Dazu is the place where a medieval Buddhist vision was carved on a human scale, and the surprise is how alive it still feels. Across the hills around the town in Chongqing, more than seventy sites hold carvings from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, made in the late Tang and Song dynasties, when a local community of monks, officials and lay believers turned the soft red sandstone into a theatre of faith. UNESCO recognised the group in 1999. Visitors usually see two main sites, Beishan and Baodingshan, and they make a pair.
Baodingshan is the larger and the more dramatic. The work was planned by a monk named Zhao Zhifeng in the twelfth century and covers a horseshoe-shaped valley, with a long cliff face carved into a vast tableau of Buddhist and everyday scenes. There are hell scenes and heavenly scenes, a huge wheel of life held by a demon, and a reclining Buddha thirty metres long, whose body seems to disappear into the rock. The carvings show not only gods but ordinary people: farmers, nursing mothers, cattle herders, and a woman feeding chickens, as if the sculptors were deliberately mixing the sacred and the everyday.
The setting is the Sichuan basin, a lush, humid country of terraced fields, bamboo and camphor trees, often wrapped in mist. The cliffs are under a roof of overhanging rock and have survived better than you would expect in such a wet climate, partly thanks to careful drainage built into the original design. The best light is in the early morning, before the tour groups arrive, and in autumn the air is clearer.
For the rider, the region is hilly and green, with busy roads, trucks, scooters and farm traffic. Visitors who want to ride in China must check the rules on licences and registration, which are strict and change often. Dazu has fuel, hotels and plenty of restaurants, and the carved sites are a short drive from the town. Sichuan cooking is bold, with chilli and Sichuan pepper that makes the lips tingle, and it is worth ordering a dish you cannot identify. Spring and autumn are the best seasons.