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Ancient architects produce spectacular mountain temple
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悬空寺 （xuán kōng sì） The Hanging Temple
Xuankongsi, or the Hanging Temple, is a gem of ancient Chinese architecture that remains a popular tourist attraction today.
Built more than 1,500 years ago during the late Northern Wei Dynasty (AD 386-534), the temple protrudes from a steep cliff facing Hengshan Mountain about 65 kilometers southeast of today’s Datong City in Shanxi Province.
Built 60 to 90 meters above the ground, the cliff-hugging temple was built so that monks could hear “neither the cock crowing nor the dog barking.”
The location was carefully chosen. The structure was protected from rain or sunlight by a protruding peak above it. There were 40 halls and pavilions of different sizes in this wooden temple with a total floor space of 152.5 square meters. It sat entirely on beams half built into the cliff.
The builders first chiseled a number of holes in the rocks of the cliff and then hammered thick beams into the holes.
A wood wedge was half pounded into the end of each beam that would be inserted into the hole. Thus when the beam was driven into the hole and about to reach the end, the wedge began to move into the beam, turning it into a giant plug bolt.
This resulted in a solid foundation for the temple. Pillars and posts were then built to support the temple’s floors and roofs.
The construction of the temple combined several ancient Chinese architectural styles. Single, double and triple eaves were all used. The post and lintel method was used for the temple’s roofs.
Some of the rooms in the temple, which housed Buddhist and Taoist monks along with Confucian practitioners, were half wooden and half cave.
All rooms on different floors were connected with staircases and winding corridors. A few corridors were supported by wood poles that appear to be dangling in midair. But the “dangling poles” remain firm to provide support.
Looking from a distance, the temple resembles an exquisite relief sculpture hanging on a sheer cliff. A Chinese scholar once described it as a “temple hanging midair on three horse-tail hairs.”
In 2010, together with Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa, it was listed as one of the world’s top 10 most precarious buildings by Time magazine.
The temple today still houses more than 80 well-preserved statues made of bronze, iron, stone or clay.
There are several more “hanging” temples in other parts of the country, but none rival the spectacular Hanging Temple in Shanxi Province.
屋架 (wū jià) Truss
Wujia, or truss, is a framework of beams, rafters and posts forming a structure to support a roof. In ancient China, trusses were almost always made of wood.
Over thousands of years, Chinese trusses slowly developed distinct features. Chinese wooden trusses were mostly rectangular with tenon-and-mortise works and bracket sets while Western countries usually built triangular trusses.
Typically, ancient Chinese roofs were supported by beams and pillars rather than walls. Due to semi-rigid tenon-and-mortise works, such frameworks were better at shock absorption, which made such buildings safer in the event of an earthquake.
For example, during the devastating 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed more than 240,000 people in Tangshan City, about 170 kilometers east of Beijing, many buildings in the Chinese capital were damaged. However, little harm was done to the imperial palaces in the Forbidden City, which feature semi-rigid trusses.
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