The temple stands on Phoenix Hill, west of the Xixian county seat, facing east and climbing the slope in two courts. It is small by the standards of Shanxi's monasteries, and the smallness is the point: the buildings are fitted to the hill, most of them two storeys because there is little room, and the paths between them turn and narrow. The upper court holds the Mahavira hall with the halls of Manjusri, Samantabhadra and Beiji and a shrine to the horse god; the lower court has the Wuliang hall, the Weituo hall, the Moyun pavilion, an eight-trigram pavilion and bell and drum towers. In 1996 it was listed in the fourth national batch, number 4-0134-3-056.
From the journal
Xiaoxitian: Colour and Craft in a Small Temple
A late Ming temple on Phoenix Hill in Xixian, where a five-bay hall holds more than 1,900 clay figures in suspended relief, begun under the last Ming emperor and finished under the first Qing.
In the same city · Linfen ↗A small temple, bright figures
Where the colour comes from
The colour is inside. The Mahavira hall is five bays wide and six rafters deep, under a single-eave overhanging gable roof, and its interior is filled with more than 1,900 figures in clay, modelled against the walls and beams and standing out from them in relief. The technique is suspended sculpture, as the Chinese term has it: figures fastened to the structure rather than set on the floor, so that the hall becomes one crowded composition rising toward the ceiling. They are counted among the finest of the seventeenth century, and the claim made for them is that no other group of the kind equals them. What the eye takes in is the density: painted clay and gilding in a space not much larger than a village hall.
The makers
The record keeps the dates and loses the names. Work on the figures began in the Chongzhen reign, in the last years of the Ming, and was finished in the Shunzhi reign, after the Qing had taken the throne, so the same hall was completed by craftsmen working for a different dynasty. The building itself is earlier: it was raised in the last years of the Ming, and no year is given for it. The figures are therefore better dated than the hall they stand in. What is certain is the continuity. Work that began under one dynasty was carried to its end under another, and the hall was finished with all of its figures in place.