People from a village in southwest China damaged a set of 1,400-year-old Buddha statues by painting them with bright colours. They did it to “redeem a wish to the god,” the officials said.
According to Chinese experts, the Shifeihe Buddha statues date back to the late Northern Wei era (386-534 AD) during the Northern and Southern dynasties. These statues are crucial artefacts with academic value in Buddhist culture and art research. Moreover, they are the only statues in Sichuan carved on the surface of natural stone.
The Najiang County Research Center for the Protection of Cultural Property released a statement saying a villager asked his mother to hire a painter to paint the statues in bright colours to thank the gods for fulfilling their dreams.
After the incident, the local authorities increased security measures to avoid more damage to the artefacts.
Discovered in 2021, the statues were not registered in the heritage protection list, an employee from the local cultural relic protection bureau told China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV. He said the villagers who damaged the statues were in their 70s and 80s and “could hardly be punished but only educated.”
The employees also mentioned that the remote location of the statues made it harder for the authorities to protect them despite installing surveillance cameras. However, the villagers have painted the statues with acrylics, and it should be possible to restore them, the employee said, citing experts who examined the scene.
It is not the first time such an incident has happened in China. In August 2018, some people smeared oil paint on Buddha statues at Fengmen Temple in Sichuan. Later, they were repaired with cement, Global Times reported. The Sichuan Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics discovered 13 Buddha statues with pigment stains, most of which were made in the 1980s and 1990s.
According to Chen Peijun from the National Cultural Heritage Administration, China has over 760,000 immovable cultural relics as of October, including the Great Wall. However, only around 5,000 of these are major historical and cultural sites that are protected at the national level. This was shared by Peijun during a news conference.
In another incident, a pair of construction workers operating an excavator severely damaged a section of the Great Wall in northern China this year while attempting to take a shortcut.
Such incidents have sparked a debate on Chinese social media about how to protect cultural relics in remote villages.
(With inputs from agencies)
