Foguang Temple (Wutai)

UNESCO World Heritage Site As Part Of Mount Wutai; Major National Historical And Cultural Site, Whose East Hall Of 857 Is Among The Oldest Surviving Timber Buildings In China · Wutai, Shanxi

For most of the twentieth century Japanese scholars asserted that no Tang dynasty timber building survived in China and that anyone who wanted to see one had to go to Nara. In June 1937 Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, following a Dunhuang cave painting that showed a temple on Mount Wutai, drove and rode by mule into a fold of the hills at Doucun and found the East Hall of Foguang Temple standing exactly where the mural said it would be. It was Lin Huiyin, short-sighted and up a ladder in the gloom, who made out faded ink characters on a roof beam naming the woman who paid for the hall - and the same name was cut into a stele in the courtyard outside, with a date corresponding to 857. The hall has stood for nearly twelve hundred years. Inside it are more than thirty Tang clay sculptures, Tang calligraphy and fragments of Tang wall painting, all of them original. They found it days before the war began.

Doucun, Wutai County, Xinzhou, Wutai, Shanxi, China

Open daily in season, generally around 8:00-17:00, with a very low admission charge. REMOTE: roughly three hours by road from Taiyuan on a poor mountain road, and SNOW AND ICE CAN CLOSE THE APPROACH FROM NOVEMBER TO MARCH - check before travelling in winter. ACCESS TO THE INTERIOR OF THE 857 EAST HALL IS RESTRICTED AND THE ARRANGEMENT HAS CHANGED REPEATEDLY; you may be admitted or held at the door. Carry food and water, as there is essentially nothing on site.

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