Buddhas of Bamiyan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Buddhas of Bamiyan stood for more than fourteen centuries in a valley in Afghanistan, 130 kilometers northwest of Kabul, carved into sandstone cliffs at an elevation of 2,500 meters. The larger figure, Salsal, meaning "the light shines through the universe," rose 55 meters tall. Beside it stood Shah Mama, the "Queen Mother," at 38 meters. On the 2nd of March 2001, workers began systematically destroying both. What follows is the story of how these sculptures came to exist, what they meant to the ancient world, and why a regime chose to erase them in a matter of weeks.

• 2. Carved Into the Cliff

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  Carbon dating of the internal structural components places the construction of the smaller Eastern Buddha between 544 and 595 CE, and the larger Western Buddha between 591 and 644 CE. Both dates fall within the period when the Hephthalites ruled the region as principalities in Tokharistan and northern Afghanistan. The Hephthalites were not a uniformly Buddhist people. The Chinese pilgrim Song Yun, visiting the Hephthalite chief, reported they had no belief in the Buddhist law and served a large number of divinities. Yet they appear to have been the patrons behind these monuments.

  The sculptures were technically reliefs, not freestanding statues: at the back, each figure merged into the cliff wall itself. Stonemasons hewed the main bodies directly from the sandstone, then applied details in a mixture of mud and straw, coated with stucco. The larger figure was painted carmine red. The smaller one was painted in multiple colours. The lower arms were built from the same mud-straw mixture, supported by wooden armatures. Current research indicates that the upper parts of their faces were huge wooden masks. The niches in which the figures stood measured 58 and 38 meters respectively from bottom to top.

  Before their destruction in 2001, Salsal and Shah Mama were the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. The 8th-century Leshan Giant Buddha, in China, is taller but is seated.

• 3. Silk Road Crossroads

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  Bamiyan had been a Buddhist religious site since the 2nd century CE under the Kushans, the dynasty that first established the valley as a gathering point on the Silk Road linking Chinese markets to those of the Western world. Monks lived as hermits in small caves carved into the cliff faces, and most of them decorated their walls with religious statuary and brightly colored frescoes rooted in the culture of Gandhara.

  The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang visited on the 30th of April 630 CE, and described Bamiyan in his chronicle Da Tang Xiyu Ji as "with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks." He noted both Buddha figures were "decorated with gold and fine jewels." He also mentioned a third, even larger, reclining statue, a figure whose existence has not been confirmed by modern excavation.

  The site's artistic tradition drew on multiple civilizations at once. The cave murals are considered a synthesis of Buddhist art and Gupta art from India, with additional influences from the Sasanian and Byzantine empires and the country of Tokharistan. Murals in the adjoining caves have been carbon dated from 438 to 980 CE, suggesting Buddhist artistic activity continued right down to the final Islamic occupation.

  In 1221, Genghis Khan's forces invaded the valley during the Siege of Bamiyan and wiped out most of its population. The Buddhas were left untouched. In the 17th century, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb briefly ordered artillery used against the carvings, causing some damage. The figures survived.

• 4. Oil Paint and the Sun God

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  The ceiling of the niche housing the smaller Eastern Buddha carries one of the most striking images in the entire site: a solar deity riding a two-wheeled golden chariot pulled by four horses. The god wears a caftan in the style of Tokhara and holds a lance. His iconography derives from the Iranian god Mithra as revered in Sogdia. Two winged attendants flank the chariot, wearing Corinthian helmets with feathers and carrying shields. Wind gods fly at the top of the composition, each holding a scarf in both hands.

  The central image is framed by lateral rows of kings and dignitaries mingled with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. One figure standing behind a monk in profile is identified as the likely King of Bamiyan. He wears a crenulated crown with a single crescent and korymbos, and a Sasanian headband.

  Scientists from institutions including the Tokyo Research Institute for Cultural Properties, the Centre for Research and Restoration of Museums of France, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble analyzed paint samples typically less than 1 millimeter across. They found pigments including vermilion, which is red mercury sulfide, and lead white, which is lead carbonate. These were mixed with natural resins, gums, and drying oils probably derived from walnuts or poppies. Spectroscopy and chromatography confirmed the oils were applied intentionally, not introduced by the touching of hands during Buddhist ritual.

  Researchers identified the drying oils in murals showing Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting amid palm leaves and mythical creatures as dating to the middle of the 7th century. The Bamiyan murals are now considered the oldest known surviving examples of oil painting, possibly predating oil painting in Europe by as much as six centuries. The destruction of the Buddhas in 2001 took these murals with them.

• 5. The Order to Destroy

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  On the 26th of February 2001, Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar issued an order to destroy all statues in Afghanistan so that "no one can worship or respect them in the future." On the 1st of March 2001, the Taliban announced that all statues depicting humans would be destroyed. Work began the following day.

  Omar's stated reasoning shifted with each telling. On the 6th of March 2001, The Times quoted him saying that Muslims "should be proud of smashing idols." During a the 13th of March interview with Japan's Mainichi Shimbun, Afghan Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakel insisted the destruction was purely religious, not a retaliation for international economic sanctions. Then Taliban ambassador-at-large Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi told a different story on the 18th of March: he said the decision came after a Swedish monuments expert proposed to restore the statues' heads, and foreign donors refused to redirect those funds to feed Afghan children instead.

  In a 2004 interview following the American invasion and his exile, Omar himself said he had not wanted to destroy the Buddhas. He described foreign visitors arriving to repair damage from rains and concluded: "These callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha."

  There is also circumstantial evidence that al-Qaeda pushed the decision to further isolate the Taliban from the international community. Abdul Salam Zaeef, a Taliban minister, held that the final order came from Abdul Wali, the Minister for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei's 2006 documentary The Giant Buddhas gathered testimony from local Afghans indicating that Osama bin Laden ordered the destruction and that Omar and the Afghans in Bamiyan initially opposed it.

• 6. International Protest

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  UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura convened a meeting of ambassadors from all 54 member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference. Every OIC state joined the protest to spare the monuments, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, the three countries that officially recognised the Taliban government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE later condemned the destruction as "savage."

  Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf sent a delegation led by Pakistan's interior minister Moinuddin Haider to Kabul. Haider quoted a verse from the Koran against slandering the gods of other religions and pointed to the centuries of Muslim armies that had passed through Afghanistan without harming the figures. He asked Omar directly: "When they have spared these statues for fifteen hundred years, all these Muslims who have passed by them, how are you a different Muslim from them?" Omar replied: "Maybe they did not have the technology to destroy them."

  India offered to transfer all the artifacts to New Delhi, where they would be kept safely and preserved for all mankind. The Taliban rejected the offer. UNESCO sent the Taliban government 36 letters objecting to the destruction. The Japanese government proposed moving the statues to Japan, covering them from view, or paying money for their preservation. The Dalai Lama said he was "deeply concerned."

  In Rome, former Afghan King Mohammed Zahir Shah issued a rare press statement calling the plan "against the national and historic interests of the Afghan people." UNESCO Director-General Matsuura called the destruction a "crime against culture" and described it as "abominable."

  Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the anti-Taliban resistance, also condemned the act.

• 7. The Destruction

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  The Taliban began by firing anti-aircraft guns and artillery at the statues for several days. Taliban Information Minister Qudratullah Jamal acknowledged mid-way through: "The destruction work is not as easy as people would think. You can't knock down the statues by dynamite or shelling as both of them have been carved in a cliff."

  To accelerate the collapse, the Taliban placed anti-tank mines at the bottom of the niches. Fragments of rock blown off by artillery would land on the mines and cause secondary destruction. In the final stage, men were lowered down the cliff face to place explosives directly into drilled holes in the Buddhas. After one explosion failed to obliterate the face of one of the figures, a rocket was launched that left a hole in the remains of the stone head.

  Mullah Omar, during the destruction, was reported to have said: "What are you complaining about? We are only waging war on stones."

  A local civilian speaking to Voice of America in 2002 said that he and other residents were forced to help carry out the demolition. He also said Pakistani and Arab engineers were involved.

  After the destruction of the larger and smaller Buddhas, 50 additional caves were revealed that had previously been concealed behind the niches. In 12 of those caves, wall paintings were discovered.

• 8. After the Rubble

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  In April 2002, Afghanistan's post-Taliban leader Hamid Karzai called the destruction a "national tragedy" and pledged that the Buddhas would be rebuilt, later calling reconstruction a "cultural imperative." In September 2005, Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, the Taliban governor of Bamiyan at the time of the destruction, was elected to the Afghan Parliament. In January 2007, he was assassinated in Kabul.

  The UNESCO Expert Working Group met in Paris between the 3rd and the 4th of March 2011 to consider options. Researcher Erwin Emmerling of the Technical University of Munich said he believed it would be possible to restore the smaller statue using an organic silicon compound. The Paris conference issued 39 recommendations, among them leaving the larger Western niche empty as a monument to the destruction, conducting a feasibility study into rebuilding the Eastern Buddha, and constructing a central museum on the site.

  In 2013, the German branch of ICOMOS rebuilt the foot section of the smaller Buddha using iron rods, bricks, and concrete. UNESCO halted further work, ruling that the reconstruction violated the organisation's policy of using original material and had been conducted without its knowledge or approval. German art historian and sculptor Bert Praxenthaler, involved in the broader restoration effort, estimated that roughly half the pieces of the Buddhas can be reassembled.

  On the 7th of June 2015, Chinese couple Zhang Xinyu and Liang Hong filled the empty niches with a 3D laser light projection lasting one night, attracting about 150 local residents. They donated their projector, valued at approximately $120,000, to Afghanistan's culture ministry. The Buddhist remnants at Bamiyan remain on the World Heritage in Danger list, and as of February 2023, restoration work resumed after the Italian government approved new funding for UNESCO's Afghan operations.