At South Korea's thousand-year-old Gounsa Temple, workers delicately swaddled a giant gilded Buddha statue with a fire-retardant blanket.

Hours later much of the temple burned down in one of the deadliest wildfires to hit South Korea -- but the Buddha and the wooden hall it was in survived.

All across the country's southeast, officials are racing to relocate priceless historic artifacts and protect UNESCO-listed sites from the blazes, which have killed 24 people and destroyed thousands of hectares of forest.

In the UNESCO-listed Hahoe village -- a popular tourist site once visited by England's late Queen Elizabeth II -- fire fighters and cultural heritage officials have been spraying water and fire retardants onto the thatched buildings, hoping they would be spared from the flames.

"It is very heartbreaking and painful to see the precious temples that are over a thousand years old being lost," Deung-woon, a 65-year-old monk told AFP.

When 68-year-old monk Joung-ou heard that the Gounsa temple had burned down in wildfires which have killed 24 people so far, he said he felt "so devastated that I couldn't come to my senses."

"It was an extremely painful feeling, and I wondered why something like this could happen," he said.

AFP reporters who returned to the temple after the blaze found the north........

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