In January of this year, I visited Longmen on a grey and chilly day. Amy McNair’s Donors of Longmen was deliberately my companion. As I walked through the site, up and down the ramps of stairs that give access to the cave temples, the fourteenth-century Muslim poet Sadula’s description of Longmen, which McNair quotes on page 160, resonated with sad truth in my mind: Along both river banks, men in the past bored into the rock to make large caves and small shrines no fewer than one thousand in number. They sculpted out of the rock sacred images of various Buddhas, bodhisattvas, mahasattvas, arhats, indestructibles, heavenly kings, and Dharma-protecting gods. There are full length statues and busts projecting from the cliff. . . . Those seated cross-legged, standing, and in attendance are also no fewer than ten thousand in number. But all of these stone statues were damaged long ago. They have been defaced by people. Some have heads broken off; some have lost their bodies; their noses, ears, hands, and feet are missing, either partially or completely. It is not my intent to diminish the tremendous accomplishments of Chinese archaeologists and administrators who since 1949 and especially in the...