Jing'an Temple

Jing’an Temple (静安寺, Jìng’ān Sì) is a working Buddhist temple at 1686 West Nanjing Road, standing over the metro interchange that takes its name. It is an easy stop between shopping streets, and most of what you see has been rebuilt in recent decades.

The temple’s own stele, the Chiwu stele, puts its founding in 247, under the name Hudu Chongxuan Temple (沪渎重元寺), on the north bank of the Wusong River, which Shanghai now calls Suzhou Creek. It took the name Jing’an in 1008 and moved to its present site in 1216, after the river began to undermine the old foundations. Those dates come from the temple’s inscription as reported by Chinese Wikipedia, so treat the earliest ones as tradition rather than archaeology.

Most of what stands today is recent. Taiping forces destroyed the temple in 1860, and it was rebuilt in 1880 with money from Hu Xueyan (胡雪岩) and others. Its birthday fair, on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, drew crowds every year until 1963. The temple also shaped the city around it. In 1862 the foreign settlements built a racecourse road out to it, which became Jing’an Temple Road and later West Nanjing Road. The Public Settlement reached it in 1899, and the first Shanghai tram line ran from here in 1908.

In 1953 the monk Chisong set up a Zhenyan altar, making the temple a centre of Tangmi, the esoteric Buddhist tradition. After 1966 its statues and ritual objects were destroyed and the buildings became a plastic factory, and the main hall burned in 1972. The State Council named it a national key Buddhist temple in 1983. It partly reopened in 1990, and the main hall and jade Buddha were consecrated in May 1991.

Older things survive among the rebuilt halls. A bronze bell cast in 1369 is the temple’s treasure, and English Wikipedia gives its weight as 3.5 tons. In the Jade Buddha Hall sits a jade Buddha about 3.8 metres high (Chinese Wikipedia says 3.87), described as the largest seated jade Buddha in China. The Guanyin Hall holds a camphor-wood Guanyin 6.2 metres tall. More recent additions include a 15-ton silver Buddha installed in December 2009 and the Jing’an Pagoda, completed in 2010.

For visiting, the metro station sits right beside the temple, on Lines 2, 7 and 14. A tourist website lists opening at about 07:30 to 17:00 and a ticket of about 50 yuan, but no official page was found, so check at the gate.