Located in Leshan City of Sichuan Province, the Leshan Grand Buddha is a statue of Maitreya，a Bodhisattva usually represented as a very stout monk with a broad smile on his face and with his naked breast and paunch exposed to view, in sitting posture and is the biggest carved stone Buddha in China.
Begun in the year 713 in the Tang Dynasty, and finished in the year 803, the statue took people more than 90 years to carve. The Grand Buddha is 71 meters tall, with 28-meters wide shoulders, 14.7-meters high head and 1.6-meters long toenails. And the Buddha statue , bare-footed and with drooping ears, has his hair arranged in a spiral knot on top, his chest exposed and his hands rested upon the knees. It has its head at the same level as the cliff top, and the feet touching the river bellow, carving into the whole face of a cliff. "The mountain is a Buddha, the Buddha is a mountain" is how the people are impressed. It is taller by 17 meters than the standing Buddha in Afghanistan, the "so-called" tallest Buddha in the world.
The Leshan Grand Buddha was included into the list of the World Heritage sites in 1996 and as the biggest carved stone Buddha in the world, Leshan Giant Buddha is featured in poetry, song and story.
