One weekend in late July, I hired a car and driver to take me from Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, to Leshan, a town two hours to the south.
There, on the steep bank of a river, stands one of the world’s most extraordinary religious statues: a 71-meter-high likeness of the seated Buddha, his enormous body and gently smiling countenance carved in stone out of the face of a mountain more than 12 centuries ago.