Laitian: a Chan dojo cut into the cliff above a walled town

Laitian lies about 20 kilometres to the north-east of Hechuan, on the bank of the Qu River, a tributary that joins the Jialing at the district seat. The town was founded in the Song dynasty and is listed among the country's ten ancient towns and among the first group named as China's most beautiful villages. Its old street is lined with Ming and Qing houses at different heights. Its Qing-dynasty barbican is still standing and is recorded as the only one of its kind left in Chongqing, kept for itself rather than for any view from it.

South-east of the town stand Erfo Temple and the cliff carvings of Jiuyingyan, a provincial-level protected site. What the record singles out is the group of figures inside them: Chan Buddhist images from a working dojo, described as the only ones of that kind surviving in the country. The central figure is a seated Maitreya seventeen metres tall, the second largest in eastern Sichuan, which is where the name of the second Buddha temple comes from. A seated figure of that size has to be read from below and from a distance, so the cliff face is doing work that a hall could not.

The cliff images are dated to the Song, and their administrative history records how a site is re-classified rather than altered. They were announced in 1956 in the first batch of Sichuan provincial historical and revolutionary relic protection units, re-announced in 1980 in the first batch of Sichuan provincial cultural relic protection units, entered the second batch tentative list of Chongqing municipal units in 1987, and named in the first batch of Chongqing municipal protection units in 2000, together with Erfo Temple and the barbican. In May 2006 they became a sixth-batch national key cultural relic protection unit, and Laitian itself is in the first batch of the Chongqing historic place-name list.