China has armed the Leshan Mountain Giant Buddha in its southwest Sichuan Province with an "electronic bodyguard" to protect the world's tallest Buddha statue from fire and flood.

Leshan Mountain Giant Buddha

The electronic management bodyguard system is a 24-hour monitoring and protection network consisting of computers, monitors and miniature cameras around the 71-metre-tall statue and its surrounding scenic areas, said Lu Lin, director of the Leshan Mountain Giant Buddha Resort.

"It is the first Chinese scenic resort equipped with an electronic bodyguard combined with high technology and traditional patrolling," Lu said.

The system will raise an alarm as soon as it monitors signs of possible fire or flood then supervisors can mobilize people to respond accordingly, he said.

"The system won't damage the statue and the landscape since the transmission lines linking it have been hidden while miniature cameras are placed around the statue, not on its body," Lu said.

With an investment of some 2 million yuan (US$240,000), the system is just part of a massive maintenance and protection project under way for the 1,200-year-old Buddha statue.

The statue, which took 90 years to build, was said to stabilize the river waters and prevent flooding by monitoring the nearby Minjiang, Qingyijiang and Dadu rivers.

The Buddha, a sitting Maitreya, is 28 metres wide and 18 metres higher than the destroyed statue at Bamyan Valley, Afghanistan - once thought to be the tallest Buddha in the world.

It was put on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's World Cultural Heritage list in 1996.

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