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| Monday, 20 January 2003 |
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India plans to build world's tallest Buddha statue NEW DELHI, Sunday (AFP) India, always eager to outdo China, plans to build the world's tallest statue of Buddha at 152.4 meters (500 feet), a newspaper reported Sunday. The bronze statue, three times as high as the Statue of Liberty in New York, will be the showcase of a 300 million-dollar park in Kushinagar, a town in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh where Buddha died two and a half millennia ago, The Times of India said. The tallest Buddha statue now is the 71-meter (233-foot) Leshan Buddha in China's southwestern Sichuan province, completed in the eighth century AD in the prosperous Tang era. While it is undecided when the statue will come up in Kushinagar, the newspaper said a research team had been put together to make the statue out of a special aluminum and nickel alloy that would last at least 1,000 years. Kushinagar had largely fallen off the Buddhist world's map until the 1860s, when a British team discovered remains of a temple and identified the town as the spot of the Buddha's demise. In recent years, India has increasingly been trying to attract tourists to Buddhist historical sites, with direct flights launched to Buddhism's holy places from Sri Lanka and Thailand. India often competes with China, the only other country with more than a billion people, looking on enviously at the other Asian giant's economic success. Earlier this month Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee called on scientists to put an Indian on the moon after China said it would launch its first manned space mission in October. |
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