated. On 30 November 2000, at the 24th session of the World Heritage Committee in Cairns, Australia, it was inscribed on the World Heritage List under criteria (i), (ii) and (iii) — the first World Cultural Heritage site in Henan province. It was named among China's first 5A-grade scenic areas in 2007.

Getting there took work on the ground. Before the bid, the city closed and sealed every lime kiln in the area and demolished 180,000 square metres of buildings that did not belong to the setting.

UNESCO's own description of the property reads: "The grottoes and niches of Longmen contain the largest and most impressive collection of Chinese art of the late Northern Wei and Tang Dynasties (316-907). These works, entirely devoted to the Buddhist religion, represent the high point of Chinese stone carving."

Standing Above the River

The river is the Yi. On the east bank the hill is Xiangshan; on the west it is Longmenshan. The two face each other with the water running between them, and seen from a distance the gap looks like a gate — which is what it was called for most of its history. Yique, the gate of Yi. The name Longmen, "dragon gate", came later, when Luoyang became an imperial capital and the gap turned into a ruler's front door.

The Commentary on the Waterways Classic gives the older explanation: Yu the Great cut the channel, the two hills stood facing each other like gate towers, and the Yi passed between them.

Bai Juyi, who spent his last years in Luoyang and paid for work on the river's shoals at seventy-three, wrote that of all the scenery around the capital, Longmen came first. In the Ming and Qing lists of the city's eight scenic places, the view here was ranked at the top.

Four hundred years of carving, and what the cliff records is not only religion. It is the moment a borrowed art form stopped being borrowed — and the people who paid for it saying so, in stone, one dynasty at a time.

The grottoes are a short distance from the city, and they sit alongside the workshops in how we think about this place: see what we do and how a visit works.