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The Longmen Grottoes ("Dragon's Gate") are cut into the limestone cliffs on both banks of the Yi River, about 12 kilometres south of the city of Luoyang in Henan province — a location where the river passes between two hills, framing a natural "gate" that gave the site its name. Together with the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang and the Yungang Grottoes near Datong, Longmen is counted among the three greatest ancient Buddhist cave-sculpture sites in China, and it holds the largest and most concentrated collection of monumental Chinese stone Buddhist carving anywhere.
Carving began around 493 CE, when the Northern Wei dynasty — a state founded by the Xianbei, a people of the northern steppe who had adopted Buddhism and much of Chinese culture — moved its capital to Luoyang and began sponsoring cave temples in the manner it had earlier developed at Yungang. The earliest Longmen caves, such as the Guyang Cave and the Binyang Caves, reflect the elongated, ethereal, linear style characteristic of Northern Wei Buddhist art, and their walls preserve some of the most important early examples of Chinese calligraphy carved in stone, including many of the celebrated "Twenty Masterworks" of Longmen dedicatory inscriptions prized by later Chinese calligraphers.
After a period of reduced activity, patronage surged again under the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), when Luoyang served as a secondary and sometimes primary imperial capital. Tang-era carving at Longmen is fuller, rounder, and more naturalistic than the austere Northern Wei style, reflecting the confident cosmopolitan aesthetic of the Tang. The supreme achievement of this period — and of the entire site — is the Fengxian Temple (Fengxiansi), a vast open-air niche dominated by a colossal seated image of Vairocana Buddha rising roughly 17 metres, flanked by monumental attendant bodhisattvas, disciples, and fierce guardian figures. Commissioned in the 670s CE with financial support associated with Empress Wu Zetian — the only woman to rule China as emperor in her own right — the serene, powerful face of the Vairocana Buddha has become one of the most iconic images in all of Chinese art, and is popularly, if not certainly, said to reflect the features of the empress herself.
Across the two riverbanks, the site's more than 2,300 grottoes and niches contain over 100,000 individual carved Buddhist images ranging from a few centimetres to many metres in height, along with roughly 2,800 inscriptions and dozens of pagodas — an immense corpus documenting not only the evolution of Chinese Buddhist art across the pivotal Northern Wei to Tang transition, but also, through its dedicatory inscriptions, the religious devotion, social identities, and political networks of the emperors, officials, monks, and ordinary donors who paid for the carvings. Longmen suffered significant looting in the early 20th century, when many heads and reliefs were removed and sold to foreign collectors, and some damage during later periods, but the great majority of its sculpture survives in place. The Longmen Grottoes were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.