watanafghanistan:

Facts about Bamiyan & the Buddhas

• The Buddha was built some time between the third and fifth centuries.
• It was 57 meters high ( the hight of a 20 story building).
• There are total of three colossal statues carved 4,000 feet apart.
• At one time, two thousand monks meditated in caves among the sandstone cliffs.
• The world’s earliest oil paintings have been discovered in caves behind the partially destroyed colossal statues. Scientists from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility have confirmed that the oil paintings, probably of either walnut or poppy seed oil, are present in 12 of the 50 caves dating from the 5th to 9th century.
• Ironically Buddhism was also a religion that abhorred idols. Over 2000 years ago, the Buddha was represented by a symbol usually a foot print or a wheel. But then great change in Buddhism took place and it took place in Afghanistan. Those who ruled Bamyan lunched a new humanized form of Buddhism by turning a Buddha into a recognizable form. Afghanistan was the place where the Buddha in a human form was taken to the world.

• Before being blown up in 2001 they were the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world (the 8th century Leshan Giant Buddha is taller^,   but the statue is sitting).
• The whole mountain surrounding the Buddha, is full of tunnels and it all leads to little chambers which the monks would have lived in and prayed in.
• The top of the Buddha’s face had been carved off and burned, by zealotry of Aurangzeb’s soldiers in the 18th century.
• A monk from Korea, Huichao (727 C.E. ) describes Bamiyan as an independent Buddhist state.
• In Bamiyan, as elsewhere in Central Asia, apocalypse came at the hands of Ghengis Khan in 1221 C.E. Ghengis sent a small army to seize the valley, commanded by his favorite grandson. When the boy was killed by a bowshot from the fortress of Shahr-i-Zohak ( the Red City), the Khan vowed implacable revenge: no human or animal would be allowed to live. As always in these matters, Ghengis Khan was true to his word. Neither the city of Bamiyan nor its outliers were ever rebuilt; their ruins stand today as mute testimony to the human capacity for savagery.
• The statues represented the classic blended style of Gandhara art.
• Bamiyan is known as city of Screams. Now silent, it was once filled with screams of the thousands of people killed there by Ganges khan.
• It was a Buddhist religious site from the 2nd century up to the time of the Islamic invasion in the 9th century. Monks at the monasteries lived as hermits in small caves carved into the side of the Bamiyan cliffs. Many of these monks embellished their caves with religious statuary and elaborate, brightly colored frescoes.
• The two most prominent statues were the giant standing Buddhas Vairocana and Sakyamuni.
• The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang passed through the area around 630, and described Bamiyan in the Da Tang Xiyu Ji as a flourishing Buddhist center “with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks”. He also noted that both Buddha figures were “decorated with gold and fine jewels” 
• The enormous statues,the male Salsal (“light shines through the universe”) and the (smaller) female Shamama (“Queen Mother”) as they were called by the locals.
• The Government of Japan and several other organizations, among them the Afghanistan Institute in Bubendorf, Switzerland, along with the ETH in Zurich, have committed to rebuilding, perhaps by anastylosis, the two largest Buddhas.
• On 8 September 2008 archeologists searching for a legendary 300-metre statue at the site of the already dynamited Buddhas announced the discovery of an unknown 19-metre (62-foot) reclining Buddha, a pose representing Buddha’s passage into nirvana

source: [1] [2] [3] [4]