Chongfu Temple in Shuozhou and Its Jin Halls

Chongfu Temple stands on Dongdajie, East Street, in the Shuocheng District of Shuozhou, one of the main streets of the old town, on the Sanggan plain. The temple belongs to the Pure Land school, the tradition centred on Amitabha, and it has carried three names: Linya Temple at its foundation, Chongfu Chan Temple after the Jin change, and Chongfu today. The founding is dated to 665, the second year of Linde under Tang Gaozong. The city around it is older than the temple and older than its name: Shuozhou's site was the frontier town of Mayi, a trading post between China and the Xiongnu, where Chinese troops tried to ambush the Xiongnu in 133 BC.

The hall to walk to is the one dedicated to Amitabha. It is seven bays wide and eight rafters deep, measured at 41.32 metres by 22.7 metres, and it was built in 1143, the third year of Huangtong under the Jin; most of the fabric from the base to the top is still that twelfth-century work. What fills it is paint. Three hundred and twenty-seven square metres of murals survive, and apart from a very few patched passages they are Jin originals. On the south wall, in the westernmost bay, a thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Guanyin with eighteen faces stands 4.68 metres high, the tallest figure of its kind surviving in China. The Guanyin Hall beside it is also recorded as Jin.

A temple like this one was a store as much as a shrine, and what Chongfu keeps is mostly its painted interior. The walls of the Amitabha Hall hold the 327 square metres of painting, the great Guanyin fills the western end of the south wall, and the timber frame that has carried both since the twelfth century is still in place. The two Jin halls are noted for their sculpture and their wall painting, but it is the dated record — the campaign of 1143, the measurements, the height of the Guanyin — that lets a visitor read the hall as one piece of work rather than a collection of objects. In 1988 the temple was named in the third batch of national key cultural relics.