Yunju Temple and Shijing Mountain

The area around the fabulous Yunju Temple complex is the site of a rather unusual undertaking for contemporary China. Rather than constructing a host of new buildings in the vicinity, workers are actually tearing down over 100 modern structures, and they won't be building new ones in their place.

This is all part of a plan to restore this ancient temple, sitting at the foot of Baidai Shan (Baidai Mountain) to something more like an "original" setting in order to have it designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Yunju is certainly worthy of the honor—for well over 1,000 years, it has served as the home of a remarkable collection of Buddhist sutras carved into stone tablets, steles and wood, kept safe, along with ancient manuscripts, as the tumultuous course of China's history saw one dynasty after another rise and fall.

About 70 kilometers from downtown Beijing, this "Beijing Dunhuang" presents visitors with a mixture of steles, pagodas—including the Jingta and Yunta pagodas, among Beijing's oldest—and Tang-era statues carved into cliffs. Yunju Temple was originally constructed under the leadership of a monk named Jingwan in the Sui Dynasty (581-618), and it continued to grow well into the Ming era (1368-1644).

All told, the complex houses some 14,000 pieces, along with artifact bones reputed to have belonged to Sakyamuni, recovered from a cave on Shijing Shan, where many religious relics were hidden during times of upheaval. Many today are to be found in the temple "palace," which is surrounded by monastery housing and pagodas.

 

 Introduction
The Yunju Temple is located in the Shiuto Village, Shangle Town southwest of Fangshan County in Beijing, which is 75 kilometers from Beijing downtown.The Yunju Temple is a famous ancient Buddhist temple located among the high mountain ridges in the suburb of Beijing. The temple was first built in the Sui Dynasty (581-618) by the eminent monk Jingwan from the Zhiquan Temple in Youzhou. At that time, there were a lot of monks and Buddhists in the temple, and all the halls were very magnificent and imposing with the forest of stone dagobas, making the temple very famous at that time. Originally all the halls were arranged in six courtyards with the middle, south and north routes. o­n the middle route stood the main hall of the temple, and o­n the south and north routes, the guesthouses and the temporary residence courtyards. Two towers of the Liao Dynasty (916-1125) stood by the side of the temple. During the Anti-Japanese War in modern time, the whole temple was destroyed except the North Tower of the Liao Dynasty and four towers built in the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
 

Highlights
All the four Tang pagodas are marked with the specific time of construction. The plane layout of the pagoda is a square of 7 layers. The body of the pagoda is carved with various Buddhist images, among which is the image of a foreign donator with deep eyes and high nose carved o­n the interior wall of the stone pagoda built in the 15th year (727) of the Kaiyuan reign of the Tang Dynasty. The clothing of the carving is quite brilliant with smooth strokes, reflecting the booming cultural exchange with foreign countries during the most prosperous Tang Dynasty. Nine Stone-Carved Sutra storage caves are located o­n the sutra hill to the northeast of the temple, where hide 4,195 pieces of scripture stone carvings carved during the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907) and at the end of Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). Among them, the most famous o­ne -- the Leiyin Cave -- houses four stone columns, each of which has several hundred basso-relievo small josses, and the josses o­n the four columns total over o­ne thousand, so they are also called as thousand Buddha columns. 146 flagstones with scriptures carved by the eminent monk Jingwan of the Sui Dynasty, who built the Yunju Temple, are kept in the cave and all of them are mounted o­n the walls of the cave. Besides the nine caves, another sutra-storage cave was found in 1956 near the south pagoda, and 10,082 flagstones carved with 3,400 volumes of scriptures were excavated, making it the biggest extant storage place for stone-carved Buddhist Sutras in China. Since the stone-carved Sutras are original and have very few errors, they are very important and valuable for correcting errors in other editions. They are also very precious materials for the research into the history of Chinese Buddhism, arts, and architecture as well as the social politics, economics, culture and folk customs.
Traffic
Bus No.917, Tourist Bus No.10 to Yunju Si
Yunju temple fee and opening hours
Admission: 30yuan, Shijing hill 10yuan, Ropeway return 30yuan
Tips
There are many very rare cultural relics like stone dagoba, steles of the late Liao Dynasty around the Yunju Temple. The buildings of the famous Tang Pagoda, the Sutra-Insolating Platform, etc., are very exquisite and hold a very important position in the Chinese history of ancient architectural research.