The Leshan Giant Buddha

Seventy-one metres of Buddha cut into a red sandstone cliff where the Min and the Dadu rivers meet, the largest stone Buddha in the world, begun in 722 and finished in 803. A monk named Hai Tong started it because boats were being wrecked at the confluence and he believed the Buddha would calm the water; the practical effect was that the millions of tonnes of rock cut off the cliff went into the river and did change the currents. When local officials moved to take the funds he had spent twenty years collecting, he is recorded as gouging out his own eyes in front of them to prove he was in earnest. He did not live to see it done; his disciples finished it with backing from Zhangchou Jianxiong and Wei Gao. The reason it is still here after 1,200 years is drainage: hidden gutters and channels run through the hair, the collar, the chest and holes behind the ears, carrying water out of the stone. UNESCO listed it in 1996.