The Leshan Buddha, UNESCO World Heritage site, rightly ranks as one of China’s historical ’must sees’. Sentinel over the junction of the Min and Dadu rivers, 1200 years on from its construction it is still one of the biggest statues in the world.

But size aside, Leshan is surprisingly unremarkable. A bit of research and a willingness to go off the beaten track grants access to dozens of its brothers across China; dating from the grandest and most refined Tang and Song colossi from the 7th to 11th centuries, all the way back to the earliest forebears hewn into hillsides from the fractured world of China’s Northern and Southern dynasties period between 4th and 6th century.

Caveat Lector

The corpus of Buddhas in China alone is remarkably diverse – beyond the giant seating, standing, or sleeping Buddhas, many more outsized examples sit in temples cast in bronze or carved in plaster, or smaller versions across grotto walls and cliffsides. Below are some indicative examples – from Langzhong, Sichuan; Laitan, Chonqqing; Datong, Shanxi; and Wuwei, Gansu. They date from the Northern Wei through to Tang dynasties.

So a health warning before going any further – I am no expert, and the short typology I’m about to set out is more a helpful way I’ve found to think about the giant Buddhas, rather than any real schemata (it would almost certainly be wrong; and will ignore many examples outside China of which I’m ignorant). But hopefully it gives a taste of the diversity of what may (in more ways than one) feel like a monolithic area of Chinese art and history.

Itinerant Giants

One of the most interesting facets of these sculptural triumphs is their link to a much greater world of Buddhist diffusion and its artistic expression from its routes in the northern Indian subcontinent.

Many if not all of the China giant Buddhas are part of larger (and as artistically vital) grotto complexes; cave shrines and hermitages festooned with painted carvings which, because of their chthonic construction, remain some of the most well preserved bits of early Chinese archaeology. They range from the blockbuster sets at Yungang, Mogao, and Longmen, to smaller sets such as Xiangtang (Hebei) and Guangyuan (Sichuan). Their genesis and evolution is fascinating, complicated, and needs much more than a small blog, but for my purposes its important to note that their first big flourishing in China occurred under ‘barbarian’ Xianbei rulers of the north in the 4th-6th centuries; who themselves were transmitting motifs originating in the brilliant Hindu and Buddhist complexes of northern India. The genealogy can be seen both in the design of the early grottoes; and the evolution of art forms from Indo-Greek and Gandharan prototypes.

Nor is the majestic evolution from larger-than-life images to the titans seen at Leshan and elsewhere an indigenous evolution. By far the most famous cousins are the tragically lost Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pair of Buddhas carved into sandstone cliffs overlooking a gentle valley in central Afghanistan (here I have to recommend Llewelyn Morgan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan – which I last read on an enforced beach holiday in Sanya and which spurred me to track down China’s Buddhas). Other examples include the earlier Avukana Buddha in Sri Lanka; and going further east reveals subsequent transmission, particularly to Japan and Korea.

Learned books have been written on the topic, so I won’t spend too much time labouring this point. Let it suffice to say that its much more interesting (and much more fun) to read the Buddhas as part of a trans-Asian context, and perhaps a microcosm of Buddhist transmission over the centuries.

Buddhas and Buddhas

The early grottoes also illustrate a fun typological challenge, which I won’t answer here but will highlight. When does a colossal Buddha become a colossal Buddha? If the criterion is one of size there’s an almost continuous sliding scale in the remaining Chinese corpus – from slightly larger-than-life instances in Shandong’s Tuoshan 驼山石窟 and Hebei’s Xiangtang 响堂石窟; to ‘really quite big’ versions such as Sichuan’s Guangyuan 广元千佛岩; all the way to the behemoths at Leshan, and also Binglingsi 炳灵寺大佛 and Tianfoshan 天佛山大佛 in Gansu.

Some of the best examples of the form occur integrated into much larger contexts – such as the astonishing (Tang) complexes in Guangyuan, and the later but no less remarkable Dazu grottoes near Chongqing which realise the final incorporation of giant Buddhas alongside non-Buddhist artistic motifs. These are also some of the hardest to find – scattered as they can be across remote hillsides (I at least have incurred many a cut or bruise scrambling up to them), and in my mind can also be among the most rewarding.

Off the beaten track

The central thesis of this little survey was that its really worth spending the time getting to some of the lesser seen Buddhas, and so for the final part of this blog I will go over four of the more obscure sites which stick in my memory.

How do you lose a Buddha?

The story of the Mengshan Buddha 蒙山大佛 illustrates a couple of points. Firstly, how easy they are to lose – the 63m seated specimen on this hillside south west of Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi, was overgrown and forgotten until rediscovery by local archaeologists in the 1980s. It sits at the end of a valley itself distinguished for a number of important artefacts – including a pair of transitional Tang-Song pagodas, and a rare cast-iron Song Buddha – and aside from the incongruous head (one wonders whether a local Party Secretary imposed his fiat on some hapless restorer) well looked after .

Secondly, the Mengshan Buddha was early – probably constructed around 551 under the Northern Qi, themselves a Xianbei group who had settled in Northern China – and therefore is roughly contemporaneous with the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a long slog away 2,500 miles west. One wonders whether the two were known to each other, or even whether there was a transmission of forms (or craftsmen?) along with the Buddhist ideas seeping into this part of China at the time.

The ugly stepsister

Rong county, Sichuan, lies about two hours drive from the much more famous Leshan city, along a route worth lingering on for a number of pretty Song pagodas and smaller historic sites. The odd looking giant Buddha here (荣县大佛) is in some ways a better preserved version of Leshan, particularly as it retains the huge wooden shed which allows pilgrims and monks closer access to the Buddha (and functions at its base as a temple).

Like Leshan, as well as other sites like Langzhong 阆中大佛 and Qishan 齐山双佛 in Sichuan, and the giant of Dunhuang 敦煌南大佛 in Gansu, the Rong county Buddha dates to the Tang Dynasty, widely regarded (although in some ways unfairly – other dynasties give them a run for their money) as the highpoint of medieval Chinese art. In particular, the patronage of devout Buddhist rulers such as Empress Wu Zetian (and despite the anti-Buddhist pogrom of Tang Wuzong) led to the sprouting of multiple temples and giant Buddha projects. Many art historians would regard these as much more strongly adapted into a local art form than the earlier Xianbei productions; and setting the stage for later refinement under the Song.

Head above the rest

The third example is a slight cheat, as there’s no evidence of a full Buddha – and significant scholarly (as well as practical) argument against one having existed. But I couldn’t resist including the hilariously outsized artefact tucked into small Dayun temple 大云寺 in Linfen, Shanxi.

This giant iron Buddha head, including the hairdo, is about 6m tall. It’s commonly regarded as dating from the 7th century Wu Zetian building campaign and was originally coated in a now mostly lost painted plaster daub. The head is hollow and in its later history, at least, served as a store for religious texts.

I would like to imagine the Dayun head was originally made for some megalomaniacal project which is now gone or, more likely, fell apart under very real engineering and cost concerns. At the very least, it is an extremely attractive and equally interesting footnote in the story China’s big Buddhas.

Beach boys

Finally, a set of three Buddhas from coastal Fujian. These are the latest of my examples, dating to around 1216 under the (southern) Song who governed this region of China after losing the north to Mongol invasions. Tucked inside the (recently rebuilt) Nantian temple 南天寺石窟 and leaning out from a coastal rock outcrop they’re really pretty, and unusually far to south (and east) for giant carved Buddhas; they also parallel (at a stretch) a world-famous carved sculpture of Mani in a Yuan temple a short drive to the north, although perhaps dictated by the rock medium more than a particular genetic relationship.

What next?

Much more has and could be written (although I struggle to find accessible stuff in English – hints welcome!) on both giant Buddhas and the amazing network of grottoes; and I am grateful to two of my travel companions who have catalogued this much more systematically than me. There’s also a great deal to be said of the carved mega-Buddhas in Korea and Japan; and I have my sights on a future project to start wrapping my head around their antecessors in the Indian subcontinent. For now I hope this general introduction gives at least a superficial overview, and gets more people engaged in these often