Carbon copies of holy texts handed to Lijiang city

Fake relics have been making headlines lately, but in the city of Lijiang in southwest China, everything is kosher. Duplicates of a collection of Buddhist scriptures have been handed back to the city. They are copies of the Ming Dynasty Tripitaka Gangyur, and were handed back to officials last Saturday.

The original texts were created over 500 years ago during the Ming Dynasty in Lijiang, written in 108 volumes featuring more than 1000 articles. The originals are currently housed in the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa.

These copies were made with state-of-the-art technology using a 300 million pixel ultra hi-def camera and printed on high quality German paper. The texts are said to be 95% accurate in their content to the originals. The copies will be kept by the Lijiang Library, the Lijiang Museum and the Buddhist association in the city.