Putuo Zongcheng: The Potala Rebuilt for a Birthday

The temple is read from the bottom up, and the reading is colour. A long white platform, eighteen metres high and about a hundred and fifty metres wide, is built of granite blocks below and brick above, faced with white lime. It is solid. Above it stands the red platform, twenty-five metres high, fifty-eight metres wide at the top and fifty-nine at the base, seven storeys in all, of which the lowest four are filled in. The wall was plastered and painted red. Against the ridge behind, the two masses look like something set down rather than grown.

The red face is not blank. Seven rows of openings climb it. The lowest row has Chinese rectangular windows; the next three have Tibetan trapezoid blind windows; the upper three alternate real and blind openings. At the centre, six glazed niches with yellow and green canopies hold figures of the Buddha of Limitless Life. Along the parapet on the east, west and south sides run eighty small yellow-glazed niches, each with the same figure, one for every year of the empress dowager's life.

Inside, the Wanfaguiyi Hall, the Hall of Ten Thousand Dharmas Returning to One, fills the courtyard of the surrounding galleries. It is square, seven bays deep, with a double-eaved pyramidal roof covered in gilded fish-scale copper tiles. More than 14,000 taels of gold leaf went into that roof. The ridge carries wave-shaped gilded tiles and a Tibetan-style bell finial.

The temple was begun in the third month of 1767, the thirty-second year of the Qianlong reign, and finished in the eighth month of 1771. A stele in the courtyard, written by the emperor, records the dates. The occasion was a double birthday: Qianlong turned sixty, and his mother, the Empress Dowager Chongqing, turned eighty.

The name explains the design. Putuo Zongcheng is a translation of the Tibetan word Potala; both mean the holy place of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. In the stele Qianlong listed three such places: one in India, one in Tibet at the Potala, and one at Putuo Island in Zhejiang. He had wanted to copy the Indian one, the earliest, but its layout could no longer be established. The Potala, he wrote, still had its full order of halls, so he copied that instead.

The result covers about 220,000 square metres and holds more than sixty structures, making it the largest and most splendid of the Eight Outer Temples. Tibetan and Chinese forms are combined throughout: white platforms with blind windows, Chinese hip roofs with yellow glazed tiles, stone lions and elephants, and a five-pagoda gate more than ten metres high whose five stupas are glazed red, green, yellow, white and black.

The temple was more than a place of worship. Envoys from different parts of the empire were received here, and the proximity of the imperial hunting grounds made it a retreat from Beijing.

In June 1930 four men came to measure the temple: the Swedish explorers Sven Hedin, Gösta Montell and Georg Söderbom, and the Chinese architect Liang Weihua. They were part of the Sino-Swedish expedition, and their task was to procure a Tibetan Buddhist temple for the Century of Progress exhibition due in Chicago in 1933.

Liang's workshops in Beijing built a full-size copy of the Wanfaguiyi Hall, one to one, together with two models at one to ten. The full-size hall was erected in Chicago; one small model went with it to help the assembly, and the other went to the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. The American financier Rockefeller paid for the enterprise, and in 1931 a chartered ship carried a large collection of Buddhist images and ritual objects to Chicago to fill the copied hall. In the late 1990s and early 2000s a foundation of Swedish experts bought the surviving components back from Indiana University, where they had ended up, with the aim of reassembling the hall in Stockholm.

At Chengde the temple was listed as a national key cultural relic in 1961 and inscribed with the resort in 1994. The Wanfaguiyi Hall remains the setting for the temple's festivals, and in 1771 it was where Qianlong received Ubashi, leader of the Torghut Mongols, after their return to Qing territory. Two steles beside the main inscription record that return in Manchu, Chinese, Mongol and Tibetan.