Qinglian Temple on a Hill above Jincheng

Qinglian Temple stands at Jincun town in Zezhou county, on the slope above the valley, in two courts that are visited as one place. The lower court is called Old Qinglian Temple; the upper is what people mean by Qinglian. The name is a gift: in 867, the eighth year of the Xiantong era of the Tang, the court granted it, and in the third year of the Taiping Xingguo era of the Song the upper court received a second name, Fuyan Temple, which never displaced the first. What the two courts hold is a sequence, running through Tang clay, Song timber and Song figures, steles of several periods and a Ming pagoda.

East of the temple stands a pagoda built in 1596, the twenty-fourth year of the Wanli era of the Ming. It is a reliquary stupa: thirteen rings are stacked above a domed body, and the Jincheng record counts it the only Tibetan-style pagoda in its area. Local accounts give it a second distinction. At the summer solstice, they say, the tower casts no shadow, and the name Wuying Pagoda, the shadowless pagoda, has stuck to it. Whether the claim holds is a matter for a visit on the right day; what is certain is the form, which is unlike anything else in these valleys.

The lower court holds the older work. Its Mile Hall keeps six clay figures of the Tang, one of the three groups of Tang temple sculpture that survive in China, just over seventy figures between them, and the main image, 4.2 metres high with both legs hanging down, is described as the only pendant-legged Maitreya among them. In the upper court the Shakyamuni Hall was built in 1089, three bays wide at 11.93 metres and six rafters deep at 11.13, under a single-eave nine-ridge roof, with a four-metre Buddha inside. What the records leave open is the founding: the temple is older than its Tang name, but no date before 867 is fixed.