Guiyuan Si

The Guiyuan Si (Guiyuan Temple) is one of the famed Buddhist sanctuaries in the tripartite city of Wuhan. Built in the 17th century, it has a relatively short history. In 1658 (15th year of the Shunzhi reign, Qing Dynasty), two brothers from Zhejiang renounced the mundane world and became Buddhist novices. Devoted to the cause of providing the remains of dead people left in the wilderness with proper burials, they donated money to build a bodhimandala that they named the “Guiyuan (Returning to Where You Belong) Temple” to redeem these lost souls. At the beginning the temple was crudely furnished, but after more than two centuries of steady expansion and development, it eventually grew into a big monastery. However, it was destroyed when the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom uprising troops attacked Wuchang in 1852. It was not restored until the period from the Tongzhi reign to the Guangxu reign of the Qing Dynasty, only to be razed to the ground once again by the gunfire of the Qing army during the Revolution of 1911. After the war ended, it was repaired and restored once again.

The Guiyuan Temple is a 50,000-sq.-m complex with an impeccable layout and an original style in which architecture blends almost imperceptibly with landscaping. What is most attractive about this temple, however, is its Hall of 500 Arhats, in which the sculptures are richly variegated in imagery and facial expression but imbued with the same lifelike quality. On display in this temple are a good assortment of precious cultural artifacts that have been collected over the last three centuries.