Mount Rushmore's rock monument was carved out of a granite mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It is a symbol of freedom and democracy and features the faces of former presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. The face of each president is six stories high, the eyes are each 11 feet wide and mouths are 18 feet wide. The lead sculptor on the project was Gutzon Borglum, who studied sculpture in Paris and died before the monument's completion. Workers built it by blasting away sections of the mountain with dynamite and carving the facial features with jackhammers and chisels. It took a team of 400 workers 14 years to complete and cost about $990,000. Mount Rushmore is visited by nearly 3 million people each year and includes a visitor center, museum, gift shop and Avenue of Flags.
Stonehenge is one of the most recognizable monuments in British culture and is located in Wiltshire, England. The Stonehenge website puts its construction about 3000 BC. Materials are bluestone, sarson and Welsh sandstone. The three phases of construction took more than 30 million hours of labor to complete, according to the website which adds there is much speculation about the reason for building Stonehenge. It is located on the line of the midsummer sunrise and midsummer sunset and it could have marked the longest and shortest days of the year. Little archaeological evidence shows who built the structure and how it was built, according to the website. Visitors can pay to visit the structure, which is owned by English Heritage.
The Giant Buddha of Leshan, China, is the world's tallest stone Buddha statue with a total height of 233 feet and 92 feet wide. An 8th century Buddhist monk carved the impressive statue out of a cliff face in hopes that the Buddha would calm the three rivers that it overlooks: the Minjian, Dadu and Qingyi rivers.
Workers placed the rocks carved out of the cliff in the rivers and altered the currents. The statue is of a Maitreya Buddha, the future Buddha, who was especially popular among Buddhists during the time of the statue's construction. The workers who constructed the Buddha monument carved a system of drainage passages in the Buddha's hair, chest, collar and back of his ears to prevent damage by weather and erosion. Tourists can visit the Giant Buddha from tourist ferries that travel the surrounding rivers.
