The Hanging Temple on a Cliff at Hunyuan

The cliff comes first. The temple stands in Hunyuan County, in the prefecture of Datong, on a recessed face halfway up Cuiping Shan, a cliff of the Heng massif; the rock curves inward above the buildings, so the halls sit under a shallow natural hood rather than on an open wall. That recess is why the place works. Rain runs off the overhang instead of through the roofs, and the timber behind it stays dry. The temple hangs about seventy-five metres above the ground, on rock more than thirty metres up. It was listed as a national key cultural relics protection unit in 1982.

Forty halls and pavilions are strung along the rock in one narrow band, and the question everyone asks is what holds them there. The answer is in the rock behind them. Twenty-seven wooden crossbeams, about fifty centimetres across and soaked in tung oil, are set into holes cut in the cliff; each is fixed at its inner end by a mortise-and-tenon joint, and the floors and roofs are built out from those beams. The dozen or so vertical posts that reach down to the ledge below are not the main structure; they steady the walkways. The load is in the beams, which is why the halls have stayed up on a face no wider than a corridor.

The date is disputed, and the dispute is old. One tradition has a single monk, Liaoran, beginning the work in 491 at the end of the Northern Wei; another also gives 491, but as an imperial project, when Emperor Xiaowen moved the seat of the Daoist master Kou Qianzhi to this cliff. A third account reaches back to 398 and to the road cut through the Heng ridge, which the temple treats as its beginning, and a Southern Song date also circulates without evidence behind it. What is not in doubt is the fabric: the buildings standing now are Ming and Qing rebuildings. The temple did not reopen to the public until May 2016.