Yonghe Temple

The tallest figure in Yonghe Temple, the Lama Temple of Beijing, rises 18 metres under the roof of the last great hall: a standing Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, carved from one trunk of white sandalwood, with roughly another eight metres of the same log sunk into the ground to hold it upright. It closes a sequence of five great halls strung along a north–south axis almost half a kilometre long, each set in its own courtyard and each a little more richly furnished than the last. Bronze Buddhas of past, present and future fill the main hall, and a hill of five hundred arhats worked in red sandalwood shares a hall with a large image of Tsongkhapa, founder of the Gelug school to which the monastery still belongs.

The compound began life not as a temple but as a prince's house. Work started in 1694 on a mansion for Yinzhen, the fourth son of the Kangxi Emperor, and the boy who would become the Qianlong Emperor was born here in 1711. When Yinzhen took the throne in 1722 as the Yongzheng Emperor, his old home was raised to the rank of a palace. His son later handed it over to Tibetan Buddhism: in 1744 Qianlong turned the palace into a lamasery, gave its roofs the yellow tiles reserved for the emperor, and filled it with monks from Tibet and Mongolia. For the rest of the Qing period it served as the court's centre for managing the Lama clergy, a role spelled out on a stele of 1792 in which Qianlong set down his views on how reincarnated lamas should be chosen, carved in Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan and Mongolian.

That mixture of worlds is what makes the place so striking. The layout, gateways and glazed roofs are those of a Chinese imperial residence, while the images, murals, ritual and incense belong to Tibetan practice, and the halls between them blend the two. Beijing itself, capital of China for most of the last seven centuries, grew around the walled imperial city; the temple stands in its north-eastern quarter, close to where the Second Ring Road now traces the line of the demolished city wall, a short walk from the Confucius Temple and the old Imperial Academy.

Getting there

The temple lies in Dongcheng District, about 4.5 km from the centre of Beijing. Yonghegong Lama Temple station, served by Lines 2 and 5 of the Beijing Subway, is at its gate. The nearest airport is Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK), about 21.5 km away.