9 hours drive from Kabul, at the heart of the Hindu Kush, lies the valley of Bamiyan. It is surely one of the most beautiful of all Afghanistan. Moreover, its position and fertility led to the establishment of a trading post on the Silk Road almost 2000 years ago. It subsequently grew to become an important Buddhist centre with many monasteries and hundreds of monks. Around the 1st Century AD, a Central Asian nomadic tribe, the Kushans, established themselves in Afghanistan. Around the end of the 1st Century AD their king was a man called Kanishka who adopted Mahayana Buddhism – which revered the Buddha as a man as much as a God. Previously Buddha had only been represented symbolically but under Kanishka the first images of Buddha the man appeared. The fusing of an Indian artistic style with that of the Greek-Bactrians led to the so-called ‘Graeco-Buddhic’ art – and the two great Buddhas of Bamiyan were examples of this.

On completion, the two tallest were 55 metres (9m taller than the Statue of Liberty) and 38 metres high – an accomplishment that may have taken two hundred years to achieve. By the time of their first record in 400 AD by a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim they were covered in a mud and straw