Buddhist Grottoes in China (English Edition): A Photographer‘s 10-Year Journey Through the Caves and the Lives Around Them

This is not a standard catalogue of Buddhist statues, and it is not a travel guide to China’s cave temples. It is a photographer‘s personal record of the ancient Buddhist grottoes scattered across China—and of the people who have lived around them for generations. Yuan Rongsun, a senior photographer and member of the China Photographers Association, spent over a decade finding and shooting these sites. He photographed the Buddhas, yes, but he also photographed the tea stalls set up at the foot of a cliff, the old men playing chess in a cave’s shadow, the farmers whose fields end where the carvings begin. The book opens with a hand-drawn map of how Buddhism and its cave art travelled into China, and this edition includes a collector‘s bookplate and a distribution map of China’s grottoes. If you want to see China‘s Buddhist grottoes not as isolated monuments but as living places where the sacred and the everyday share the same space—rather than read an academic art history or flip through a conventional photo album—this is it.