Thank you for downloading this episode of a history of the world in a hundred objects from BBC Radio 4. That's the sound of Buddhist monks chanting and as you could perhaps hear they're invoking the

name of Tara the predicament of life, even the powerful and the privileged whose private worlds I'm focusing on this week, and pretty

well every religion has spirits or saints, gods or goddesses that can be called upon to see

us through. If you were a Sri Lankan around 800 AD,

you would probably have turned like the monks who just heard to Tara. Over the centuries, many artists have given Tara physical form,

but it's hard to imagine many more beautiful than the golden nearly life-size figure

that now serenely presides over the long Asian gallery at the British Museum.

I'm not a religious person, so I just see it as a wonderfully beautiful and indeed quite

sensuous figure of a woman.

You can also see that it's a work of extraordinary technical perfection.

A History of the World in a Hundred Objects. objects. Bronze statue of Tara, 8th to 9th century, from Sri Lanka. The statue of Tara is casting one piece of solid bronze that's been covered in gold.

When you, she must have been dazzling when she was seen under the Sri Lankan sun.

And even now, when her gilding is rather worn and she stands in the cool light of Bloomsbury, she still has a compelling luster. She is about three quarters life size and she stands as she always would have on a plinth so that as you look up at her she

benignly gazes down at you. Her face tells you at once that she comes from

South Asia, but that's not the first thing that strikes visitors as they look at her.

She's got a quite impossible hour-glass figure, and her upper body is completely naked.

Her full and perfectly rounded breasts float above a tiny wasp waist, while below a flimsy

sarong is draped in gleaming folds which cling to and beguilingly reveal her shapely lower body.

So you'll hardly be surprised to learn

that when Tara arrived at the British Museum

from Salon, as it was then known in the 1830s, she was seen as so dangerously erotic and voluptuous

that she was at once put into the store rooms and kept there for 30 years, visible only

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