China built a massive 190-foot statue of a god of war that locals don't like. Now it'll cost more than $20 million to move the hulking work of art.
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Cheryl Teh
Sep 8, 2021, 14:02 IST
The 180-foot-tall statue of Chinese warrior god Guan Yu is located in Jingzhou, China. It's currently being relocated, piece-by-piece, to a spot eight kilometers away - though the price of moving it will cost the government an eye-popping $20 million.
Weibo
Chinese officials are wincing at the hefty $20 million cost of moving a 190-foot-tall bronze statue.
An order was issued in December 2020 to relocate the colossal monument of Chinese warrior-god Guan Yu.
It cost close to $26 million to build, but the Chinese government later said it ruined the area's landscape.
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It'll cost the Chinese city of Jingzhou a whopping $20 million to relocate a 190-foot-tall statue of Chinese warrior-god Guan Yu.
The eye-watering sum drew the ire of local anti-graft officials, who released a sharply-worded statement on September 7 calling for more oversight when approving "large projects" - like the construction of this colossal bronze statue back in 2016.
"It's a waste of more than 300 million yuan ($46 million). First, it was constructed illegally, and then removed," local officials said of the statue in the central Chinese province of Hubei.
Images circulated on Weibo, the country's Twitter-like platform, of the war god being "decapitated" while workers toiled to remove it, piece by piece. The humongous statue is being shifted to Dianjiangtai, a less-conspicuous tourist precinct around five miles from its current location.
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