Baodingshan: the cliff read from outside

The Baodingshan carvings do not hide in cells. They stand in the open, in a U-shaped valley near the Longevity Pavilion, and they run for about five hundred metres along a rock face that can be read in sequence from one end to the other. That choice changes the craft. The figures are relief rather than sculpture in the round, so light rakes across them from the side, and an image that would need a niche of its own elsewhere is carved shoulder to shoulder with its neighbours on one crowded wall. The valley is dated to the 12th and 13th centuries, and its subjects run from Tantric Buddhism into the ordinary business of secular life.

The founder was a Sichuan monk, Zhao Zhifeng, who began the work in 1179 and gave it seventy years of his life. The hill was not unknown when he arrived: Baoding was already one of the holy places of the region, ranked in local saying just below Mount Emei, and people came here whether or not the rock had been cut. What Zhao Zhifeng set out to build was not one image but a sequence of thirteen scenic groups gathered around the Great Buddha Bay, which is the largest, the richest and the best preserved of them. A campaign of that size means decades of scaffolding, chisels, lime and patience on an open cliff.

Scale here is not decoration. The whole Dazu group is made up of seventy-five protected sites holding some fifty thousand statues and more than a hundred thousand characters of inscription, and it stands in hills about 165 kilometres west of the Chongqing urban area. For years the carvings were shut: they opened to Chinese travellers in 1961 and to foreign visitors in 1980, and until 1975 the only way in from Dazu town was a muddy path. The World Heritage listing came in 1999, and the wording of the citation is telling. The case rests on the way the three traditions were brought together here, and on what the stone records about everyday life in the period.