China Invests to Protect Oldest Cliff-carved Buddha

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Taiyuan, China -- A multi-million-yuan project that helps to shore up the country's oldest cliff-carved Buddha statue is to kick off before the end of June in north China's Shanxi Province.

<< Visitors look at the Mengshan Buddha statue in Taiyuan, North China's Shanxi province in this March 26, 2011 file photo. [Photo:Xinhua]

With a 74 million yuan (11.7 million U.S. dollars) investment approved by the Ministry of Land Resources, the work will focus on consolidating mines around the Mengshan Buddha, which was once in danger of collapsing, according to Taiyuan City's land resources bureau.

Qiao Qinghai, a geological environment official with the city's land resources bureau, said the project will increase greenery and eliminate the hidden geological hazards in the Mengshan scenic area, which will also improve living conditions for local residents and help the development of tourism.

The 1,461-year-old Buddha statue was carved on a cliff face on Mengshan Mountain in the year 551, during China's Northern and Southern Dynasties. It is believed to be 162 years older than the world's largest sitting stone sculpture of the Buddha in Leshan, Sichuan Province.

The Mengshan Buddha, 63 meters tall, was discovered in the 1980s with parts of it lost or buried in silt and rubbles. Continuous mining in the area led to geological disasters including landslides, ground collapses and fissures, leaving the giant statue in danger of collapse. It was opened to tourists in 2008 after repair.

A total of 211 million yuan has been invested to improve the area's geology since 2008.

The Mengshan Buddha statue is more than 20 km southwest to Taiyuan, the provincial capital.

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China invests heavily in protecting ancient town from desertification

The plan for preserving the oasis, in northwest Gansu Province, has been approved by the State Council and will be a major boost for Dunhuang, also an ancient Silk Road town, to fight an uphill battle against desertification, said officials with provincial water resources bureau.

Authorities will build channels to bring water in from outside, promote water-saving technologies and methods, ration the use of water, and plant more trees and wetland plants, according to the plan.

Dunhuang, with a population of 130,000, has been protected from the encroaching dunes of the Kumtag desert by a belt of forests, wetland and lakes sustained by two major rivers and abundant underground water. But in recent years, excessive draining of water in the region has dropped the levels of the lakes, shrunk the wetlands and dried up the rivers.

Government statistics show that over the past six decades the forests of Dunhuang have shrunk by 40 percent, meadows by 62 percent, and the wetlands by 68 percent.

"A large part of salt lakes and fresh water lakes in the oasis had mostly gone," said Gao Hua, director of the Forestry Bureau of Dunhuang.

Gao previously told Xinhua that the Kumtag desert was pushing back the oasis' forest belt three or four meters each year.

Experts say desertification also threatens the preservation of 1,000-year-old Buddhist frescoes in the Mogao Grotteos, which were listed in 1987 by the United Nations' Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization as China's first world heritage site.

Dunhuang is just one example of the effect water shortages have on the vulnerable ecology in the country's northwest, where about 1.7 million square km of territory in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia, or 17.7 percent of China's land space, are covered by desert.

During a visit to Gansu in 2009, Premier Wen Jiabao, who started his career as a geological engineer in the province, called for efforts to "save" Dunhuang from disappearing into the desert.

"We should never allow Dunhuang to become a second Loulan," Wen said, referring to an ancient Kingdom located in today's northwestern Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Loulan is believed to have been swallowed by the desert about 1,400 years ago.

"It is a good thing that the state is about to give us such major support," said Ren Shenglu, head of the village of Heshui in Dunhuang. "We have been calling for the support for years."

Local officials said they have taken measures to prepare for the implementation of the plan, including promoting water-saving irrigation, advising farmers to grow agricultural products that need less water, and restricting drilling wells, farming and migration.

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