The sacred Buddhist mountain of Wutai in China was among five new sites newly added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List.
The announcements were made on the fifth day of a meeting of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee in Seville, Spain.
The committee, which is meeting until June 30, is deciding which of 27 sites deserve to be added to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation’s heritage list of 881 sites that have "outstanding universal value".
UNESCO said Mount Wutai, a "sacred Buddhist mountain" in northern China that includes 53 monasteries, was named as a "cultural landscape".
It features "the Ming Dynasty Shuxiang Temple with a huge complex of 500 statues representing Buddhist stories woven into three dimensional pictures of mountains and water.
Overall, the buildings on the site present a catalogue of the way Buddhist architecture developed and influenced palace building in China over more than one millennium."
AFP reported that on the down side, UNESCO announced it had removed Dresden’s Elbe Valley from its World Heritage List because the eastern German city had gone ahead with the building of a road bridge "in the heart of the cultural landscape".
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