Guanyin of Nanshan
statue in Sanya, Hainan, China
The Guanyin of Nanshan (Chinese: 南山海上观音圣像) is a 108-metre (354 ft) statue of the bodhisattva Guanyin, sited on the south coast of the Island with Hainan on top of the Nanshan Temple of Sanya.
History
The statue took six years to build and was enshrined on April 24, 2005, with the participation of 108 monks from various Buddhist groups in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and mainland China, and tens of thousands of pilgrims. The delegation also included monks from the Theravada and Vajrayana traditions.
Design
The statue has three aspects: one side faces inland and the other two face the South China Sea, to represent blessing and protection by Guanyin of China and the whole world. One aspect depicts Guanyin cradling a sutra in the left hand and gesturing the Vitarka Mudra with the right; the second with her palms crossed, holding a string of prayer beads; and the third holding a lotus.
The statue ranks among the tallest in the world: 78 meters in height without including its pedestal, and 108 meters if the pedestal is included. (For comparison, the American Statue of Liberty is 93 meters tall when its pedestal is included, and 46 meters without.)
Features
Former analyst for the Australian government's ASPI, Alex Joske, has stated that the temple and statue are owned and operated by front groups of the Shanghai State Security Bureau, a branch of the Ministry of State Security, to exert ideological control and influence over the southeast Asian Buddhist community and counter the influence of Indian Buddhism. He wrote that the temple promotes Chinese government-approved religious practices known as "South China Sea Buddhism", and that temple's religious messaging has been managed by the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department since 2018.
“Guanyin of Nanshan” enters the record as statue in Sanya, Hainan, China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Guanyin, Nanshan and statue can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2976528. Authority coordinates are 18.292, 109.208. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005 and 2018.
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This entry incorporates text from “Guanyin of Nanshan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.