Tianlong Shan

Tianlong Shan, Wade-Giles romanization T’ien lung Shan, site in central Shanxi province in China containing a series of Buddhist cave temples dating from the mid-6th century. The sculptures in these temples represent the Tang dynasty style of the late 7th and 8th centuries. Many intact and fragmentary examples of these famous Tang sculptures are now in collections outside China. The stone images, which were often painted, represented the extreme development of sensuous and voluptuous sculptural form that is generally considered characteristic of the Tang period. The style represented a Chinese reworking of the standard Buddha form developed in the Gupta period (320–647) in India.