Dazu Rock Carvings — archaeological site
Gwydion M. Williams from Coventry, Great Britain · CC BY 2.0

Dazu Rock Carvings

  • 2 min read
  • 29.713° N 105.707° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • A traditional pilgrims' saying ranks the site beside a sacred mountain: 'Go up to Emei, come down to Baoding.'
  • Work at Baodingshan began in 1179 under the monk Zhao Zhifeng and continued for more than seventy years.
  • The Great Buddha Bend is a horseshoe-shaped gorge whose carved cliffs, up to about 20 metres high, curve for some 500 metres.
  • Carving at Beishan began in 892 and continued through the Five Dynasties until 1146, a span of more than 250 years.
  • In Beishan's niche 125 stands a Guanyin holding prayer beads, so graceful that she is nicknamed the 'Charming Guanyin'.
  • Beishan's Cave 136, built around a revolving sutra repository, is often described as the finest single work of Song-dynasty stone carving.
  • At Shizhuanshan, early 12th-century carvings place Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian figures side by side in a single ensemble.
  • Nanshan, a mainly Taoist site, preserves a stele recording the history of Sichuan after the 13th-century Mongol invasion.
  • The carvings were opened to Chinese visitors in 1961, nearly two decades before foreigners were admitted.

Why it is worth it

In the hills of Dazu, west of Chongqing, tens of thousands of figures look out from the rock: Buddhas, bodhisattvas, sages, demons, officials and ordinary people, cut into open cliff faces and shallow grottoes over some six centuries. The Dazu Rock Carvings comprise 75 protected sites with about 50,000 statues and more than 100,000 carved Chinese characters of inscriptions, and they were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. What sets them apart is breadth: alongside Buddhist imagery they include Taoist and Confucian subjects, and many scenes show daily life in Song-dynasty China with unusual directness.

The earliest carvings date from 650, early in the Tang dynasty, but serious work began in the late 9th century when Wei Junjing, prefect of Changzhou, sponsored the first carvings on Mount Beishan, close to the town of Dazu. After the fall of the Tang, local gentry, monks, nuns and ordinary donors kept adding niches, and Beishan became a gallery of finely carved figures, among them a Guanyin and the Wisdom King Mahamayuri riding a peacock. The most ambitious ensemble is Baodingshan, about 15 km north of the town, created in the Southern Song period under the direction of a single monk, Zhao Zhifeng, who is said to have devoted some seventy years to it. Its more than six thousand figures stretch for about a mile and a half around a semicircular bend of rock.

At Baodingshan's Great Buddha Bend the cliff becomes a continuous sequence of large tableaux that follow the curve of the hillside. A huge reclining Buddha shows his passing into nirvana, a Thousand-Armed Guanyin spreads its gilded hands across a wall, and a great Wheel of Rebirth and a panorama of the hells mix doctrine with vivid, sometimes grim, scenes of human behaviour. A sequence on the taming of an ox illustrates the stages of spiritual training. Carved texts accompany the images throughout. The carvings were long remote: until 1975 only a muddy path linked Dazu town with the main cluster, and they were opened to foreign visitors only in 1980.

Getting there

The carvings are spread across Dazu District in Chongqing Municipality; Beishan lies close to Longgang, the urban centre of Dazu, about 2 km away, and Baodingshan about 15 km to the north. The nearest airport is Luzhou Yunlong Airport (LZO), about 79 km away.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Chongqing 6The Most Beautiful Places in the People's Republic of China 105The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in the People's Republic of China 9The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in the People's Republic of China 10The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the People's Republic of China 25The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Dazu Rock Carvings are a series of Chinese religious sculptures and carvings and UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Dazu District, Chongqing, China. The carvings date back as far as the 7th century AD, depicting and influenced by Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist beliefs. Some are in rock-cut cave shrines, in the usual Chinese Buddhist style, but many others are rock reliefs carved into the open rock faces. Listed as a World Heritage Site in 1999, the Dazu Rock Carvings are made up of 75 protected sites containing some 50,000 statues, with over 100,000 Chinese characters forming inscriptions and epigraphs. The sites are located in Chongqing Municipality within the steep hillsides throughout Dazu District, located about 165 kilometers west of the urban area of Chongqing. The highlights of the rock grotto are found on Mount Baoding and Mount Beishan.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

29.71333, 105.70694per Wikidata