After a long bus journey from Luoyang train station, I was at Longmen bus stop without any problems, but the thing I encountered was a large complex of well-designed mockup traditional village to serve tourist spending. I had to walk through this fake village with countless shops selling souvenirs you can find everywhere in China for almost 15 minutes, a real exhausted experience from tourism industry. Thankfully that beyond the village was a beautiful and peaceful landscape of riverside garden spanning from the village to the limestone cliffs located both side of the river forming a pretty river valley where ancient Chinese named this area “The Dragon Gate” or Longmen.

With the hefty fee of 120 RMB, I went under the arch bridge which cleverly used as an entrance gate engraving Longmen name in traditional Chinese alphabet, a real unique as other Longmen sign in other places using simplified alphabet, a really nice small detail if you know Chinese. After passing tourist information center, the wonderland of hundreds of grottoes appeared. For over 200 years, artists were busy for craving the striking white limestone to hold thousands of small Buddha statues, a real religious devotion transforming the cliff to be looked like a large emmental cheese. After in-depth admiration, the art of Longmen was divided into two styles – northern Wei style and Tang style.

From my perspective, northern Wei Buddhist art was quite strange; a collision of many central and eastern Asian art elements, a face of Buddha was hard to explain as it was unique in its own kind with oval face, the out proportionate body and the larger than usual ears but exquisite cloth line depiction. The best of northern Wei was Three Binyang Cave, with three grottoes and three totally contrast Buddha statues, noted for the right grotto has funny posed Buddha with Churchill’s victory finger. I have to admit that northern Wei was not my favorite or ideal Buddhist art in my humble opinion, but for the Tang groups I really appreciated to see.

Tang art was developed after northern Wei and in Longmen could be found in Fengxian Si, a large group of statues with Buddha and guardians. The famous Losana Buddha is one of the iconic images in China believed to be modeled after the face of Empress Wu, the only woman who ruled China by her own right and had been regarded as Mona Lisa of the orient for its beautiful and real life face, not only Losana, the face of the guardians were also wonderful, Tang style had add the expression to the face of the statues, and these made a great contrast to Northern Wei ones, the statues also have unique illusive proportion of head and body, a real great art.

After exit, I walked to another side of the river for great view and then used the arch bridge crossing the river, the same one that used as an entrance gate, and back to the tourist village. All in all Longmen was a great place to visit, since this was my only and first Chinese Buddhist cave I saw, so I could not make any comparison to other Chinese cave in WHS list, but if you want to see the zenith of Tang Buddhist art period, Longmen was the place to pay visit and admire the art representing one of the most sophisticated time in Chinese history.