The great temple of the southern god

The god of Nanyue Temple is the deity of the Southern Mountain, who is the fire god Zhurong, the figure the peak of Hengshan is named after. Successive rulers heaped titles on the god of the southern peak: in the early Tang he was made the Sitian Huo Wang, in the Kaiyuan era the Nanyue Zhenjun, and in the Song the Sitian Zhaosheng Emperor, the title the main hall still carries. The temple was the place where the emperor's court and the mountain's worshippers met, a state shrine for the southern quarter of the empire as much as a local one. Alongside the god, the temple holds the whole weight of Hengshan's religious life, for the mountain was sacred to both Daoism and Buddhism long before the temple's present buildings rose, and the earliest Daoist activity on the mountain is dated to the Eastern Han, when Zhang Daoling is said to have climbed it. The god, in short, is the fire god of the south, wrapped in the ranks and titles the dynasties laid on him. The mountain itself was sealed as the southern peak in the time of the legendary emperors, and it has received imperial offerings ever since.

The temple runs along a north-south axis of nine halls and courtyards, entered through the Lingxing Gate and passing the Kuixing Pavilion, the Zhengchuan Gate, the imperial stele pavilion, the Jiaying Gate, the imperial library, the main hall, the sleeping palace and the north rear gate. On the east and west flanks sit eight Daoist temples and eight Buddhist monasteries, so the three teachings, Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, share a single compound. The main hall, modelled on the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City, is the tallest building in the old town, and its seventy-two stone columns stand for the seventy-two peaks of Hengshan; a carved white-marble dragon runs up its sixteen steps. Inside the imperial stele pavilion, an inscription of 279 characters by the Kangxi emperor declares the mountain the southern pillar of the realm and the peak of long life, which is the source of Hengshan's title as the mountain of longevity. The whole compound covers more than 98,000 square metres, and the Jiaying Gate, a Ming-dynasty structure, is the widest part of the temple, while the Kuixing Pavilion above the entrance once served as a stage for performances.

The incense of Nanyue Temple burns heavily, and on the great Buddhist days of the year the temple fills for its temple fair, a custom that began in the Tang dynasty, held around the birthday of the Tianfu emperor on the seventeenth day of the fifth lunar month, and that now mixes sacrifice with acrobatics, opera, calligraphy and lanterns. Worshippers come not only from Hunan and Guangdong but from Hong Kong, Macau, Southeast Asia and Japan, and the two treasure storehouses before the main hall receive incense, the left for the living and the right for the dead. The statue of the southern god now standing in the main hall is a copy made in 1983, after the original was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and the temple has been under continuous repair since the 1980s. It is at once a working place of worship, a monument of the three teachings and a festival ground, one of the fullest expressions of what the southern mountain has meant for more than a thousand years. A volunteer fire brigade of monks now drills against the fires that have repeatedly damaged the halls over the centuries.