Tourists visit Fengxian Temple, built in the Tang Dynasty and the largest grotto in the UNESCO World Heritage site in Luoyang, Henan Province, China. The Longmen Grottoes or Dragon's Gate Grottoes contain the largest collection of Chinese Buddhist art of the late Northern Wei and Tang Dynasties (316-907). Altogether there are 1,352 caves, 785 niches, more than 97,000 statues and 3,680 inscribed stone tablets along the one-kilometre long cliff of Mount Longmen on the west and Mount Xiangshan on the east of the Yihe River south of Luoyang. Most of the smaller Buddhist statuary, many inscriptions and murals were stolen by Western visitors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is estimated that some 800 of the finest pieces were carried off in the 1930s alone

Credit : EPA