It wasn't the first act of destruction of its kind, and it won't be the last.
Perhaps the last time such a defiant act caught the world's attention was back when the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan at the turn of the century.
Bamiyan was recently named as the 2015 Cultural Capital of the SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) in the ongoing bid to restore the area to its former glory.
A Chinese couple, using tens of thousands of dollars' worth of technology have done their bit and helped one of the Bamiyan Buddhas reincarnate into the light, but for all to see.
Though the project has been proposed in the past by others, it was self made millionaires Zhang Xinyu and Liang Hong who brought it to fruition.
Fourteen years on, there are now children in the area who are seeing the Bamiyan for the first time. I don't know about you, but my heart kind of fluttered a little when seeing these images.
Nothing will ever undo the senseless acts that led to their willful destruction in the first place, but there is some comfort to be had in seeing that empty space created by human brutality refilled by compassion.
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