The story goes that a monk decided to carve the Buddha to protect boatmen who were often sucked under by the dangerous current where two large rivers joined below. It was started in 713 AD and took 90 years to complete.
It actually worked too, as the surplus stone chiseled from the cliff filled in the hollow that was causing a vortex, so far few fishermen perished after the Buddha was created.
A narrow path takes you down the left side of the face to the Buddha’s feet (this can take 1.5 hours if caught in the crush) then you go through a cave and climb back up the right hand side to the head again. Fortunately we were already on the other side before the Chinese tourists, that seem to appear at every attraction around 10:00am, arrived in hundreds of coaches.
