Stephan Greenwood at Gadling has an amusing story about his recent visit to Ngong Ping, the Big Buddha out on Lantau Island. He expected mass tourism, found mass tourism, yet still went home considering it was a visit worth doing. Sometimes, it's perfectly OK to be a tourist.
The world's largest outdoor seated bronze buddha.
It sounds more like an obscure sports statistic than a record for a religious statue - and it left me to wonder - where does the largest indoor standing silver buddha reside? My skepticism about the buddha at Ngong Ping was barely trumped by my interest in finally visiting a historically and culturally significant monument in Hong Kong - fantasizing that it must have been built at least a few hundred years ago by devoted buddhists that used sacred, ancient methods of construction.
And yet again, my assumptions failed me.
The buddha was built in 1993. Nineteen Ninety-Three. The same year Intel shipped the first Pentium chips. The same year that the first corrected images from the Hubble telescope were taken. Hardly the timeworn, historical relic that I had pictured. I suddenly felt bitter and betrayed, like someone was trying to pull a fast one on a poor foreigner. But it seemed to sum up the story of Hong Kong; a new shining structure built upon a connection to Chinese heritage, in the hope of attracting foreign dollars.
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