The Temple of Yao in Linfen

The temple began on the west bank. It was founded in the Western Jin, on the west side of the Fen, and only in 658, the third year of the Xianqing era of the Tang, was it moved to the east bank, where it still stands, at Yaomiao village in the southern suburbs of Yaodu District. The move is the oldest dated event in its history, and it fixed the temple on the east side for the rest of its life. What stands today is the product of that move and of what came after. The site has been a protected site of Shanxi province since May 1965, entered in the first provincial batch as a historic building, number 1-115.

The main hall, Guangyun Hall, has had the most eventful recent history. It was repaired in 1984, when Feng Dongqing of the Shanxi Research Institute for the Conservation of Ancient Buildings rebuilt it in an imitation Ming style on the basis of the old and decayed hall, and the work was finished in July 1987. In the early hours of 4 April 1998 the hall was set on fire; the blaze was put out around nine in the morning, by which time the building had collapsed and the figures inside had burned. It was rebuilt in 1999. Around it the temple is a compound rather than a single building, with halls to Shun and Yu and a series of gateways along the axis.

Yao is the first of the sage rulers of the old texts, the emperor who handed the throne to Shun rather than to his son, and this temple is one of the places where that story is fixed in building. The connection to Linfen is old and argued over: Chinese archaeologists have held that Yao's capital stood in the city, which is why the central district is named Yaodu, and the walled site at Taosi, in Xiangfen County down the valley, is the excavation most often cited in support. The temple does not settle the question. It records a devotion - the earthquakes of 1303 and 1695, the fourteen years of repair after the second, the fires and rebuildings - rather than a biography.