Faxing Temple and the Painted Figures of the Song

Faxing Temple stands on Cuiyun Mountain at Cuizhuang village in Cilin town, Changzi county, south-west of Changzhi. The halls are not on their first ground. The temple was built at Cilin Mountain close by, and mining caused the ground beneath it to subside until the buildings were unsafe, so the group was moved to the slope it occupies now. Its record runs further back than its walls: founded in the Later Liang, one of the states of the Sixteen Kingdoms, as Cilin Temple, it was renamed Guangde Temple under the Tang and took the name Faxing in the Zhiping era of the Northern Song. In 1988 it entered the third batch of national key cultural relics.

The reason to come is one room. The Yuanjue Hall was built in 1080, the third year of the Yuanfeng era of the Northern Song, three bays wide and six rafters deep, under a single-eave hip-and-gable roof. It is a small building, and the whole of it is given over to one altar. Nineteen figures in clay stand there, all of them dated to the Song, and that count is the temple's reputation. Because the hall was made for them and not adapted to them, the figures are seen at the distance the carver worked at: close enough to read a hand, far enough to take in the row.

Nineteen figures in one room make a group rather than a set of statues, and the way to read it is from the door inwards. Clay figures of this period are modelled, not carved: the material is built up, smoothed and then painted, so what survives is the surface as much as the shape, and a hall that has kept its figures shows a programme rather than a row of survivors. Beyond that the record for this temple is thin. It fixes the date of the hall and the number of figures, and leaves the faces to the visitor. Outside, the stone pagoda keeps the temple's oldest dated event: in 673 Li Yuanyi, thirteenth son of the Tang founder Gaozu and then prefect of Luzhou, gave thirty-seven relics and a Buddhist canon, and they were stored inside it.