Follow Wukong to Ancient Buildings: A Second Visit to Foguang Temple, Xinzhou.

This year, Shanxi's ancient buildings are open for photography, so I decided to visit Foguang Temple again during the National Day holiday! As Foguang Temple is one of the filming locations for the popular game "Black Myth: Wukong," the number of visitors this year is several times that of last year! However, as Foguang Temple is located outside the Wutai Mountain Scenic Area, transportation is inconvenient, and most visitors are self-driving tourists and tour groups, so the experience is not too bad. After discovering the East Hall of Foguang Temple in Wutai Mountain, Liang Sicheng called it "China's No. 1 National Treasure," and people learned that the East Hall of Foguang Temple is the largest existing Tang Dynasty wooden structure in China and the second oldest wooden structure after the Main Hall of Nanchan Temple in Wutai County. Its discovery disproved the assertion of Japanese scholars that "there are no wooden structures from the Tang Dynasty or earlier in China." "In addition to the Tang Dynasty wooden structure, the hall also contains more than ten Tang Dynasty Buddha and Bodhisattva statues, Tang Dynasty inscriptions under the beams, and Tang Dynasty murals on the walls. Any one of these four features is remarkable, but all four in one hall make it truly China's No. 1 National Treasure!" This is the praise of Liang Sicheng, a famous Chinese architect, for Foguang Temple in Wutai Mountain. The East Hall is the main hall of the temple, and its structure consists of three parts: the deep column network, the bracket layer, and the roof beam frame. The seven-bracket dougong is the most extensive and farthest-reaching example of its kind in existing Chinese ancient architecture, and it is the only example in China that combines Tang Dynasty architecture, painted sculptures, murals, inscriptions, and sutra pillars in one hall. Although the East Hall of Foguang Temple was built more than 70 years later than the Main Hall of Nanchan Temple, it is much larger in scale and has undergone very few changes during later renovations, so it is generally regarded as an example of Tang-style architecture in China.