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.xml
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 – the earliest being from the Tang
dynasty, more than a millennium after he died – 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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