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China Gives Facelift to World Highest Buddha Statue
China began to give a facelift to the 1,280-year-old world highest Buddha statue in Leshan, a city in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
The statue, which has been included on World Cultural Heritage list, has suffered weathering from the wind, water, acid rain and damages from visitors for years. Some coiled buns on the head of the statue fell down and the face was darkened.
Experts will clean up the body of the statue, piece up the cracks, and install drainage devices and protection facilities against wind and water.
The repair project is divided into two stages, in April and at the end of this year respectively, costing a total of 250 million yuan (30 million U.S. dollars), including two million U.S. dollars of World Bank loans.
The Buddha statue, sitting on a cliff, 71 meters from top to bottom and 28 meters from left to right, is 18 meters higher than the standing Buddha statue at Bamian Valley, Afghanistan, once thought to be the highest of its kind in the world.
The head of the Leshan Buddha, 14.7 meters up and down and 10 meters sideways, is covered with 1,021 buns of curly hair, each of which is large enough to support a big round table. Seven meters long, each ear can hold two people in its hole. Over a 100 people can sit on the 8.5-meter-high flat and smooth instep.
Carving of the Buddha started in AD 713 and was completed in 803, during the prosperous period of the Tang Dynasty in Chinese history.
The statue has been repaired many times in history. However, an effective way to prevent the statue from erosion has not been found, experts said.
Before the current repair project, experts from seven cultural relics protection research institutes across China, and those from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) had made a diagnosis on the cause of the statue's "illnesses."
They examined the environment of the Buddha statue. In order to find the most suitable material to mend the cracks on the statue, experts put several hundred slates made of different materials beside the statue, and select one kind which had the least erosion.
The selected material, in the same color of the statue, is a mixture of lime, carbon residue and hemp, according to experts.
When it was built, the body of the Buddha had a hidden water drainage system to prevent erosion. And experts will add more drainage devices on its body to better protect the statue.
The statue is regarded to represent ancient China's high sculpture level. An ideal view of the Buddha is from a boat on the river which provides the required distance to take a picture of the entire statue.
According to the local cultural relics protection department, a research center of Leshan Buddha Statue will be established by the end of this year to develop more effective technologies to protect the world heritage.
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