China has armed the Leshan Mountain Giant Buddha in its southwest Sichuan Province with an "electronic bodyguard" to protect the world's tallest Buddha statue from fire and flood.

The electronic management system, or "electronic bodyguard," is a 24-hour monitoring and protection network consisting of computers, monitors and miniature cameras around the 71-meter-tall statue and its surrounding scenic areas, said Lu Lin, director of Leshan Mountain Giant Buddha Resort.

"It is the first Chinese scenic resort equipped with an electronic bodyguard combined with high technologies and traditional patrolling," Lu said.

The system will raise an alarm as soon as it monitors signs of possible fire or flood then supervisors can mobilize patrolmen to respond accordingly, he said.

"The system won't damage the statue and the landscape since the transmission lines linking the system have been hidden while miniature cameras are placed around the statue, not on its body," Lu said.

With an investment of some 2 million yuan (US$240,000), the "electronic bodyguard" was just part of a massive maintenance and protection project underway for the 1,200 year-old Buddha statue.

The Buddha statue, which took 90 years to build some 1,200 years ago, was said to stabilize the river waters and prevent flooding by monitoring three nearby rivers of the Minjiang, Qingyijiang and Dadu.

The Buddha statue, a sitting Maitreya, is measured at 71 meters tall and 28 meters wide, 18 meters higher than the destroyed Buddha statue at Bamyan Valley, Afghanistan, once thought to be the tallest in the world.

The statue was put on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's World Cultural Heritage list in 1996.

(Xinhua News Agency October 29, 2003)