Three teachings on one climb

From the Mahavira Hall up twenty-four steps

Gao Temple stands at the north edge of Zhongwei’s old street grid, in Shapotou District, just north of the junction of Gulou North Street and Tuanjie Road. The complex is also called Gao Temple–Bao’an Temple, and it sits north of the old county seat. It was founded in the Yongle reign of the Ming, from 1403 to 1424. Later generations enlarged it, and by the Qing it was a large compound.

The path is one axis. The south-facing Bao’an Temple has side rooms and a Mahavira Hall, the main hall of the Buddhas, under a single-eave hip-and-gable roof. Behind that hall, 24 steps rise through an archway, the South Heaven Gate, and a middle tower, and come to a three-storey hall of the Five Marchmounts, the five sacred peaks, together with the Jade Emperor and the Holy Mother. Off the axis stand the bell tower, the drum tower, the civil tower, the military tower, and the halls of Lingguan, a Daoist guardian, and Ksitigarbha, a bodhisattva. Nearly a hundred rooms occupy a platform of a little more than 2,000 square metres. The roofs change as the eye moves up: hip-and-gable, pyramidal, cross-gable, and helmet.

Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian rooms

Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian rooms share this one axis. In the same building group are Buddhas and bodhisattvas, the Jade Emperor, the Holy Mother, Wenchang, the deity associated with letters, and Guan Yu, the general later worshipped as a guardian. The lower hall is the Mahavira Hall. The upper storeys hold the Five Marchmounts, the Jade Emperor, and the Holy Mother. Wenchang and Guan Yu belong to the same complex, so the climb is a shared house of images and a shared stair.

A brick arch of the Xianfeng reign of the Qing carries a couplet to the effect that Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist deliverance all passes through here. The line matches the walk. A person climbs one axis, from the Buddhist rooms at the foot of the steps toward the Daoist rooms above, and meets the three teachings as successive doors in a single compound. The address is the street corner north of Gulou North Street, on the drum-tower side of the old grid.

A protected building, and paint that was replaced

In 2013 the temple entered the region’s seventh batch of national key cultural relics, a list of seventeen sites. The ancient building is named there as Zhongwei Gao Temple, Qing through the Republican period, in Shapotou District, Zhongwei. The tourism directory marks it the same way, as a national-level protected cultural relic. The period on that 2013 national-relic list runs from the Qing into the Republic.

More than 1,700 painted statues, and many paintings, were damaged. Later replacement statues are not the damaged originals, and they do not match what was lost. The climb is still the sequence of roofs, steps, and named halls. The colour a visitor sees on the statues is that later work. The building to read is the one on the north edge of the drum-tower streets: a temple axis in the district seat, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian rooms stacked along one approach.