Tianlongshan Grottoes travel guide map.

Headless Grottoes - Tianlong Mountain Grottoes|||Tianlong Mountain was formerly known as Fangshan. Gao Huan, the prime minister of the Eastern Wei Dynasty, once built a summer palace and excavated grottoes here, which marked the beginning of the cultural history of Tianlong Mountain. After thousands of years of development and evolution, it has become a nationally famous historical and cultural mountain integrating grottoes, ancient buildings, tombs, pagodas, inscriptions and sculptures. Tianlongshan Grottoes are a national key cultural relic protection site, with a total of 25 grottoes on the east and west peaks. The exquisiteness of the Tianlongshan Grottoes has attracted worldwide attention, but it has also attracted the covetousness of cultural relics dealers. Yamanaka Teijiro, a Japanese antiquities dealer and owner of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce, wrote in "Records of Buddhist Statues at Tianlong Mountain": In 1922, when I first saw photos of Tianlong Mountain, I was deeply attracted by the grottoes and statues there. Today, two years later, I finally traveled thousands of miles to Tianlong Mountain. It houses the splendor of Chinese Buddhist art at its peak from the Northern Qi Dynasty to the Sui and Tang Dynasties. The surprise and joy they brought me cannot be expressed in words. According to statistics, Yamanaka Teijiro stole a total of 45 Buddha heads from the Tianlongshan Grottoes. These exquisite stone carvings, which have stood the test of thousands of years, were transported to Japan via Beijing and sold all over the world through the trade routes of the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce. In November 1932, the Yamanaka Chamber of Commerce held the "World Ancient Art Exhibition" at the Tokyo Art Association in Japan, and put these Tianlongshan stone Buddhas up for public auction. At this time, the Tianlongshan Grottoes had become a "headless cave". ||