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Indian Daily
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Angkor revamp: India's loss, China's gain
Saibal Dasgupta
[ 28 Jan, 2007 0026hrs ISTTIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
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BEIJING: China and Japan are in a race to grab a larger portion of the
restoration work at Angkor Wat, the 12th century Hindu temple in Cambodia.
These well-intended moves also highlight India's inability to make the
most of an opportunity to build on age-old cultural ties with Cambodia
and be seen as an influential friend in the region, sources said.
The Cambodian government and the Unesco are considering an offer from
Beijing to fully restore the 900-year-old ChouSay temple, one of the
shrines in the sprawling temple complex built by the Chola dynasty.
cont'd....
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Angkor_revamp_Indias_loss_Chinas_gain/articleshow/1489093.cms
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People's Daily
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China helps Angkor heal wounds of time
We know Angkor as the ruins of a city with grand temples of exemplary
architecture in Cambodia. But for conservationist Jiang Huaiying, it is
a big jigsaw puzzle.
A holy place first for Hindus and then Buddhists, Angkor is one of the
Seven Forgotten Wonders of the Medieval Mind. But when the Chinese
conservation team, led by Jiang, was invited by the Cambodian government
and UNESCO in 1997 to repair the 900-year-old ChouSay Temple, the place
had nothing to show its glorious past, except about 5,000 pieces of
stone lying around.
But in 10 years, the team has given back ChouSay some of its glory, even
though it didn't have any drawing or description to fall back upon.
The Chinese government has approved the $1.86-million conservation work,
which now awaits the ratification of the Cambodian government and
UNESCO, a top official at the State Administration of Cultural Heritage
said yesterday.
After ChouSay, the team will move to the much larger and historically
more significant Ta Keo Temple, deputy minister of the administration
Dong Baohua said. The project will begin later this year and end in 2014.
The Ta Keo Temple was built between the 10th and 11th centuries to
"replicate" Khursag Kurkura, or "mountain of all lands", in the Hindu
scriptures. The five pagodas on a three-layer terrace represented that
mountain.
Suryavarman II built most of the structures in Angkor, including the
grand Angkor Wat Temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, between 1113
and 1150. The huge pyramid temple is regarded as the supreme masterpiece
of Khmer architecture.
The Ta Keo Temple, however, is older, built by Jayavarman V about 150
years before Angkor Wat. It's a sandstone structure, with a central
tower surrounded by four turrets. The fact that the temple was built
with giant pieces of stone, many of them weighing over 5 tons, makes the
project all the more challenging.
"It's hard to imagine how the medieval Cambodians carried the stones
into the jungle and laid them one upon another," Jiang said.
The Ta Keo project budget has not been finalized but it could be more
than 40 million yuan ($5.13 million), a huge amount for a conservation
project in China, said Shen Yang, director at the conservation center
for monuments and sites, China National Institute of Cultural Property.
A majority of the team members, including Jiang, are from the institute.
Apart from the Angkor temples, Chinese conservationists are working on
an ancient palace in Ulan Bator in Mongolia.
source:
http://english.people.com.cn/200701/26/eng20070126_344995.html