Tayuan Temple and Its White Pagoda

The Great White Pagoda is a stupa, and the temple grew around it rather than the other way round: the ground began as the stupa court of Xiantong Temple. The present pagoda was built in 1302, the sixth year of the Dade reign of the Yuan, to the design of Aniko, a craftsman from Nepal. It is Tibetan in form, a rectangular base carrying a bulbous body, brick-built and coated outside with lime, which gives it the white colour; it stands 75.3 metres to the top. Above the body rise thirteen rings, then a metal finial with copper eaves that carry wind bells. In 1983 the temple was named a national key Buddhist temple in the Han Chinese area.

The compound covers 15,000 square metres and holds more than 130 halls and houses, and almost all of them are grey: brick, tile, stone. The pagoda is the exception, and its lime coating is renewed so that it stays white, which is why it can be picked out from the far side of the valley. The main hall on the axis, the Great Compassion Hall, was built in 1578 for the Wanli emperor's mother, Empress Li, five bays wide and 27.4 metres across. In 1589 the Wanli emperor granted the temple a plaque and it became a separate monastery, no longer a court of Xiantong. East of the great pagoda stands a smaller white one, the Manjushri Hair Pagoda.

The yard around the base is kept open, and that is what a stupa needs: room to walk. The circuit is short, a few minutes at an unhurried pace, past the base and the lower drum of the body, with the white surface always on the inside of the turn. Walking around a stupa is the old act of respect in Buddhism, and the paving here is broad enough for a crowd to do it at once. In the pavilion behind the pagoda, a revolving sutra repository stands 11.3 metres high in thirty-three octagonal tiers, with more than twenty thousand volumes of scripture in Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan on its shelves. Turning such a case by hand is the same act at another scale, and it is still done.