Asian Geographic 2017

Beyond improved legislation, activist groups have worked

to come up with creative means of salvaging heritage sites.

Several projects seeking to protect, preserve and archive

threatened heritage sites and lost artefacts are working to

ensure that history is not lost – or at best, can be recreated.

One such effort involved a projection of the lost Buddhas

of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. Built in the 6th century, these

ancient sandstone carvings were the world’s tallest Buddha

statues until they were destroyed by a bomb placed by the

Taliban in 2001. Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar

justified the deliberate destruction of the statues on religious

grounds, saying that “These idols have been gods of the

infidels”. Recreating the Buddhas involved using three-

dimensional laser projection technology to recreate the

statues as a hologram, filling the empty cavities in the cliffs

with the projections. According to a report in The Atlantic,

the holograms were the work of a Chinese couple who

Several projects seeking to protect,

preserve and archive threatened heritage

sites and lost artefacts are working to

ensure that history is not lost

to P right Iraqis stand
near the destroyed
statue of Abu Jaafar
al-Mansour, which
was blown up in an
overnight explosion in
Baghdad in 2005

to P Workers from TorArt

watch as the central

part of the marble

replica of Palmyra’s

Arch of Triumph is put

into place near the

caves of Carrara, Italy

above The Arch of

Triumph of Palmyra in

the east of Syria before

its destruction

IMAGE © SHUTTERSTOCK

IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES