Nanshan: the Daoist seats above Dazu

Nanshan is the one Dazu hill where the Buddha is not the reason for the cutting. The niches stand on the summit, two kilometres south of Dazu town, inside the Jade Emperor Temple on ground once named Guanghua hill, and they are Daoist: Zhenwu, the Three Pure Ones, the Three Earthly Mothers, and a combined Buddhist and Daoist niche that shows how close the traditions stood here. Niche one, the Zhenwu grotto, is 2.35 metres high and 1.65 deep. The emperor sits against the back wall with one foot on a ghost and the other on an elephant, and a taiji diagram is cut into the ceiling above him.

Niche five is a cave rather than an alcove: 3.91 metres high, 5.08 wide and 5.58 deep, its floor plan laid out in the shape of the character hui. The back wall of the upper chamber carries the seated Three Pure Ones; below, a stone platform was cut for images that no longer survive. Around them run six rows of small standing figures, the responsive spirits, three hundred and sixty in the original scheme, of which two hundred and thirty-one remain. A third seat waits at niche four, where the Three Earthly Mothers sit together on a panel 3.15 metres high. And at the back of niche fifteen there is something rarer in Daoist caves: a scaled dragon, foreclaw in the air.

Nanshan also keeps the plainest historical document on the hill. The stele of the magistrate He Guangzhen, cut on the outer wall of the Three Pure Ones cave, runs to 602 characters and was finished on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of the Chunyou reign, 1250. It records how thin the inner prefectures of Sichuan had become and what the Mongol army left behind when it came into the province. Scholars treat it as the earliest, longest and best preserved record of Yu Jie's government here, and it is the latest of the Song steles among the Dazu inscriptions. Against five niches, one block of text does a great deal of work.