Luoyang: Thirteen Dynasties Underground, One Tang-Dynasty Day Above
On an evening in September, the Yi River slid quietly between the two cliffs of Longmen. On the far bank, the Vairocana Buddha kept his eyes lowered, the faintest arc of a smile at the corner of his mouth — he has watched over the human world this way for more than thirteen hundred years. Once the tourists had gone, only water and wind remained, punctuated by an occasional birdcall, while a hundred thousand stone Buddhas kept their silence on the cliff.
From Luoyang Longmen Station it is only a fifteen-minute taxi ride. In the morning you are drinking spicy hulatang soup in Zhengzhou; by evening you are standing inside a Buddhist kingdom carved by Northern Wei stonemasons. This city keeps giving you that feeling of dislocation: beneath the ground, a dozen ruined capitals — Xia, Shang, Zhou, Han, Wei, Sui, Tang — stacked in layers; above it, daily life going on unhurriedly, as it always has. I stayed in the old town, waking each morning to steam from soup shops. This piece starts with that Buddha, then takes you to drink soup, crawl into tombs, and meet the “earliest China.”
Luoyang deserves three days. It will hold you longer if you let it.
The Gaze of Vairocana: How to Do the Longmen Grottoes
The Longmen Grottoes are not one temple but an open-air gallery carved across an entire mountainside. Work began after Emperor Xiaowen of the Northern Wei moved his capital to Luoyang, and continued under the Eastern Wei, Western Wei, Northern Qi, Sui, and Tang dynasties — more than four hundred years of chiseling that left over 2,300 niches and some 100,000 statues spread along both banks of the Yi River. Seeing every one of them would take a week; a first visit is best spent on the west cliff’s main circuit.
Fengxian Temple is the grand finale. Carved in the time of Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu Zetian, the main Vairocana Buddha stands more than seventeen meters tall — one of his ears alone is nearly two meters. A board at the site records that Wu Zetian donated twenty thousand strings of coins from her cosmetics allowance toward the work. The artisans gave the great face a full, gentle look, lowered eyes, a soft smile — later legend insists the face was modeled on Wu Zetian herself. Nobody can verify that now, but pilgrims have passed the story down for generations, along with this piece of advice: come at dusk, when the light rakes across the cliff and the Buddha’s compassion turns golden. Those are the best fifteen minutes Longmen has to offer.
Two more spots on the west cliff are worth lingering at. Ten Thousand Buddha Cave is dense with more than ten thousand tiny seated figures, each one carved with a complete face if you lean in close. And in the Prescriptions Cave, Tang-era people carved more than 140 medical formulas straight into the rock — headache, fever, sprains, all treatable by prescription. A thousand-year-old medical manual whose binding is a whole mountain.
Don’t rush off after the west cliff. Cross the low bridge to the east bank and turn around: the entire grotto complex reads like an open stone book. Halfway up the hill sits Xiangshan Temple, restored at the expense of the poet Bai Juyi, who spent his last years in Luoyang, styled himself “the Xiangshan Hermit,” and paid out of his own pocket to clear the treacherous “Eight Rapids” of the Yi River so that boats could pass more safely. Bai Juyi’s garden, Baiyuan, lies nearby below Pipa Peak — the man who wrote the best poems of his life in this city was buried where he could see the Great Buddha every day.
Beneath Yingtian Gate, the Whole City Wears the Tang Dynasty
People of Luoyang like to call their city “Shendu” — the Divine Capital. When Wu Zetian overthrew the Tang and founded her Zhou dynasty, she made Luoyang her capital and turned it into one of the greatest cities on earth. The Grand Canal of the Sui and Tang dynasties was centered here, with merchant boats sailing up from the Jiangnan region straight to the city walls. Sima Guang, the Song historian, passed by centuries later and wrote: “Ask of the rise and fall of all ages — one look at Luoyang suffices.” No other place in China stacks a dozen dynastic capitals on the same plot of earth.
In recent years Luoyang has rebuilt the great gates of its Sui-Tang palace axis. Yingtian Gate, the Hall of Brightness, the Heaven Hall — reconstructed over their own archaeological remains — line up across the city center. When the lights come on at night, the whole axis glows, and standing beneath the gate tower you can almost picture the envoys of a hundred kingdoms filing in with tribute. The ground floors of the reconstructions preserve the excavation sites: through glass floor panels you look down on Tang-dynasty column bases and rammed earth. The street you are standing on was already a highway in Wu Zetian’s day.
What truly brings Yingtian Gate alive is the city’s love affair with hanfu. Over the past few years, dressing in Tang costume has become everyday wear in Luoyang. In the plaza before the gate at dusk, young people in chest-high ruqun gowns and long-sleeved cloaks gather in droves — local students and visitors who flew in for exactly this. For fifty to a hundred-something yuan you rent an outfit with hair and makeup included, and the stylist will turn you into someone who just stepped out of a Tang painting. Even the aunties on the street don’t blink: in Luoyang, going out in hanfu is as ordinary as going out in jeans.
Luoyi Ancient City, in the southeast of the old town, is a reproduction district wrapped around the Qing-era Wenfeng Pagoda; at night its lanterns double in the canals, and it is the city’s main stage for hanfu night photography. The smoothest plan: rent your costume near Lijing Gate in the afternoon, catch the lights at Yingtian Gate at dusk, then stroll over to Luoyi Ancient City for a slow evening of photos. A full day as a Tang person, and your phone’s photo album pays for the trip before you do.
White Horse Temple: Where China’s First Buddhist Incense Was Lit
China’s first officially founded Buddhist temple stands in Luoyang, and its name is White Horse Temple. In AD 68, Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han dreamed of a golden man, sent envoys west to seek the Dharma, and when the Indian monks Kasyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna arrived in Luoyang with scriptures carried by a white horse, the court built a monastery to house them — named after that horse. In Buddhist circles it is known as the “source of the Dharma” and the “ancestral court”: the entire incense of Chinese Buddhism begins at this gate.
The gate itself is a plain brick archway in Han style, and the ancient cypresses in the courtyard are older than most nations. The stupas of the two Indian monks still stand within; Qiyun Pagoda dates from the Jin dynasty, thirteen storeys of brick in the eastern yard. Gaze up long enough and you feel the vertigo of history: a road that began in India, threaded through the Western Regions, and ended in this quiet courtyard. In the old days the “temple bell of White Horse” was one of the eight sights of Luoyang; the bell tower has risen and fallen with the centuries, but the tradition of morning bells and evening drums has never quite stopped.
White Horse Temple also holds a spectacle found nowhere else: temples in Thai, Indian, and Burmese styles have risen inside its grounds in recent decades — golden spires, stone stupas, and sharp pagoda roofs sharing a frame with the Han-dynasty gate. It is the only monastery in China to host such an international assembly of Buddhist architecture. Apt enough: Buddhism walked into Luoyang along the Silk Road in the first place.
The Day in Luoyang Begins with a Bowl of Soup
Luoyang people call breakfast “drinking soup.” Beef soup, mutton soup, donkey soup, tofu soup, meatball soup, bufan soup — a dozen or more varieties with real reputations. When old-town locals talk about their soup, their eyes light up, as if introducing an old friend of many years.
Soup has its etiquette. The old shops light their fires at four or five in the morning, and the first pot of the day, ready around six, is the richest and most fragrant; connoisseurs arrive at opening time and start drinking right by the door. Most shops close after noon, so late sleepers simply wait for tomorrow. Meat is sold by the liang — you weigh your beef first, then the broth is ladled over it. A bowl of clear stock cradles paper-thin slices of beef, topped with a scatter of scallions and half a spoon of chili oil, served with a just-baked oil-twist flatbread, which you tear into the soup until it is half soft, half crisp. One mouthful and the Luoyang morning has properly begun.
On my first visit I went to Majieshan, an old name on the banks of the Chan River, and at half past six the shop was already full. The owner dipped a long-handled ladle into his iron cauldron and flicked his wrist; the soup hit the bowl and the fragrance exploded upward. An old man at the next table, sweating over his bowl, saw me with a camera and raised his bowl: “Zhong bu zhong?” — in the Luoyang dialect, zhong means “good.” I nodded and said zhong; satisfied, he turned back and slurped down the last of his soup.
Vegetarians have tofu soup and meatball soup — a few yuan a bowl, meat versions run to twenty-odd, and one bowl holds you till afternoon. For something braver, the fermented-bean-noodle soup, jiang miantiao, in the old town’s lanes is the local favorite: mung-bean pulp soured by fermentation, noodles cooked in it, topped with chopped celery, cooked soybeans, and a spoon of chili oil. Outsiders frown at the first mouthful, start craving it by the second, and by departure day are asking whether it can be vacuum-packed for the flight home. Food that splits opinion this cleanly is a city’s real secret weapon.
The Water Banquet: A Feast That Flows Like a River
Of Luoyang’s three great claims to fame, the Longmen Grottoes and the peonies are for the eyes; only the water banquet is for the mouth. Twenty-four courses — cold, hot, and soupy — every one of them carrying broth, arriving one after another without pause, flowing like water. That is where the name comes from.
The first course is Peony Swallow’s Nest, the face of the whole banquet. Its main ingredient comes as a surprise: white radish. Shaved into silver threads, bedded with slivers of ham and bamboo shoot in a clear broth so limpid you can see your reflection, the dish is a quiet duel of knife work and timing. Its name has a well-worn story attached. One version holds that Wu Zetian tasted a dish that mimicked bird’s nest with shredded radish and praised it lavishly. Another says that in 1973, when Zhou Enlai hosted Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in Luoyang, a chef crowned the swallow’s nest with a peony carved from radish, and the premier declared it should be called “Peony Swallow’s Nest.” Truth is hard to sort out; the deliciousness requires no verification.
For the full ceremonial spread, book a table at Zhentong, the famous old restaurant, where the twenty-some courses arrive in classical order and dinner runs two or three hours. For a lighter taste, the small water-banquet houses in the old town’s lanes sell single dishes: one bowl of swallow’s nest, one plate of crisp fried meatballs, one bowl of sliced meat in soup — seventy or eighty yuan for two, and you leave rolling.
Night snacks belong to the market at Cross Street, inside Lijing Gate. Once dark falls, the neighborhood smokes with energy — stalls for tripe hotpot, skewers, and fried bean jelly crowd shoulder to shoulder, locals and tourists on the same pavement. When you shop a night market like this, ignore the influencer-endorsed stands: find whichever queue is full of local faces, join it, and you cannot go wrong.
What the Locals Keep to Themselves: Crawling into Tombs, Gazing at National Treasures
Beneath Luoyang there is more life than above it. The old saying goes, “Be born in Suzhou or Hangzhou, be buried on Mount Mang.” The graves crowding Mount Mang, north of the city, are so numerous that the Tang poet Wang Jian wrote: “On Mount Mang there is little idle earth — it is all old graves of Luoyang folk.” A few centuries later, even families with gold to spend could not buy a burial plot up there.
Today Luoyang has turned this underground inheritance into a museum like no other. The Luoyang Ancient Tombs Museum, on Mount Mang, has dismantled and reassembled more than twenty real tomb chambers spanning the Han through Song dynasties. Visitors stoop through the tomb passages and stand beneath murals painted more than a thousand years ago — Han-dynasty Fuxi and Nüwa, processions of chariots, brushwork so archaic it raises goosebumps. At the deepest point lies the Jingling mausoleum of Emperor Xuanwu of the Northern Wei: a long corridor, a stone door, and beyond it an empty underground hall lit by a dim lamp. Alone down there, the feeling of crossing the boundary of life and death hits harder than any thriller.
For national treasures in a quieter setting, go to the Luoyang Museum. The white jade cup of the Cao Wei kingdom was cut from a single piece of Hetian jade, plain and unadorned — minimalism at its absolute ceiling even today. Tang sancai glazed ware is common enough, but a black-glazed sancai horse is a rarity: jet-black and glossy, head raised in a neigh frozen for thirteen centuries. And there is an Eastern Han stone bixie, a winged beast weighing several tons, mouth open as if to drive every evil from the city gates. Admission is free; book a day ahead on the museum’s public account.
Beneath the downtown Zhouwangcheng Square lies an even older chariot pit. In 2002, construction workers digging foundations uncovered an Eastern Zhou royal burial — including one pit where six horses pull a single chariot, exactly confirming the ancient ritual that “the Son of Heaven rides six.” The six skeletons are astonishingly well preserved, still caught in the instant before the gallop after two thousand years. The metro stop is named Zhouwangcheng Square; the museum sits right under it, and the ticket price is almost embarrassing.
Farther East: Erlitou and the “Earliest China”
Half an hour past White Horse Temple, beside the wheat fields of Yanshi District, stands a great building the color of rammed earth — the Erlitou Site Museum. Erlitou dates back some 3,800 years, and scholars widely identify it as the late capital of the Xia dynasty: the “earliest China” that archaeologists chased their whole careers.
In 1959, the archaeologist Xu Xusheng followed clues in the ancient texts to these wheat fields, and the layers beneath Luoyang grew one level deeper. Digs here have uncovered China’s earliest palace-city compound and its earliest grid of city avenues; the bronze jue goblet with nipple studs is among the oldest bronze ritual vessels in China, honored as the “first jue of Huaxia.” There is also a dragon assembled from more than two thousand pieces of turquoise — after more than three thousand years underground, it came out with every piece still in place.
The museum itself is restrained: rammed-earth walls, light falling from the ceiling, walking through the galleries feels like stepping into the dawn of the Xia. For the casual traveler, this is the bonus track of a Luoyang trip; for anyone who has studied Chinese history, it is a pilgrimage. Half a day, and worth every minute.
How to Spend Three Days
Give the first day to the Longmen Grottoes, unhurried: the west cliff, across the bridge to the east, Xiangshan Temple and Baiyuan included, then back to town in time for the lights at Yingtian Gate. Day two starts early — a first-pot beef soup in the old town, then east to White Horse Temple, on to Erlitou after lunch, and back for the water banquet and the Cross Street night market. Day three belongs to the underground city: the Ancient Tombs Museum on Mount Mang in the morning, the Chariot Pit and the Luoyang Museum in the afternoon, and in the evening a set of hanfu at Luoyi Ancient City — spend your last night photographing yourself into the Tang dynasty.
If your schedule has room, spend half a day in the Jianxi District. Here stand whole neighborhoods of Soviet-style red-brick housing from the 1950s and the old workshops of the First Tractor Works — in 1958, China’s first crawler tractor rolled off the line in Luoyang under the name “Dongfanghong,” and Chinese farming left the ox behind. Today the workshops sit quietly, ivy climbing the red-brick walls, almost no tourists in sight. It is the least scenic-looking sight in the whole city — and one of its best.
Practical Notes and a Few Bottom Lines
Spring and autumn are the best seasons. In April the peonies bloom in a riot, the annual Peony Festival mobilizes the whole city, hotel prices double, and rooms vanish; in September and October Luoyang returns the festival crowds to the flowers — the sky is high, the clouds thin, the grottoes quiet, the soup shops queue-free. Without the peonies, Luoyang somehow becomes more itself. Winters are dry and cold, but if you catch a snowfall, Yingtian Gate looks like it did in the high Tang.
Take the high-speed rail to Luoyang Longmen Station: a ten-minute taxi ride puts you at the grottoes, and luggage can be stored there. Metro Line 1 runs east-west through the city, with stops at Yingtian Gate, Lijing Gate, and Qingniangong in the old town — a few yuan between the old town and the Sui-Tang heritage park. Taxis between sights are cheap; use ride-hailing apps with clear meters and give the eager pedicab touts a wave past.
A few small things to remember. When renting hanfu, check the clothes are clean and confirm what the hair-and-makeup package includes before you put anything on. Longmen has a lot of steps — wear grippy shoes. The museums are free but require ID and advance booking. The full water banquet is enormous; half a set is plenty for two, and the soup bowls are big enough to wash your face in — share them. One more tip: when a Luoyang person agrees with you, they say one word: “Zhong.”
On the morning I left, I went for one last bowl of soup. The owner recognized me and called through the steam: “Zhong bu zhong?” I echoed his accent with that single word. He grinned and turned back to stir his iron cauldron.
The rise and fall of thirteen dynasties lies buried beneath Luoyang; the people above ground simply go on living their days hot and full. Zhong — yes, it is good.