Urban Family

The Most Precarious House in China, Tottering but Standing there for 1,500 Years

By Peter Chen, 2019-03-22 12:33:56

The Most Precarious House in China, Tottering but Standing there for 1,500 Years

What can we Chinese be best at? Work wonders! World-famous wonders include number one population around the globe, the Great Wall said to be visible on the moon, and the theory that man is an integral part of the nature etc. Today, we are going to talk about the most precarious house in the world!

There are two houses in China. One is located at Tayun Mountain, 35 kilometers southwest of Zhen’an County, Shaanxi Province. On the golden peak lies the Hall of Guanyin (referring to the Goddess of Mercy, or Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit) with an area of less than six square meters. Three walls of the Hall stand on the cliff with bottomless chasms down there for almost 500 years. Whenever there is sunshine, golden lights are everywhere. Looking afar, the temple, blue sky and white clouds, all blended into one harmonious whole like a fairyland we can ever imagine.

However, what we are going to introduce to you is another place named Xuankong Si (literally, Xuankong Si means Hanging Temple), located in Hunyuan County, Shanxi Province. It is a unique monastery syncretized with Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. Built in Late Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534AD), it has a history of 1,500 years. As the legend goes, the origin of the temple is quite odd, ‘it is hung in the middle of the sky and hoisted by three horsetails.’ Until now people still cannot figure out why the ancients had to build this kind of temple at such an extraordinary place.

Xuankong Si is only 70 kilometers away from Datong City, Shanxi Province, where you can find some tourist buses and more car rentals for the tour. The monastery is built on a precipice 60 meters above the ground. Look afar, it were like floating in the sky beyond the earth’s gravity. Xu Xiake, a legend traveler of Ming Dynasty, marveled at ‘the grand view of the universe’. And it was also listed by Time magazine as ‘One of the Top 10 Precarious Buildings in the World’.

As we all know, geological conditions in Shanxi Province is not stable. Over 1,500 years, 41 Halls of Xuankong Si have gone through numerous earthquakes, landslides and torrential rains, and in the recent 50 years, Hunyuan County where the temple is located has suffered two times of earthquake higher than six magnitude on Richter scale, the worst of which had destroyed one third of the county buildings. However, Xuankong Si was miraculously intact.

Tourists coming here are all curious at how such a big complex can cling to a vast rock face at the foot of Mt. Hengshan? At the very beginning, people believed that the temple must be propped up by 30 pieces of red logs sustaining the pavilions and plank paths. But soon after, researchers found out among the 30 vertical logs, some were even movable! Besides, the thinnest one has a diameter of only 10 centimeters, simply not strong enough to support 10-ton buildings.

So, what will be the answer? Not until the late 1990s that the experts began to find out the real supporters were the wooden crossbeams sized at 50cm in diameter. They were fitted into holes chiseled into the rock but like its natural protrusions in no way they can be taken out. It was just these vertical logs and crossbeams jointly form a strong support system, holding up a miracle of the Chinese people.

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