The idea belonged to Syahrul Yasin Limpo, then governor of South Sulawesi, who wanted to draw more visitors to Tana Toraja. In 2013, the provincial government held an open competition to design the statue, and the winning entry came from Supriadi, an artist from Yogyakarta, supported by Hardo Wardoyo Suwarto. Construction began that same year on Buntu Burake hill, a promontory rising roughly 1,700 meters above sea level near Makale, the capital of Tana Toraja Regency. The foundation alone cost 5.8 billion rupiah. The statue itself, cast in bronze and standing approximately 40 meters tall, cost another 22 billion rupiah. By 2015 the figure was complete, though the site continued to be developed with additional infrastructure including a glass viewing bridge at the base.

At 40 meters, Jesus Buntu Burake stands among the tallest statues of Christ in the world, rivaling Bolivia's Cristo de la Concordia in Cochabamba. The comparison most visitors reach for is Brazil's Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, which stands 30 meters tall atop Corcovado mountain -- ten meters shorter than its Indonesian counterpart. But Buntu Burake differs in more than scale. Where Cristo Redentor gazes over a sprawling coastal metropolis, the Toraja Christ looks out across a highland valley of terraced rice paddies, traditional tongkonan houses with their distinctive boat-shaped roofs, and the green ridgelines of South Sulawesi's interior mountains. The setting is quieter, more intimate. Visitors who reach the glass viewing platform at the statue's base find themselves standing above clouds on clear mornings, the valley floor visible through the transparent floor beneath their feet.

Christianity arrived in Tana Toraja with Dutch missionaries in the early twentieth century, and today the region is one of the most predominantly Christian areas in Indonesia, a country where Muslims make up roughly 87 percent of the population. The Torajan relationship with Christianity has always been distinctive, though. Traditional Torajan beliefs, collectively known as Aluk To Dolo -- the Way of the Ancestors -- did not disappear with conversion. Instead, many Torajans practice both, attending church services and observing ancestral funeral rites without seeing contradiction between the two. The statue on Buntu Burake reflects this layering. It is unmistakably Catholic in form, yet it sits in a landscape where the spiritual world is understood to be densely present in the mountains, the rice fields, and the houses where the living and the recently dead share space under the same roof.

Though the statue was physically complete by 2015, the official inauguration did not take place until December 23, 2018, when President Joko Widodo traveled to Tana Toraja for the ceremony. The timing was deliberate -- the event was folded into the Tana Toraja Oikumene Christmas celebration, a regional gathering that draws Christians from across South Sulawesi. For a president of a Muslim-majority nation to inaugurate a monumental Christian statue on the eve of Christmas carried its own significance, a gesture toward the pluralism that Indonesia's national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika -- Unity in Diversity -- is meant to embody. The statue has since become one of the region's most visited landmarks, drawing both domestic tourists and international travelers who come to Tana Toraja for its funeral traditions and stay to see the bronze Christ standing against the highland sky.