Famen Temple (法门寺)

Why Go

Found by Accident, Then Built Over

1. The crypt was found because the building failed

Almost everything on this site is here because of a collapse. The brick pagoda that stood over the crypt was a Ming tower, and in 1981, after heavy rain, half of it came down. When the foundations were cleared in 1987 the work exposed a sealed stone chamber underneath, untouched since the Tang court closed it in the ninth century.

What was inside makes the accident important. Four finger-bone relics, each in its own container. Sets of caskets built one inside another, from plain boxes at the outside through silver and gilt to small jewelled ones, ending in a miniature pagoda. Porcelain of a type known from Tang poetry and not previously identified with confidence among surviving pieces. Bolts of silk, some woven with gold thread. And a stone tablet listing what had been deposited, which allowed the objects to be matched against a Tang inventory item by item, which almost never happens.

The pagoda has since been rebuilt, so the tower in the photograph below is younger than the excavation. That is worth stating plainly, because a visitor standing in the courtyard is looking at a 1980s brick tower in a Ming form, above a Tang chamber, at a temple founded long before either. Nothing standing on this site is as old as the chamber that was buried under it, and that chamber was the one part nobody could see.

2. What the relic built

A few hundred metres from the old courtyard the ground opens into a paved plaza on the scale of an airport apron, with reflecting pools down the middle and a structure at the end shaped as two hands pressed together, in orange and gold, with a gilded pagoda standing in the gap between the palms. It was finished in 2009. It is visible from a long way out across the wheat fields, and it is where the relic is shown on ceremonial occasions.

Foreign visitors tend to arrive with a ready opinion about this, and the opinion is usually too simple. The building is unquestionably enormous, expensive and new, and it sits in farmland in a county most Chinese people could not place on a map. It is also a fairly exact continuation of what the Tang court did here. The crypt exists because emperors spent extraordinary sums escorting this relic to the capital and back, with processions, and buried the proceeds of that devotion under a tower. The scale was always the point.

There is even a contemporary objection on record. In 819 the official Han Yu submitted a memorial to the throne arguing against receiving the bone into the palace, in terms blunt enough to get him exiled to the far south. The argument between spectacle and scepticism at this site is twelve hundred years old and was being conducted by Chinese people long before any foreign visitor had a view on it. The court Han Yu was writing to sat at the Daming Palace, which is the other end of the same road.

Orientation

Two Ends of One Site

The site has a modern end and an old end. Arrival is at the modern one: a ticket hall, the plaza, and the joined-hands tower at the head of it. The old temple courtyard, with the rebuilt pagoda and the halls in use, is several hundred metres away, and the museum holding the crypt finds is beside it. Buggies run between them and the walk is flat and dull.

The order that works is museum first, then the temple courtyard, then the modern complex last. Understanding what came out of the ground makes the rest legible, and doing it the other way round means meeting the 2009 complex before the reason it was built.

Context

A Bone, an Empire, and an Argument

Relics are the physical economy of Buddhism: fragments of the historical Buddha, real or believed, around which monasteries were founded and rulers competed. The Tang state took this seriously, and it did so at court. On a cycle of decades the finger bone kept here was escorted to the capital, received by the emperor, displayed, and returned, and each round trip left behind a deposit of imperial gifts. The crypt is the accumulated record of those visits, sealed for the last time in the ninth century.

What that means for a visitor is that the objects in the museum are not temple furniture. They are court goods, made in imperial workshops to the standard of the palace, and their survival in a sealed chamber with a written inventory beside them gives an unusually exact picture of what Tang luxury looked like. Most of what is known about this period comes from tombs, texts and fragments. Here a complete deposit was opened at once.

The argument came with it. Buddhism was foreign, it was expensive, and it took men out of the tax rolls and into monasteries, and Confucian officials said so. Han Yu’s memorial of 819 against bringing the bone into the palace is among the sharpest pieces of writing in Chinese on the subject, and it cost him his post. Within a few decades the state had turned on the monasteries in a general suppression, and the crypt was closed not long after. Standing on the plaza in front of a gilded building the height of a tower block, it is worth remembering that a Chinese official made the obvious objection to all of this in writing, twelve centuries ago, and lost.

Where to Base

Xi’an (西安)

Xi’an is the base for this, at about two hours by road. There is little reason to stay nearer unless the trip continues west, and Baoji, the prefecture city, is an industrial centre rather than a place to spend an evening.

Because the site lies away from the Terracotta Army and the other eastern sights, it is worth pairing with something on the same side of the city rather than squeezing it into a day that also crosses Xi’an. The temple is the reason a visitor goes west at all.