Statue of the Maitreya Buddha, Yonghe Temple

            The Wanfu Pavilion is the northernmost of the five halls of the Yonghe Temple in Beijing. It contains the statue of the Buddha Maitreya, said to have been carved from a single precious white sandalwood log from Nepal. It is the biggest wooden Buddha in the world, reaching 18 metres in height but also extending 8 metres below ground level, and 8 metres wide. The seventh Dalai Lama gifted the Qianlong Emperor with the sandalwood in the 1750s.

A site of both mass tourism and intense religious devotion, the Yonghe Temple is one of Beijing’s most significant historical landmarks, and a great survival of the golden age of peace and prosperity that marked the early part of the Qing Dynasty in the late 17th and 18th Centuries. This complex is located on a tight urban land footprint, and contains five main halls on a series of courtyards.

The Yonghe Temple (Chinese: 雍和宮 or yōnghé gōng, “Palace of Peace and Harmony”), also known as the Yonghe Lamasery, or popularly as the Lama Temple, is a temple and monastery of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism located on 12 Yonghegong Street, Beijing’s Dongcheng Borough, around 4 km north-east of the Forbidden City. The building and artwork of the temple is a combination of Han Chinese and Tibetan styles. This building is one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in China proper. The current abbot is Lama Hu Xuefeng. Yonghe Temple was the highest Buddhist temple in the country during the middle and late Qing dynasty.

Building work on the Yonghe Temple started in 1694 during the Qing dynasty on the site where an official residence for court eunuchs of the Ming dynasty originally stood. It was then converted into the residence of Yinzhen (Prince Yong), the fourth son of the Kangxi Emperor in 1702-3In 1711, Hongli, the fourth son of Yongzheng, the future Qianlong Emperor, was born in the East Academy in this building.

Prince Yong ascended the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor in 1722, and the palace was renamed the ‘Palace of Peace and Harmony’ (雍和宫). After the Yongzheng Emperor’s death in 1735, his coffin was placed in the temple from 1735 to 1737. In 1744, the Qianlong Emperor issued an edict of converting the Palace of Peace and Harmony into a lamasery.

Subsequently, the monastery became a residence for large numbers of Tibetan Buddhist monks from Mongolia and Tibet, and so the Yonghe Lamasery became the national centre of Lama administration. Since 1792, with the foundation of the Golden Urn, the Yonghe Temple also became a place for the Qing dynasty to exert control over the Tibetan and Mongolian lama reincarnations.

The temple was the site of an armed revolt against the Chinese Nationalist government in 1929.

After the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949, the temple was declared a national monument and closed for the following 32 years. It is said to have survived the Cultural Revolution due to the intervention of Premier Zhou Enlai. Reopened to the public in 1981, it is today both a functioning temple and highly popular tourist attraction in the city.

This description incorporates text from the English Wikipedia.

Taken in: China / Beijing / Dongcheng District (show map)

Taken on: October 4, 2024

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