The Hanging Temple at Mount Heng was built along a rock face, combining wooden beams and columns with the cliff to create its distinctive appearance. The slender columns visible in photographs are not its only supports; stability depends on the whole structure. Ancient architecture cannot be understood from a photograph's surface impression alone.
Historical background
The Hanging Temple, also Hengshan Hanging Temple, Hanging Monastery or Xuankong Temple is a temple built into a cliff (75 m or 246 ft above the ground) near Mount Heng in Hunyuan County, Datong City, Shanxi Province, China. The closest city is Datong, 64 kilometres (40 mi) to the northwest. Along with the Yungang Grottoes, the Hanging Temple is one of the main tourist attractions and historical sites in the Datong area. Built more than 1,500 years ago, this temple is notable not only for its location on a sheer precipice but also because as a Buddhist temple it also contains references to the other two of the three Chinese traditional philosophies or religions: Taoism, and Confucianism.
The structure is kept in place with oak crossbeams fitted into holes chiseled into the cliffs. The main supportive structure is hidden inside the bedrock. The monastery is located in the small canyon basin, and the body of the building hangs from the middle of the cliff under the prominent summit, protecting the temple from rain erosion and sunlight bake.
History
According to legend, construction of the temple was started at the end of the Northern Wei dynasty by only one man, a monk named Liaoran, in 491 AD. Hanging Temple, located in Hunyuan County, Datong City, Shanxi Province, China, is a temple integrating Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. It has a history of more than 1,400 years. The entire temple was built into a cliff face on the west side of Jinxia Gorge, approximately 75 meters (246 feet) above the ground. It relies on 27 wooden beams to support all the main temple buildings. The temple is also reinforced with iron chains and beams to enhance its stability. From a distance, it looks like it is hanging in the air.
Accounts of the temple's beginnings connect it with the Northern Wei period, but the traditions concerning its founder and royal sponsorship are not identical. They should not be combined into one certain sequence of events. The surviving structure supplies a different kind of evidence. Beams anchored into the rock, connected timber buildings, and supporting columns show how the temple occupies the cliff face. Its appearance of suspension comes from the relationship between those structural elements and the steep setting. Studying that relationship provides a firmer explanation of the architectural curiosity than treating a founding legend as a complete construction record.
Conservation
Due to its precarious location and exposure to the elements, the Hanging Temple requires regular maintenance and conservation efforts to ensure its structural integrity and preservation. In September 2015, the China Cultural Heritage Administration officially approved the project for the restoration of paintings and oil decorations in the Hanging Temple, and the overhaul project of the Hanging Temple scenic area began. It was not reopened to the public until May 2016.
The entire 40 halls and pavilions are all built on cliffs which are over 30 metres (98 ft) from the ground. The distance from north to south is longer than from east to west and it becomes higher and higher from the gate in the south to north along the mountain. The temple can be divided into a northern and southern section.