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Shanxi

Chinese ancient architecture and grottoes in Shanxi: 5 entries, including Foguang Temple, Huayan Temple, Jinci Temple, and more.

001 Architecture Foguang Temple Foguang Temple lies in Wutai County, Shanxi, and takes its name from an auspicious response of "Buddha's light." In the fifth year of the Dali era of the Tang, the monk Facao saw several beams of white light to the temple's south; during the Yuanhe era there was a memorial reporting that "auspicious clouds appeared beside Foguang Temple." The Dunhuang Record of a Journey to Mount Wutai describes its seven-bay great Buddha hall and its three-story, seven-bay Maitreya pavilion; after the Huichang persecution the monk Yuancheng "sought out Foguang Temple anew" and rebuilt it step by step. The East Hall that survives today is a relic of that reconstruction. Tang Dynasty · Shanxi · Wutai County, Shanxi Province

002 Architecture Jinci Temple The shrine was first raised for Tang Shuyu, and Emperor Taizong of the Tang personally composed and inscribed a stele here; four hundred years later the Northern Song Hall of the Sacred Mother was completed, and the principal deity shifted from Shuyu to the Sacred Mother — a shrine whose own later additions replaced its protagonist. Tang dynasty · Shanxi · Taiyuan, Shanxi

003 Architecture Nanchan Temple The main hall of Nanchan Temple is located in Lijia Village, Wutai County, Shanxi. An ink inscription under the beam reads “restored in the third year of Jianzhong of the Great Tang,” making it one of the earliest surviving Tang-dynasty timber structures with a definite date. Pre-restoration survey photos from 1953 show that the front-eave doors and windows, the eave bracket projections, and structural details still preserve original Tang construction. Tang Dynasty · Shanxi · Wutai County, Shanxi Province

004 Architecture Shanhua Temple After the Song envoy Zhu Bian was detained in the Jin state, he moved into the Da Pu'en Temple and lived for fourteen years amid the rubble left by the fires at the end of the Liao dynasty, witnessing firsthand as the monk Yuanman raised funds to rebuild more than eighty bays. He recorded the experience in a stele inscription, and his own captivity thus became a testimony to the rebirth of this ancient Tang-dynasty temple. Tang Dynasty · Shanxi · Datong, Shanxi Province

005 Architecture Huayan Temple The chronology of Huayan Temple does not begin with a single record: a construction inscription of 1038 survives on a beam of the Hall of the Bhagavat Sutra Repository, while the History of the Liao dates the temple's founding to 1062. Thereafter, wartime fires, the Jin-dynasty rebuilding, the Yuan-dynasty revival, modern photographic surveys, and twenty-first-century expansion each left layers of text and image behind. The temple today thus faces both its old Liao and Jin structures and a newly spread-out courtyard complex, linking nearly a millennium of rise and decline. Liao Dynasty · Shanxi · Datong, Shanxi Province

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