The Longmen cliffs are a working river gap, not a mountain vista: Xiangshan and Longmen Shan face each other across the Yi, and the official site describes the place as the ancient "Yi Que", a natural gate. Statues are cut into a kilometre of cliff face on both banks, begun around the time the Northern Wei court moved the capital to Luoyang and continued through later dynasties into the Song. The counts are exact and large: 2,345 niches, more than 100,000 statues and over 2,800 stelae and inscriptions. The study institute notes the limestone itself as a working material, pointing out that the earliest carved stone prescriptions, in the Prescriptions Cave, were collected in Japan's Ishinpo. The site was made a national protected site in 1961 and inscribed by the World Heritage Committee in 2000.
Longmen is a kilometre of carved cliff on both sides of the Yi River. Cross the water and the statues turn from a skyline into bodies you can measure, from a 17.14-metre Buddha to a niche no taller than your hand.