Tongnan: the gilded Buddha in the cliff hall

The image that brings people to Tongnan stands inside a hall at the foot of Dingming mountain: a seated Buddha 18.43 metres tall, covered in gold, and by the usual reckoning one of the largest indoor golden statues in the world. The carved cliff is the older thing. Those cliff carvings, at Shinian village in Zitong subdistrict, are dated to the Song, and they were entered on the Sichuan provincial list in 1956, republished in 1980 and named a national key cultural relic in 2006. Gilt and carved are two different crafts on the same rock, and the temple is where the two meet.

Three halls organise the visit. The Great Buddha Hall holds the seated figure, the Guanyin Hall holds the bodhisattva of compassion, and the Jade Emperor Hall belongs to the Daoist side of the same religious world. Around them the complex keeps Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian statues together, which is the ordinary arrangement of a temple town on this plain rather than a museum's arrangement of one faith at a time. Visitors also come for smaller things: a gilt cliff Buddha standing in the open air, an ancient carved character for Buddha in the rock, and the sound of the stone steps, which the locals tune like a zither.

The name is late and the site is old. Before it was the Great Buddha Temple it was known as Dingming Yuan, or Nan Chan Sui, and it took its present name in the Song, when a colossal Buddha was carved into the mountains around it; the buildings themselves are described as Song and Yuan work with a thousand-year history. The wider district supplies the frame. Tongnan covers 1,594 square kilometres with the Fu and the Qiong as its rivers, and Zitong, the subdistrict that holds the temple, is one of only two such divisions in a district of twenty towns. A giant Buddha on a quiet river plain.