In 722 AD the Chinese Buddhist monk Haitong looked down from Lingyun Mountain in Sichuan at the confluence of the Min, Dadu, and Qingyi rivers, where colliding currents, rapids, and vortexes sank boats and killed traders. His answer was to carve a giant Maitreya Buddha into the cliff so its spiritual power would calm the waters. He spent about 20 years begging for alms to fund it. When local officials challenged his sincerity and moved to seize the money, he told them they could have his eyes before the Buddha’s funds, then gouged out his own eyes. The shocked officials backed off, and work began on what would become a 71 meter statue, the tallest pre-modern statue on earth.

Haitong died when only the head and shoulders were done, and work stopped. Decades later his disciples resumed with backing from official Zhangchou Jianqiong, reaching the knees before he was called to the court at Chang’an. After another 70 year pause, military governor Wei Gao funded the final push, and the feet were finished in 803 AD, about 90 years after the start. The rock thrown into the river over those decades filled deep scour holes, leveled the riverbed, and calmed the currents. A 13 story wooden pavilion once covered the statue until it was burned in the wars at the end of the Yuan dynasty.

• The scale: 28 meter shoulders, 5.6 meter nose and eyebrows, and an instep that can hold about 100 people
• Seven meter ears built from wooden armatures coated in clay because the soft red sandstone could not support carved ones
• A hidden drainage system running through 1,021 carved curls, the robe folds, and tunnels behind the ears and inside the chest
• The local saying that the mountain is a Buddha and the Buddha is a mountain, and the sleeping Buddha silhouette of the range
• Modern threats from acid rain, mosses and liverworts, and up to 2.8 million visitors a year, and the World Bank restoration from 2002