BEIJING: Authorities in Xian, the Chinese city home to the Terracotta Warriors, have ordered most of the buildings in a 1,300-year-old Buddhist temple demolished, staff said yesterday.
The Xingjiao Temple holds relics of Xuan Zang, a Chinese monk who travelled to India to retrieve Buddhist scriptures in the 7th century.
His trip was the basis of a popular 1988 Chinese TV drama Journey to the West and inspired an earlier Japanese show, Monkey, which became cult viewing in Britain and Australia.
The temple has been asked to remove two-thirds of its buildings by the end of May, including the monks’ dormitory, canteen and some “rooms to hold Buddhist services. The clearance will hurt some ancient sites”, a temple employee said.
Some structures to go are recent but “the place will be almost flattened if all those are pulled down... How can we present the history of the temple then? (Those left) would look very isolated.”
The move is part of preparations for an application for Unesco World Heritage status for sites in Shaanxi province along the Silk Road, an ancient trade route from the Middle East to China.
AFP
