The Hall That Moved Fifteen Centimetres

The first thing you meet at Dule Temple is not the temple but its gate. The Shanmen (山门) is a single storey of dark timber under a broad tiled roof, and with the Guanyin Pavilion behind it, they are the oldest structures still standing on the site. Both were rebuilt in the second year of the Tonghe reign of the Liao dynasty, in 984. The temple itself is older than that date and its beginning is not recorded anywhere; the origin of the foundation is placed at least as far back as the early Tang. Liang Sicheng argued in 1932 that the gate's proportions resemble the Tang buildings painted in the Dunhuang murals.

In 755 the general An Lushan held a rally inside Dule Temple. It was the opening of his rebellion against the Tang emperor, and the fact that he chose this courtyard says something about how the place sat on the road north. Eleven centuries later the temple was used again, far less ceremoniously: in 1928 a unit of soldiers commanded by the warlord Sun Dianying was stationed here and turned the main hall into barracks. Between those two events the buildings survived on their own terms. In the early 1930s the Japanese scholar Sekino and Liang Sicheng, who wrote China's first modern history of Chinese architecture, both came to study them.

On 28 July 1976 the Tangshan earthquake reached Jizhou. Some parts of the White Pagoda, which once belonged to the temple, collapsed, walls fell, and the siding of the Guanyin Pavilion came away. What happened to the great clay figure inside was measured afterwards: the top of the Guanyin, 16.08 metres from the floor, had moved about fifteen centimetres to the south-west. A restoration also uncovered murals on the inner walls of the pavilion that had been hidden for centuries. Liang Sicheng had proposed lightning rods, doors and windows for the temple in 1966; after 1976 the seismic behaviour of these timber frames became a research subject in its own right.