During the Spring Festival of 2012, a team of archaeologists from China Academy of Social Science and Cultural Relic Institute Hebei Province, discovered a pit with a large number of Buddha statues in Beiwu village of north Ye city.
Yecheng 鄴城 was first built in the Spring and Autumn period (770 BC-476 BC) and served as the political center of China during the Three Kingdoms period (220 AD-280 AD) and the Northern dynasties (386 AD-581 AD). For those history buffs, it served as the military headquarters of the warlords Yuan Shao 袁紹 and Cao Cao 曹操 in the last years of the Eastern Han Dynasty and later as the capital of the Eastern Wei Dynasty and Northern Qi Dynasty.Buddhism was very popular during the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties, when Yecheng served as the capital. It was especially prevalent in the Northern Qi period, as the imperial family revered Buddhas and more than one-seventh of the population were Buddhist monks and nuns. However the pit was irregular and the state of the statues suggest that it was the result of one of the periodic anti-Buddhist movements in Chinese history.
Yecheng 鄴城 was first built in the Spring and Autumn period (770 BC-476 BC) and served as the political center of China during the Three Kingdoms period (220 AD-280 AD) and the Northern dynasties (386 AD-581 AD). For those history buffs, it served as the military headquarters of the warlords Yuan Shao 袁紹 and Cao Cao 曹操 in the last years of the Eastern Han Dynasty and later as the capital of the Eastern Wei Dynasty and Northern Qi Dynasty.Buddhism was very popular during the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties, when Yecheng served as the capital. It was especially prevalent in the Northern Qi period, as the imperial family revered Buddhas and more than one-seventh of the population were Buddhist monks and nuns. However the pit was irregular and the state of the statues suggest that it was the result of one of the periodic anti-Buddhist movements in Chinese history.
Among the unearthed Buddha statues, the archaeologists have numbered 2,895 pieces with thousands of others unnumbered. The statues, some of which are painted or gilded, are sized from 20 centimeters long to the size of an actual person, said Zhang Wenrui, an official with the provincial cultural heritage bureau. The Buddha statues, mostly made of white marble and blue stone, could date back to the Eastern Wei and Northern Qi dynasties (534 AD-577 AD). This pit is one of the most momentous archaeological finding in the People's Republic of China since its founding in 1949, with the most Buddha statues unearthed at one time.
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