Shuanggui: the temple of two osmanthus trees

The name is the simplest fact about the temple and the one that survived. Shuanggui means two osmanthus, and the house was founded in 1653, the tenth year of Shunzhi, by the Chan master Poshan Haiming, who built it as Fuguo Temple. The two trees in the compound gave it the name it kept. From 1653 to 1926 it passed through seven generations of abbots, including Poshan and Zhuchan, and grew to seven halls, eight tang and eight courts. In the Republican period it was called the first of the Shu monasteries and the ancestral court of south-western Chan, and in 1983 the State Council confirmed it as a national key Buddhist temple of the Han Chinese area.

The plan is a line, not a cluster. The temple faces east and is built of brick and timber, with seven buildings along its axis, and more than three hundred side rooms and monks' quarters joined by long corridors on either side. The Mahavira Hall is 25 metres wide, 19 metres deep and 10 metres high, carried on 72 stone pillars, and it was renovated three times, in 1758, 1822 and 1889. Among the buildings are the shanmen, the Mahavira Hall, the Maitreya Hall and the Five Hundred Arhats Hall, the last built in 1998. The temple holds a set of the Buddhist canon given by the Yongzheng emperor.

In April 1968 a factory moved from Beijing into the temple and the monks were driven out; in the years that followed troops were stationed there and the buildings were damaged. What saved the images was a decision by Abbot Miaotan, who bought matting, wrapped the statues, whitewashed them and wrote quotations in red paint over the surface, so that the hall read as a political display rather than a shrine. The ruse held. The temple was repaired, and on 5 March 2013 it was listed in the seventh batch of national key cultural relics, with the halls, the stone inscriptions and the canon protected together.