The Mengshan Giant Buddha is a cliff carving, not a free-standing statue, and it was cut in the Northern Qi, in the sixth century. It sits in the Mengshan hills behind Sidí village in Jinyuan District, a little behind the Kaihua Temple founded there in 559, and it is also called the Giant Buddha of the Western Hills of Jinyang. It was rediscovered in a 1980 place-name census, when its head was already missing and the body lay under earth and stone, badly weathered. What the visitor sees today is therefore two things at once: an ancient body and a modern head, built between 2006 and 2008. The new head is twelve metres high, eight metres across and weighs about 140 tonnes, modelled on Northern Qi heads excavated in the area.
From the journal
The Giant Buddha at Mengshan: An Ancient Carving, a Modern Head
The Mengshan Buddha is a Northern Qi cliff carving rediscovered in 1980 without its head, measured at about forty-six metres, given a new head in 2008 and lit, in the old records, by ten thousand oil basins.
In the same city · Taiyuan ↗An ancient carving, a modern head
How a statue of this size is exposed
The height of the figure was measured, not assumed. The body runs about thirty metres from the base of the legs to the neck; the original head is estimated at about ten metres, and a base of six metres was added in later rebuilding, which puts the original statue at roughly forty-six metres. Ancient records give the figure as two hundred chi, about fifty-nine metres in modern measure; the measured height is the smaller of the two. The statue is protected as a Taiyuan municipal cultural relic. Mining beneath the hill for coal and limestone left cavities in the ground that threatened the rock face, and between 2008 and 2011 the city applied for 211 million yuan to treat the geology of Mengshan and replant the slopes.
The night the great Buddha was lit
The old accounts describe the statue by its light. The History of the Northern Dynasties records that the last emperor of the Northern Qi had a great Buddha carved in the western hills of Jinyang, and that on one night ten thousand oil basins burned so that the light reached the palace; the carving of the image and the illumination of one night stand in the same sentence. A pavilion was built over the figure in the Sui; it was destroyed in 844 in the persecution of Buddhism, leaving the statue exposed to weather, and rebuilt from 895 over five years. The figure was damaged again at the end of the Yuan. In 2013 the Buddha was given a gilt robe, which the site removed three days later after press questions about whether it covered a weathered body. The scenic area has been open without charge since October 2008.