Tianlongshan is a separate site from Jin Shrine, and the two are often run together. The grottoes are cut into the cliff of the western hills of Taiyuan, along the south-facing rock of the mountain's eastern and western peaks, in a line about five hundred metres long. The English account counts eight grottoes on the eastern mountain and thirteen on the western; the Chinese account counts twenty-five caves in all, twelve of them on the eastern peak and thirteen on the western. The two counts do not agree, so the safest description is two groups of caves, one on each peak. Cutting began in the late Northern Wei and the Eastern Wei, ran through the Northern Qi and the Sui, and continued into the Tang, when most of the caves were worked.
From the journal
Tianlongshan Grottoes: Carvings Cut into a Western Hill
Caves cut into the western hills of Taiyuan from the Northern Wei to the Tang: what the two sources count, where the sculpture went, and what the digital reconstruction is putting back.
In the same city · Taiyuan ↗Not the same as the Jin Shrine
Where the sculpture was taken
The loss is the story here. In the 1920s sculptures were taken out of the caves and sold to collectors abroad; a book published by the Japanese dealer Yamanaka Sadajiro describing the contents of the caves sharpened that appetite, and much of what can now be seen abroad came out of these holes in that way. A recent survey counts more than 240 statues or fragments removed, at least 150 of them now in foreign museums or private collections across dozens of institutions in the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland. The caves remain, but they read as empty shells: visitors cannot imagine how they looked in the past. A digital reconstruction project begun in 2013 has since recorded the data for more than a hundred lost statues and restored eleven of the main caves to varying degrees.
What the site looks like now
What can still be seen is mostly outline and style. The Tang sculptures that remain are noted for soft modelling, sensuous drapery and a naturalism that has been linked to the Gandhara tradition of Central Asia, and the Tang work here formed what is called the Tianlongshan style, with a regional character of its own. The English account counts more than 1,500 statues and 1,144 reliefs surviving in the caves, while the Chinese account gives more than 500 figures; the two do not use the same way of counting. Cave 8 is the one that carries a date in stone, cut in the fourth year of the Kaihuang era, 584 CE, and it is among the largest in the group. The caves were listed at national level in 2001, with the protection area taking in the caves of both peaks, Tianlong Temple and related remains.