Two sites of precious grottoes on the ancient "Silk Road", the
Longmen Grottoes and Kumutura Thousand Buddha Caves, have been put
under a joint protection project by Chinese and Japanese
governments and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Representative of the UNESCO Beijing Office, Yasuyuki Aoshima,
and Vice-director of China's State Administration of Cultural
Heritage (SACH), Zhang Bai, signed an agreement on the second phase
of the protection project here on Friday.
The project will not only offer funds for the protection of the
two sites, but also help introduce advanced technologies and
methods of cultural heritage protection in the world to China, and
help train a batch of personnel of heritage protection, said an
official with SACH.
He said the leaders of China and Japan signed an agreement in
1998 on the protection of the cultural heritage sites along the
"Silk Road".
According to the agreement, Japanese government invested five
million US dollars to the Japanese Trust-in Funds under UNESCO for
the protection of the heritage sites on "Silk Road".
All of the funds will be used to protect the Kumutura Thousand
Buddha Caves in northwest China's Xinjiang and Longmen Grottoes in
central China's Henan, said Aoshima.
The first phase of the project was launched in 2001. Experts
have conducted investigation and survey to the two grottoes and
made a protection plan and found the main causes of the damage to
the grottoes.
In the second phase, experts will focus on repairing and
consolidating the damaged caves and murals.
Kumutura Thousand Buddha Caves, located 20 kilometers northwest
of Kuqa County of Xinjiang , has a total of 112 caves and mural
paintings of 5,200 square meters.
Located near the ancient imperial capital of Luoyang, Longmen
Grottoes are composed of more than 2,300 carved caves and niches
hollowed out of steep limestone cliffs flanking the Yihe River. The
grottoes were firstly built in 493 A.D. and the construction lasted
more than 400 years. There are also more than 70 Buddhist pagodas,
110,000 sculptured figures, and 2,800 tablets in the caves.
Natural disasters and human activities have brought many damages
to the two sites of grottoes. Advanced protection technology and
international cooperation may help better preserve the precious
heritage sites, said experts.
(Xinhua News Agency September 6, 2005)