Chongshan Temple in the Middle of Taiyuan

Behind the Taiyuan Confucian Temple, one hall of a much larger monastery survives in the middle of the city. Chongshan Temple covered 240 mu; in its Ming prime it held nearly a thousand rooms and six great halls on its central axis, and ranked first among the province's temples. The present layout is late. A fire in 1864 destroyed most of the complex, leaving the Ming Great Compassion Hall standing alone; in 1882 the Shanxi governor Zhang Zhidong turned the ruins at the front into the Taiyuan prefectural Confucian Temple and built a new mountain gate and bell and drum towers before the surviving hall. What you walk through today is therefore a nineteenth-century arrangement built around one medieval building. The hall is a national-level protected monument in its own right, listed in the seventh batch in 2013; the temple as a whole has held provincial protection since 1965.

The Great Compassion Hall is large: seven bays wide, five purlins deep and close to twenty metres high, under a double-eave hip-and-gable roof. Inside stand three Ming clay figures more than eight metres tall - an eleven-faced, thousand-armed, thousand-eyed Guanyin in the centre, the thousand-armed Samantabhadra on the left and Manjusri on the right. The hall was the fifth of the six on the temple's axis and the second in size after the nine-bay main Buddha hall, which did not survive. The scale is what the eye takes in first: painted and glazed figures eight metres high, standing in a darkened timber frame. The temple also keeps a large number of precious Buddhist scripture woodblock prints from the Song, Yuan and Ming, and on New Year's Eve many people from the city come to strike the bell here.

Chongshan has worn several names, and they record what happened to it. The written account traces it to the early Tang, when it was the palace of Emperor Yang of Sui, and it first appears as White Horse Temple; it was later called Yanshou Temple, then Zongshan Temple, and for the longest stretch Xinsi, before the Jiajing era of the Ming brought the name Chongshan, meaning honouring goodness. The change came with the Ming expansion of 1381, when the Prince of Jin rebuilt the temple on the site in memory of his mother, the Empress Ma. The same pattern is visible across the city: the Jin Shrine began as the shrine of Tang Shuyu, became the Shrine of the Prince of Jin, and was only later called Jin Shrine. In both cases the name records who was being remembered.