Longmen Grottoes
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Work on the three Binyang caves commissioned by Emperor Xuanwu reportedly took 24 years and the labour of some 800,000 workers.
- The smallest carved Buddha at Longmen, in the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas, is only about two centimetres tall.
- Empress Wu Zetian is recorded as donating twenty thousand strings of cash from her cosmetics allowance toward the Fengxian sculptures.
- Fengxian is the largest cave at Longmen, an open-air shrine roughly 39 by 35 metres cut into the western cliff.
- The Tang poet Bai Juyi, who spent his final years in Luoyang, is buried at Longmen.
- Carving at Longmen continued in smaller campaigns for centuries after the Tang, with some work dated as late as the Northern Song.
- Two-thirds of the empress's procession relief from the Binyang Middle Cave ended up in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, the emperor's procession in New York.
- A dedicated agency to protect the grottoes was set up in 1953, and China declared Longmen a national cultural monument in 1961.
Why it is worth it
At Longmen, the "Dragon Gate" south of Luoyang, the Yi River cuts between two limestone hills, and for four centuries emperors, officials and pious families hollowed out both cliffs to fill them with Buddhas. Along roughly a kilometre of riverbank there are more than 2,300 caves and niches holding up to 100,000 statues, from figures a couple of centimetres high to a Buddha of more than 17 metres, plus nearly 2,500 steles and inscriptions and about sixty small stone pagodas. With Yungang and Mogao, Longmen is one of the three great Buddhist cave sites of China, and UNESCO listed it in 2000.
The carving began in 493, when the Northern Wei emperor Xiaowen moved his capital from Datong to Luoyang, and it peaked under the Tang in the seventh and eighth centuries; roughly 30% of the caves are Northern Wei work and 60% Tang. The two periods are easy to tell apart. Wei figures are slender, elongated and austere, with flat fish-tail drapery; Tang sculpture turns fuller, more naturalistic and more worldly. The Guyang cave, the oldest, holds some 800 inscriptions by donors, recording names, dates and reasons for carving — the largest number in any cave in China and prized examples of Wei calligraphy. The Middle Binyang cave, commissioned by Emperor Xuanwu in memory of his parents, keeps its great Wei trinity and lotus ceiling, but lost its imperial procession reliefs in the 1930s: they are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City.
The climax is Fengxian Temple, an open-air cave cut in 672–676 with the support of Empress Wu Zetian, who is recorded as donating her own "rouge and powder money". Its central figure, the Vairocana Buddha, is 17.14 metres tall with ears about 2 metres long, flanked by disciples, bodhisattvas and fierce guardian kings; tradition holds that its serene face was modelled on the empress herself. Nearby, the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas holds some 15,000 tiny figures in rows of niches, and the Prescription Cave carries around 140 medical recipes carved at its entrance.
Longmen also shows its losses. Many heads were hacked off in the twentieth century by collectors and dealers, and more during the Cultural Revolution, so the headless bodies are part of the site's history. The caves are numbered from north to south along the west bank, where the visit begins at the northern end; the smaller east-bank caves are all Tang and once housed communities of monks.
Getting there
The grottoes lie about 13 km south of central Luoyang. Luoyang Beijiao Airport (LYA) is about 22 km away. High-speed trains stop at Luoyang Longmen station, about 8 km from the site; bus 71 runs from there to the grottoes, and bus 81 runs from the older Luoyang railway station.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Longmen Grottoes or Longmen Caves are some of the finest examples of Chinese Buddhist art. Housing tens of thousands of statues of Shakyamuni Buddha and his disciples, they are located 12 kilometres (7.5 mi) south of present-day Luoyang in Henan province, China. The images, many once painted, were carved as outside rock reliefs and inside artificial caves excavated from the limestone cliffs of the Xiangshan (香山) and Longmenshan, running east and west. The Yi River flows northward between them and the area used to be called Yique. The alternative name of "Dragon's Gate Grottoes" derives from the resemblance of the two hills that check the flow of the Yi River to the typical "Chinese gate towers" that once marked the entrance to Luoyang from the south.
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