This is the Big Buddha at Leshan. At 71 metres high and over 1,300 years old, this is one impressive statue. The problem, though, is that so many people want to oogle the stone behemoth.
We’d probably have taken the time to see the Big Buddha anyway, but we also needed to extend our Chinese visas and we’d heard that the PSB (Public Security Bureau) in Leshan was friendly and efficient. I was more than a little wary about this, our first real interaction with the Chinese state but we didn’t have much of an option we had less than a week left on our current visas. Murph, aka Mr. Laissez-Faire, said I was fretting for nothing. For our boys visas fall into the “Stuff Parents Do” category i.e. to be ignored unless they need to stand in front of an official to prove ownership of a passport.
