Qingyang Palace (Green Ram Temple), Chengdu成都青羊宫
- Type
- Temples and Abbeys (Gongguan)
- Location
- China · Sichuan · Chengdu · No. 9, Section 2, West First Ring Road, Qingyang District, beside Baihuatan
- Coordinates
- 30.666, 104.043 Map ↗
- School
- Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) Daoism, Longmen (Dragon Gate) Lineage of Quanzhen
- First built
- Zhou (traditionally the Green Ram Market); Qingyang Gong was built by imperial decree in 883, the 3rd year of the Zhonghe era, Tang · Traditionally the site where Laozi told Yin Xi, 'seek me a thousand days hence at the Green Ram Market in Chengdu'; Emperor Xizong of Tang, taking refuge in Chengdu, gave it the name Qingyang Palace; destroyed in the Ming and rebuilt in the sixth year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing (1667)
- Heritage status
- Sichuan Provincial Cultural Heritage Site (2002)National Key Daoist Temple (1983)
Overview
The Qingyang Palace (Green Ram Temple) is one of the largest and oldest Daoist temples in Southwest China. Tradition holds that Laozi arranged to meet the Guardian of the Pass, Yin Xi (Guan Yin), 'a thousand days hence at the Green Ram Market in Chengdu'; a Green Ram Market already existed in the Han dynasty, and it was called the Green Ram Temple by the Jin. In the third year of the Zhonghe era of the Tang (883), when Emperor Xizong took refuge in Shu from the rebellion of Huang Chao, he ordered the temple built by imperial decree and gave it its present name; Du Guangting once resided and wrote here. It was destroyed by warfare at the end of the Ming and rebuilt in the sixth year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing (1667), taking the layout it has today: a mountain gate, the Hall of the Divine Ancestor, the Hunyuan Hall, the Bagua Pavilion, the Sanqing Hall, the Doumu Hall, and the Hall of the Tang King arranged along the central axis. The Bagua Pavilion is a Qing-dynasty double-eaved octagonal pavilion, and a pair of bronze rams before the Sanqing Hall — one of them a single-horned ram combining the twelve zodiac animals, cast in the first year of the Yongzheng reign of the Qing — are treasures that guard the temple. The palace houses more than 13,000 woodblocks of the Daozang jiyao printed during the Guangxu era of the Qing, the only complete set of woodblocks for a Daoist textual collection surviving in China. It was designated a National Key Daoist Temple in 1983, and the Sichuan Provincial Taoist Association is headquartered here; the annual Flower Fair on the fifteenth day of the second lunar month (the Qingyang Palace Flower Market) is a traditional festival of Chengdu.
Highlights
- Bronze rams before the Sanqing Hall
- Bagua Pavilion
- Woodblocks of the Daozang jiyao
- Hall of the Tang King
- The Flower Fair