http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/26/wchina126.xml

China's enduring fascination with what Confucius might have looked like has finally been addressed by officialdom, with the unveiling yesterday of a state-sponsored statue of the ancient sage.

In a marketing move that even state media admitted was controversial, the government-backed China Confucius Foundation commissioned a statue for his birth-place, Qufu, in the east of the country. Keen to promote his work, which is often used by the Communist Party leadership to justify its own rule, the foundation's sculptors consulted pictures ¨C the earliest being from the Tang dynasty, more than a millennium after he died ¨C and even his descendants in coming up with a portrait of a balding man with a long beard, broad mouth and thick ears.

The statue will be given copyright protection, the foundation said. "A standard portrait is needed so that different countries can have the same image of him," said its secretary general, Zhang Shuhua. Like Shakespeare for the English, Confucius, who lived in the sixth century BC, has a number of popular images but none that had been definitively accepted.

Scholars said yesterday that people were entitled to use their imaginations to think of what he looked like, but that unlike the venerable sage's words of Eastern wisdom, an "official" version of his image was unlikely to stand the test of time.