Shanhua Temple: A Hall Rebuilt After Fire

Inside the south gate of the old city, a temple closes off a courtyard on Nansi Street. This is Shanhua Temple, called the South Temple locally; it stands on the west side of Yongtai Gate in Pingcheng District, and it began in the Kaiyuan era of the Tang, when the court granted it the name Kaiyuan Temple. It took the name Shanhua in 1445. What survives is a set of timber buildings from two dynasties: one hall from the Liao and three from the Jin. It was listed in the first batch of national key cultural relics protection units in 1961, and it now houses the city's office for the care of ancient buildings.

The fire explains the shape of the complex. In 1122, when Jin troops attacked the city, Shanhua was burned; in 1128 the monk Shi Yuanman began rebuilding, and the work took fourteen years, finishing in 1143. Three of the buildings standing today are that reconstruction, and one, the Daxiongbao Hall, is earlier, an eleventh-century Liao hall. The mountain gate raised in the Jin is the largest surviving temple gate of that dynasty in China, under a hip roof that is rare for a gate. Two pavilions are modern: the Puxian Pavilion was destroyed in the Second World War and rebuilt in 1953, and the Wenshu Pavilion, burnt after being turned into a tannery, was rebuilt by the local government in 2008.

Inside the main hall the datable layer is paint rather than clay: 190 square metres of murals, painted between 1708 and 1716 and damaged over the years since. The hall ranks third among the surviving Buddha halls of China, after Huayan Temple's in this city and Fengguo Temple's in Yi County, Liaoning, and its scale is what makes the painting hard to read from the door. The temple's dated stone is elsewhere, in the Sansheng Hall, where two Jin steles stand against the west wall: one of 1176, written by Zhu Bian, and one of 1190 carrying a text by the Tang writer Wang Bo.