Lingshan Grand Buddha

National 5A Tourist Attraction; An 88 Metre Bronze Buddha With The Brahma Palace Beneath It · Wuxi, Jiangsu

An eighty-eight-metre bronze Buddha standing on a hillside above Lake Tai, built in 1997 on the site of a Tang monastery, and one of the largest statues of its kind anywhere. The scale is the first thing: the figure is cast in more than seventeen hundred bronze plates, the hand alone is over eleven metres, and visitors climb a flight of two hundred and sixteen steps to reach the plinth and touch the foot for luck. Around it the complex is unashamedly theatrical - a bronze fountain sculpture of the infant Buddha rising from a lotus that opens on the hour to music, a hall of a hundred bronze arhats, and a wall of carved seals. The unexpected part is underground: the Brahma Palace, opened in 2008 for the World Buddhist Forum, is a vast hall of lacquer, jade, gold leaf and carved wood beneath a domed ceiling, closer to a baroque opera house than a temple, and genuinely astonishing whatever you think of the rest. It is a modern pilgrimage site, not an ancient one, and is priced accordingly.

Mashan, Binhu District, Wuxi, Wuxi, Jiangsu, China

Daily 7:00-17:30 from 1 May to 31 October and 7:00-17:00 the rest of the year. Individual halls keep their own times - the Brahma Palace about 9:00-17:30, the Buddha Museum 8:30-17:00 and the Wanfo Hall 8:30-16:30.

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