Longmen Grottoes

Luoyang, Henan, China

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Longmen Grottoes, near Luoyang in Henan Province, China, are a vast series of Buddhist cave temples carved into limestone cliffs along the Yi River, forming one of the country’s largest and best‑known sites for rock‑cut Buddhist art.

The work began in the late 5th century under the Northern Wei dynasty when the capital moved to Luoyang and continued for over 400 years through the Tang and Song periods, producing more than 1,300 caves and niches holding roughly 100,000 statues ranging from tiny figures to massive Buddha carvings up to 17 meters tall.

The grottoes show the evolution of Buddhist imagery and Chinese sculptural style, with the most famous area being the Fengxian Temple cave, created in the 7th century under Empress Wu Zetian, which houses a colossal seated Vairocana Buddha and attendant figures. Today Longmen is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a major tourist destination, where visitors walk along the riverbanks to see the cliff‑side shrines, intricate reliefs, and inscribed steles that together form a “stone sutra” of Chinese Buddhist devotion.