Longmen style coloring book to meet tourists

Updated: 2015-09-30

Longmen Grottoes, the treasure house of ancient Buddhist cave art, has debuted the Longmen Grottoes Coloring Book on its official WeChat account on Sept 29.

The Longmen style coloring book is composed of eight pages, with sketches of images from the Longmen Grottoes statues and murals such as a Tang Dynasty Buddha and a flower vase from the Northern Wei Dynasty. There are text introductions about each drawing and readers can color them based on individual taste.

"It's not a simple 'imitation of the brand name' (editor's note: the brand name here refers to the Secret Garden, an Amazon best-selling coloring book )," said Yu Ying, head of the Longmen Grottoes scenic area management committee, speaking about the originality of the book. According to Yu, most of the statues in Longmen had their own colors in history, which have faded away after more than 1,000 years.

"So we want to restore the 'colorful' history of the grottoes, and in the meantime, to arouse people's awareness of heritage preservation through this more interesting means – that is, compared with simple preaching," she said.

The book will be sold in the scenic area during the National Day holidays.

The cover of the Longmen Grottoes Coloring Book [Photo/Longmen Grottoes on WeChat]

The loose-leaf Longmen Grottoes Coloring Book [Photo/Longmen Grottoes on WeChat]

A coloring example of Longmen Grottoes Coloring Book [Photo/Longmen Grottoes on WeChat]