Luoyang, Henan, China
龙门石窟 · Lóngmén Shíkū
A kilometre of limestone cliff on both banks of the Yi River, cut into 2,345 caves and niches with more than 100,000 Buddhist figures, the work of the Northern Wei and Tang dynasties. World Heritage since 2000.
Photo: xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
The great Buddha in front of you is 17.14 metres high, and the head alone is 4 metres. It was cut in the reign of the Tang (618–907) emperor Gaozong. His empress, Wu Zetian, gave twenty thousand strings of cash from her "powder and rouge money" toward it, and it was finished in 675. For more than thirteen hundred years it has looked out over the Yi River with the same faint smile.
Longmen is four places on two banks of one river. On the west bank is the West Hill, where almost all the famous caves are, the great Buddha among them. A low bridge leads to the east bank, with the caves of the East Hill, Xiangshan Temple and the Bai Garden, where the poet Bai Juyi is buried. One day ticket covers all four.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| West Hill: Qianxi Temple, the first large cave | Included |
| West Hill: the three Binyang caves | Included |
| West Hill: the Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas | Included |
| West Hill: the Lotus Cave | Included |
| West Hill: Fengxian Temple and the great Vairocana | Included |
| West Hill: the Prescription Cave and the Guyang Cave | Included |
| East Hill: Kanjing Temple and the other eastern caves | Included by day; closed in the evening |
| Xiangshan Temple | Included |
| The Bai Garden and the tomb of Bai Juyi | Included by day; closed in the evening |
| The evening opening of the West Hill | A separate ticket |
| The Longmen Museum and the Luoyang Museum, in the city | Not part of the site; separate visits |
In 493 the Northern Wei (386–534) emperor Xiaowen moved his capital from Pingcheng, today's Datong, to Luoyang, and the habit of cutting cave temples came with him. The carving went on into the Tang dynasty. It left 2,345 caves and niches and more than 100,000 figures along one kilometre of cliff on both banks of the river.
You can tell the dynasty from the face. A Northern Wei Buddha has a thin face, a long neck and robes in close folds; the old phrase is "fine bones, clear features". A Tang Buddha has a round face and broad shoulders, like the one in front of you.
Many of the small figures have no heads. Most were not worn away. In the first half of the twentieth century they were cut out and sold abroad.
This is the first large cave at the north end of the West Hill, cut in the early Tang, about 650 to 683.
Fix the Tang look in your mind here: a round face, broad shoulders, robes that follow the body. The next stop is the comparison.
The Northern Wei emperor Xuanwu ordered one cave for his father Xiaowen, one for his mother Empress Wenzhao and one for himself. The middle cave took twenty-four years, from 500 to 523.
Binyang means "greeting the rising sun". It is the only imperial cave at Longmen whose cutting is described in the official histories.
The figures in the middle cave are Northern Wei: fine bones, clear features. The south and north caves were finished only under the Sui (581–618) and Tang, and the style has changed.
The front wall of the middle cave once carried two reliefs, the emperor and the empress each coming with their court to honour the Buddha. In the 1930s they were cut from the wall in pieces and taken out of China. The emperor's procession is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the empress's in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. Stand in front of the bare wall.
An inscription says the work was directed by Yao Shenbiao, who held the palace office of "great supervisor", and the nun Zhiyun, and finished in 680 for the emperor Gaozong, Empress Wu and the princes.
The north and south walls are covered with small seated Buddhas, "fifteen thousand" by the inscription. The smallest are a few centimetres high.
Choose a small patch of wall, count the figures, and estimate the whole.
A Northern Wei cave. In the middle of the ceiling is one great lotus in high relief, which gives the cave its name.
Flying figures circle the lotus. Compare the ceilings of the middle Binyang cave and of Kanjing Temple on the East Hill and see how three lotuses differ.
This is the largest niche at Longmen, open to the sky. There are nine great figures: the Buddha Vairocana in the middle, and on each side a disciple, Kasyapa the old and Ananda the young, then a bodhisattva, a heavenly king and a guardian.
Under the Buddha is an inscription added in 722. It records that in 672 Empress Wu gave twenty thousand strings of cash, and that the work was finished in 675. It calls the Buddha's face rare in its beauty and without equal.
Look at the heavenly king and the guardian on the right: bulging muscle, a demon under the king's foot, all force.
There was a large rescue repair in the 1970s. Fifty years later, in 2022, 228 days were spent sealing leaks and fixing loose rock.
On both sides of the door of the Prescription Cave old medical recipes are cut into the rock: a book of medicine carved on a hill.
The Guyang Cave is the oldest at Longmen, begun about the time the capital moved. It holds more than 800 inscriptions.
Calligraphers speak of the "Twenty Pieces of Longmen", the twenty finest Northern Wei dedications. Nineteen of them are in this cave. The strokes are square and sharp-cornered, a style called Wei stele script.
Trace one character in the air with your finger and compare it with your own handwriting.
Cross the low bridge to the East Hill. Kanjing Temple, the "temple of scripture reading", is the largest cave on this side, cut in the Tang.
Round the foot of the walls walk twenty-nine arhats, the patriarchs of Chan Buddhism, each about life size and each with a different face.
From the East Hill, looking west, you have the best view of the whole West Hill and of the great Buddha.
Xiangshan Temple was first built in 516. What stands now was rebuilt under the Qing (1644–1912) and enlarged in 2002. Beside it is a small villa of 1936 that belonged to Chiang Kai-shek.
Bai Juyi lived his last years in Luoyang, called himself the Lay Buddhist of Fragrant Hill and paid for repairs to the temple. His tomb is in the Bai Garden.
In the Bai Garden, find a poem of his that you know by heart.
Pieces of Longmen are in museums in the United States, Europe and Japan. Photographs and rubbings made by Western scholars in the early twentieth century, before the worst of the cutting, are now the evidence used to put things back together on a screen. In 2023 the Luoyang Museum showed heads and bodies digitally rejoined.
Before you come, look at a picture of the emperor's procession on the museum's website. Then, at the middle Binyang cave, stand before the empty wall and imagine it there.
The Yungang Grottoes at Datong are the Northern Wei's imperial caves from before the move. See Yungang first and then Longmen, and you watch the Buddha change from broad and heavy to fine-boned. The Mogao Caves at Dunhuang are painted and modelled in clay; Longmen is cut in limestone.
The great bronze Buddha of Todaiji at Nara in Japan, consecrated in 752, is also Vairocana, made under Tang influence. The cliff Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan were blown up in 2001, which says something about why protection matters.
In 2021 Henan Television opened a festival programme with a dance called The Guardians of Longmen, dancers as guardians and flying figures inside a digital Longmen. Watch it, then find the two guardians at Fengxian Temple.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 293 BC | The battle of Yique: the Qin (221–206 BC) general Bai Qi defeats Han and Wei in this gap | The successors of Alexander the Great are fighting over his empire |
| 493–494 | The Northern Wei capital moves to Luoyang; the Guyang Cave is begun | Theodoric the Ostrogoth takes Italy; the western Roman empire fell 17 years ago |
| 500–523 | Twenty-four years cutting the middle Binyang cave | Imperial carving has moved here from Yungang |
| 672–675 | The great Vairocana of Fengxian Temple | Silla unites the Korean peninsula; the Arabs first besiege Constantinople |
| 680 | The Cave of Ten Thousand Buddhas is finished | The Third Council of Constantinople meets |
| 752 | – | The great Vairocana of Todaiji at Nara is consecrated |
| 832–846 | Bai Juyi repairs Xiangshan Temple and is buried on the East Hill | Charlemagne's empire is divided in three (843) |
| 1930s | The emperor and empress reliefs are cut out and taken abroad | The Great Depression; the art market stays busy |
| 2000 | Listed as World Heritage in November | The same session lists Dujiangyan, the villages of southern Anhui and the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing imperial tombs |
| 2022 | Fengxian Temple is repaired again after fifty years | – |
One line to remember: thin face, Northern Wei; round face, Tang.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The face of the great Vairocana is said to be the face of Empress Wu Zetian, who paid toward it. The inscription under the Buddha records her gift and says nothing of a model, and scholars repeat the story only as hearsay.
Source: Widely repeated; no early record
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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