Yonghegong's first article names the Wanfu Pavilion's Maitreya statue in a single line; the object itself is a feat of transport and carving that took the better part of a decade to complete. The seventh Dalai Lama sent the white sandalwood trunk it is carved from as a gift to the Qianlong Emperor, cut from a single tree reportedly sourced in Nepal, and moving it from there to Beijing occupied specialized transport crews for roughly three years before carving could even begin, an operation extraordinary enough that court records treated the trunk's arrival as an event in its own right.
The finished statue rises some eighteen meters above the pavilion floor, with several meters more sunk below it for structural support, carved from that single piece of wood rather than assembled from sections, a scale of monolithic wood carving craftsmen rarely attempted. Guinness World Records has recognized it as the largest such carving from a single tree, one of three objects at Yonghegong to receive that distinction. The carving follows Tibetan Buddhist iconographic convention closely, a calm, symmetrical face, elongated earlobes, hands set in postures proper to Maitreya as the Buddha of the future, executed at a scale that required scaffolding built up through three stories of the pavilion simply to carve the upper body and head.
The statue's completion gave the newly converted monastery its defining image, a single object whose creation drew together a Tibetan gift, Nepalese timber, Qing engineering and Chinese craftsmanship in one undertaking, and it remains what most visitors come to Yonghegong specifically to see, more than two centuries after the carvers finished.