Huayang Temple

Nestled within the picturesque Huayang Mountain Scenic Area stands a renowned ancient temple perpetually shrouded in curling incense smoke — Huayang Temple.

Also known as Xianyuan Baoxing Temple, Huayang Temple was erected during the Xining reign of the Song Dynasty. Its original site lay at Longshangyang in Thirty-Six Hollows of Huayang Mountain. Legend has it that a wandering monk from Jiuhua Mountain in Anhui founded the temple, which was later destroyed and rebuilt.

Since ancient times, Huayang Mountain has been revered locally as the "Ancestor Mountain" of Shunchang County, and Huayang Temple is accordingly dubbed the "Ancestral Temple of Huayang". The temple derives its name from the mountain, while the mountain gains spiritual vitality from the temple. It has long served as a sacred ancestral shrine where devout men and women come to pray for blessings, wealth and safety. The mountain woodlands around the temple were once protected under an official edict that ordered afforestation and banned felling and firewood gathering.

Huayang Temple flourished in the early Song Dynasty but fell into decline in the late Qing Dynasty. In the third year of the Xianfeng reign (1853), the Red Turban Army, the largest peasant rebel force in northern Fujian, rallied at Nine-Dragon Mountain to stage an uprising against the Qing government, building barracks and stockades with Thirty-Six Hollows as their base. After five years of suppression by Qing imperial troops, the rebel army was defeated. The devastation left a stretch of more than ten square kilometers around Huayang Mountain and Nine-Dragon Mountain completely desolate and uninhabited. Huayang Mountain suffered severe damage, the temple’s incense offerings ceased entirely, and it never recovered its former glory.

In 1958, the Nine-Dragon Mountain Logging Farm was established, with a work zone set up at Longshangyang. Dormitories were constructed on the ruins of Huayang Temple, and the entire temple complex was demolished completely.

In April 1994, to boost tourism development in Shunchang, Huayang Temple was reconstructed at a new site with support from the county government and all sectors of society. Monk Shi Weixiong, dispatched from Yunfeng Temple at Dragon Head Rock, presided over the reconstruction work. By November of the same year, the 200-square-meter Mahavira Hall with a double-eave hip-and-gable roof was completed, alongside a two-story timber-and-earth dining and guest house covering another 200 square meters.

Today, under collective preservation efforts, Huayang Temple has regained its former splendor. Boasting crimson walls and purple glazed tiles, the Mahavira Hall exudes solemnity, antiquity, elegance and gravitas. Inside the temple, incense coils endlessly and candles burn bright; outside, ancient trees enclose the compound amid lush green bamboo groves. Huayang Temple is not only a sacred pilgrimage site for believers to pray for good fortune, but also a core landmark attraction of Huayang Mountain Scenic Area.