Long Son Pagoda in Nha Trang, Vietnam isn't very old compared to many famous Buddhist monasteries. Founded in the late 19th century, it has in 1990, been destroyed by a cyclone and has been rebuilt many times to recreate the exact replica of the old temple which; with its curved eaves, sculptures of Taoist gods and mythical animals could be easily mistaken as non-Buddhist. That it is Buddhist is evident with the big 24-metre tall white Buddha statue that sits on a lotus atop Trai Thuy Mountain. Climbing up the 150 stone steps to have a closer look at the white Buddha, one would inadvertently go past a 14-metre-long reclining Buddha whose back panel features a bas-relief representation of the monks and nuns who died in the late 1950s while protesting against the corrupt US-backed Diem regime. There are more relief busts of monks who died in self-immolations in 1963 at the top where the white Buddha is located; chief among which is the bust of Thich Quang Duc, the Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk who burned himself to death at a busy Saigon road and whose photographs of self-immolation were widely
circulated around the world. The late American president John F. Kennedy described the photographs as the only news picture in history that generated so much emotion around the world. The photographs of the monk who died in his protest against the persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government led by Ngô Đình Diệm went on to win the photographer, Malcolm Browne a Pulitzer Prize.
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