This Buddah

The statue's story shifts with the teller. One account has a rebel general looting a temple northeast of Peking and shipping the Buddha to New York; another sends it from a Chinese warlord in the 1920s; a third calls its origin unclear. All agree that two New York friends, Robert Youngs and Ernest Tracy, found it in a warehouse and gave it to Edward McIlhenny in 1936. He built a lagoon, a rocky mound, a stone bridge, seven planted hills and a glass-enclosed shrine, designed by Owen Southwell, around it.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 0.3 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 9.0 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 12 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 16 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Boat House — steps away
• The Cleveland Oak — steps away
• Bird City — 0.3 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.3 mi