Chinese woman gets into hot water over claim that digging up an ancient stone rhino caused heavy flooding
Police take to social media to defend decision to act against woman whose comments prompted campaign to rebury 2,300-year-old statue to appease ancient superstition
Police in southwestern China have defended their decision to punish a woman for “spreading rumours” after she claimed that digging up an ancient sculpture had caused heavy rain and flooding in the region.
Social media users have been demanding that the government restore the sculpture to its original after the woman, who was only identified by her surname Yang, started making her demands online late last month.
“Some people don’t understand why she was punished, because they haven’t realised how many residents in Chengdu, Sichuan believed the claim and wrote to the mayor on that matter,” police said in a post on the microblogging platform Weibo on Thursday.
The 2,300-year-old stone rhino was unearthed by archaeologists in Sichuan’s capital city Chengdu in 2013.
The statute is over 3 metres (10ft) long and almost 2 metres high and, according to the Chengdu Museum’s website, it may have been buried by the celebrated irrigation engineer Li Bing.
Li, who lived in the era of the Qin dynasty over 2,200 years ago, designed the oldest functioning irrigation system in the world, the Dujiangyan.
The system, which still irrigates over 668,700 hectares of farmland, was recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2000.
According to a popular local tradition, rhinos are a divine beast that can help stop flooding and some chronicles have claimed that Li Bing buried five stone rhinos to stop flooding after the construction of Dujiangyan.