The Leshan Giant Buddha is a monumental stone sculpture carved into a cliff at the meeting of the Min, Dadu and Qingyi rivers in Sichuan Province. At 71 metres high, it is among the largest premodern Buddha images in the world and the most remarkable cultural feature of the Mount Emei–Leshan World Heritage property. The figure faces the river confluence from Lingyun Mountain. Its scale is most apparent when a visitor compares the head, shoulders and feet with the cliff and with people moving along the lower paths.
UNESCO dates the carving to the eighth century, during the Tang dynasty. The local tourism account dates the beginning of the project to 713 and its completion to 803, after successive generations continued the work. It associates the undertaking with the monk Haitong and the hazardous currents faced by boats at the confluence. That account explains the traditional motivation for the sculpture; it should not be taken as proof that the statue alone controlled the rivers. The documented achievement is the sustained engineering effort to carve an immense figure into the living rock above a busy waterway.