Probe reveals believers painted on ancient Buddha sculptures

Although Yunguang village, where the carvings are located, is only 20 kilometers from the Anyue county seat, it takes more than two hours to travel from the county seat to the village by car because the county is mountainous, according to Yang Guoyu, the 55-year-old guardian of the stone carvings in the temple.

Yang, the villager who has worked as the temple's guardian for seven years, says the tourists did not visit the temple as it was inaccessible. And only a dozen Buddhist believers visited it during the Spring Festival.

Meanwhile, on Aug 7, the Guang'an Economic Development Zone in Guang'an, Sichuan, said the second stone carving of Buddha referred to by the netizen was located in the zone.

The 3.86-meter-high carving done in the Southern Song Dynasty was painted in March 1994 by local believers who had raised funds themselves, it said.

Both the carvings in Anyue and Guang'an were under county-level protection as Anyue and Guang'an, then a county, had no bureau of cultural heritage at the time when the carvings were painted. And this had led to the lack of protection for the carvings, the Sichuan cultural bureau said.

Separately, the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, a central body, said on Thursday that the Sichuan cultural bureau had sent officials to 13 sites with stone Buddha carvings in Anyue and Guang'an in the wake of the online outcry in early August. And the investigation showed that the carvings had been painted on in the 1980s and 1990s by local believers.

"Believers think they have done something great by painting on the ancient carvings of the Buddha. But it is sabotage," says Zhu Zhangyi, an archaeologist in Chengdu, Sichuan.