Leshan Giant Buddha

The Leshan Giant Buddha is a seated figure of Maitreya, the future Buddha of Buddhism, carved out of a red sandstone cliff at the meeting of the Min, Qingyi and Dadu rivers beside the city of Leshan in Sichuan, south-west China. Begun early in the eighth century and finished in 803, under the Tang dynasty, it stands 71 metres high and is the tallest stone Buddha in the world. Its builders hoped that the Buddha would calm the dangerous waters at its feet.

No document gives the exact starting date. A Tang inscription and later local records place the beginning in the first years of the Kaiyuan era, usually taken as 713, although some accounts give 712 or 722 and Chinese scholars note that the early date may mark only the first plan. The project was led by a monk named Haitong, who believed that a great image of Maitreya would subdue the currents that wrecked boats where the three rivers met. A well-known story tells that when a local official demanded a bribe from the donations, Haitong gouged out one of his own eyes rather than hand over the Buddha's money; it survives as tradition rather than recorded fact.

After Haitong died, work stopped with only the upper part carved. In 739 Zhangchou Jianqiong, military governor of the region, gave part of his salary to restart it, but when he was recalled to the court in 746 the statue had reached only the knees. A third phase began in 785 under the governor Wei Gao, who also contributed his own salary, and Haitong's successors finished the work in 803, some ninety years after it began. Wei Gao recorded the history in an inscription cut into the cliff beside the statue, which was long thought lost until surveyors found it again around 1991.

The Buddha sits with both hands resting on its knees, facing Mount Emei across the water. Its head is 14.7 metres tall and 10 metres wide, set with 1,021 spiral curls that were fitted on rather than carved from the cliff, and its shoulders are about 24 to 28 metres across, depending on the measurement. A hidden system of gutters in the hair, collar and chest, and channels behind the ears, carries away rainwater and has slowed erosion. When new it was painted and partly gilded and sheltered by a great wooden pavilion, said to have had thirteen storeys; for a long time this was known only from poems, until archaeologists found evidence of it in 2013. Two armoured guardian figures, each about 16 metres tall, flank the niche. One popular claim holds that rubble from the carving changed the river currents and made passage safer.

By the start of the Northern Song dynasty the statue was overgrown with moss and the pavilion had collapsed. It was restored on a large scale under Emperor Renzong in the eleventh century, but records of later damage and repair are sparse, and the neighbouring Lingyun Temple was destroyed by war several times. With the pavilion gone, the figure stood exposed to the weather. By the early twentieth century the nose and right ear had been lost. In 1925 a local warlord paid for a crude repair that covered the face in a mask of red sandstone blocks; that same year troops of a rival commander, Yang Sen, used the statue for target practice and blew a hole in the new face. It was mended again in 1927 and more thoroughly between 1930 and 1933.

Sichuan province listed the statue as a protected relic in 1956, and it became a national protected site in 1982. According to local accounts, students in 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, talked of blowing it up but were stopped. In December 1996 UNESCO inscribed Mount Emei and the Leshan Giant Buddha together as a mixed cultural and natural World Heritage Site. Repairs funded by a World Bank loan in 2002 restored the head and chest and reinforced the rock at its feet. The figure still suffers from weathering, seeping water, air pollution, plant growth and heavy tourism, and urgent work on cracking in the chest and belly was carried out in 2018 and 2019.