Xiantong Temple and Its Bronze Hall

Xiantong Temple fills the centre of Taihuai Town, a walled quarter of courtyards rather than a single building: more than 400 structures, with seven main halls on the central axis in a fixed order, from the Guanyin Hall through the Great Manjushri Hall, the Great Buddha Hall, the Wuliang Hall, the Qianbo Hall and the Copper Hall to the Buddhist Texts Library. It is the largest and oldest monastery on the mountain, and the head of its Chinese monasteries. It began in 68 AD as the Dafu Lingjiu Temple; the Tang emperor Taizong rebuilt it as the Great Huayan Temple. In 1982 the State Council listed it in the second group of national key cultural relic protection units.

The Copper Hall stands near the top of the axis, and it is what its name says: a square building assembled from cast bronze, with a double-eaved hip-and-gable roof, 8.3 metres high, 4.7 wide and 4.5 deep, made with 100,000 jin of the metal. Its walls carry ten thousand small Buddha figures. It was cast in 1610, the thirty-eighth year of the Wanli reign. Earlier on the axis the Wuliang Hall makes the same argument in another material: built of blue brick without a pillar or a beam, two storeys high, 28.2 metres across and 20.3 metres tall, its interior three brick vaults under a roof that imitates timber.

The bronze room is small and tall, and the proportions do the work. A hall 4.7 metres wide and 4.5 deep, raised to 8.3, is a box rather than a room, and the metal closes it on every side; light comes in at the door and does not travel far. What the walls hold is the point. Ten thousand small figures cover them, cast in rows set close enough that the surface reads as a grid, so that below eye level the wall is a crowd and above it a pattern. Bronze here is not a finish laid on wood but the structure itself, and it keeps the cold of the mountain. In the bell tower hangs the largest bronze bell on the mountain, 9,999.5 jin, cut with more than ten thousand characters of scripture.