Filed under: Arts and Culture, History, Learning, Asia, Afghanistan, China, NewsWe all remember the Bamiyan statues, those giant stone Buddhas the Taliban blew up in 2001. One of the 1,500 year-old statues is pictured here. Pictures are all we have left of them.
Now another Buddhist site in Afghanistan is under threat of destruction. This time the danger isn't the Taliban, but a Chinese mining company. The site of Mes Aynak in eastern Afghanistan was home to a thriving Buddhist monastery in the seventh century. It's also right next to an abandoned Soviet mine that may have the world's second-largest reserve of copper. A Chinese mining company has invested $3.5 billion to exploit the mine and Afghan officials are eager for work to get underway.
A team of Afghani archaeologists is busy excavating the site and has found an entire monastery complex with more than 150 statues. They were originally given three years, a woefully inadequate length of time for a team of barely forty people, and now they're being pressured to finish by the end of this year. The archaeologists fear that once the miners move in, the monastery will get wrecked.
The mine will bring much-needed jobs and wealth to Afghanistan, which is also courting adventure tours, so the in the rush to yank copper out of their land they might want to think about preserving some of their past.
[Photo courtesy Marco Bonavoglia via Wikimedia Commons]Afghan archaeologists race to study Buddhist site before destruction originally appeared on Gadling on Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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