The Statues Under the Ground

The find is the reason the Qingzhou Museum matters. The discovery of more than two hundred buried Buddhist statues at Qingzhou was called a major archaeological find, and the statues included early examples of painted figures. The museum was recognised in 2008 by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage as one of the first batch of national first-class museums, and it holds some of the statues unearthed in 1996 and 1997. Paint is what makes the figures unusual: the colour is still on them, which is not how Buddhist sculpture of the period usually comes out of the ground.

Why they were buried is a question with a likely answer. The statues are thought to have been buried because of Emperor Huizong's Song dynasty repression of Buddhism, since that emperor favoured Taoism. The hoard was therefore a deposit made in a particular political moment rather than a workshop's rubbish, and the figures were put into the ground whole enough to be recognised. The same museum carries the town's standing: in 2008 it was recognised as one of the first national first-class museums, and it is the only one in a county-level city.

Qingzhou is one site in a landscape of Buddhist sites. Weifang was one of the earliest places Buddhism reached in China and became the Buddhist centre of the Qilu region, leaving a large number of relics: this temple hoard, the statues of Tuoshan and Yunmen mountain, and the grottoes at Shimenfang. Tuoshan and Yunmenshan stand about four kilometres southwest of the city centre, a pair of hills with a collection of grottoes under national protection, served by a single cable car. The monk Faxian landed on the Shandong coast at Laoshan in 412 and came to Qingzhou to translate and edit the scriptures he had brought back from India.