Exploring China’s Longmen Grottoes

Art galleries are not to everyone’s taste, but where would you go to get your culture fix when the likes of the Louvre and the Tate aren’t for you personally?

Dotted around the world there are amazing cultural sites in the great outdoors where people can easily see carvings, paintings and statues within the environments where they were intended to be displayed, but few are as impressive because the Longmen Grottoes in China.

Dating back to the Northern Wei and Tang dynasties, the Grottoes are the place to find one of the greatest collections of Chinese art on the planet. Located within the cavernous space, that was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000, are approximately 100,000 statutes of Buddha, along with other carvings and pagodas. There are also historical materials concerning art, music, religion, calligraphy, medicine, costume and architecture kept in the caves.

The grottoes were started in the year 493 and measure about 1,000 metres from north to south. Overall there are around 2,300 holes and niches, 2,800 steles, 40 dagobas and 1,300 caves to understand more about, which is certainly more rooms than any museum.

If you’ve only had a day to explore and trekking through on the thousand caves seems like a tall order, we recommend you go to the Fengxian Temple, which is the largest inside the Grottoes and contains the breathtaking Vairocana Buddha statute which measures around 17 metres as a whole.

It is also well worth fitting in a vacation to the Wanfo Cave which contains 15,000 small Buddha statutes within its two rooms, in addition to a statue of Kwan-yin and lifelike carvings of singers and dancers which decorate the walls and ceiling.

If you want a real cultural experience beyond museums and galleries, make sure you include a day at the Longmen Grottoes in Luoyang in your itinerary when in China.