CHINA / Foreign Media on China
Confusion over Confucius image
(Telegraph)
Updated: 2006-09-26 10:20
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/26/wchina126.x
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China's enduring fascination with what Confucius might have looked like
has finally been addressed by officialdom, with the unveiling yesterday
of a state-sponsored statue of the ancient sage.
In a marketing move that even state media admitted was controversial, the
government-backed China Confucius Foundation commissioned a statue for
his birth-place, Qufu, in the east of the country. Keen to promote his
work, which is often used by the Communist Party leadership to justify
its own rule, the foundation's sculptors consulted pictures �C the
earliest being from the Tang dynasty, more than a millennium after he
died �C and even his descendants in coming up with a portrait of a
balding man with a long beard, broad mouth and thick ears.
The statue will be given copyright protection, the foundation said. "A
standard portrait is needed so that different countries can have the same
image of him," said its secretary general, Zhang Shuhua. Like Shakespeare
for the English, Confucius, who lived in the sixth century BC, has a
number of popular images but none that had been definitively accepted.
Scholars said yesterday that people were entitled to use their
imaginations to think of what he looked like, but that unlike the
venerable sage's words of Eastern wisdom, an "official" version of his
image was unlikely to stand the test of time.
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