Local Grottoes in Tang China shifts attention from China’s imperial and Silk Road cave temples to local settings where Buddhist monuments were created, used, and remembered. Examining 33 sites and over 2,000 niches across Northern Sichuan, a transitional zone between Northern China and the Sichuan Basin, it asks how an artistic region formed and why its subregional centers developed distinct formats.

It argues that early seventh-century cave-temple construction brought northern models of rock-cut architecture and religious organization into dialogue with sculptural traditions rooted in Chengdu, creating an early Tang regional style in Northern Sichuan. By the turn of the eighth century, Guangyuan and Bazhong became subregional centers. Guangyuan engaged closely with metropolitan art and imperial Buddhist politics under Empress Wu Zetian, while Bazhong adapted metropolitan forms within regional practices, developing a distinctive canopy-shaped niche style.

Combining visual, archaeological, inscriptional, and textual evidence, the book moves beyond a center–periphery model to show how locality shaped the production and transmission of Buddhist art. Roads facilitated exchange but did not determine its outcomes; local communities selected, transformed, and recirculated Buddhist forms. The book will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary readership interested in art, religion, material culture, local knowledge, and cultural exchange across premodern Asia.

Dr. Yang Xiao is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. She received her PhD in East Asian Art History from Heidelberg University. Her research focuses on Buddhist art and material culture in medieval China, particularly cave temples in southwestern and northwestern China. Leveraging art-historical analysis alongside archaeological and textual research, she examines how regional traditions of Buddhist images, architectural forms, and religious practices developed through wider networks of artistic and cultural exchange across medieval China and beyond.