Golden Temple

Location: Kunming

The Golden Temple, situated on Mingfeng Hill (the Hill of Singing Phoenixes), also called Yingwu Hill (the Parrot Hill) in the northeastern outskirts of Kunming, 7 kilometres away from the downtown area, is also known as Taihe Palace (the Hall of Supreme Harmony) and Tongwa Temple (the Bronze Tile Temple). The building is cast entirely in bronze weighing about 250 tons. The hills around the temple abound in evergreen pines and hardy cypresses, adding beauty to the superb scenery. This scenic wonderland, surrounded by verdant hills and enveloped by mists can be seen dimly from a distance. By the Qing Dynasty, the place had been acclaimed as the Fairyland of Mingfeng.

The Golden Temple is a Taoist temple. According to legends, during the reign of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, Chen Yongbin, the then governor of Yunnan, believed in Daoism. One day he dreamed about the immortal Lu Dongbin making an appointment with him to meet each other at the foot of Yingwushan Hill the next day. Shortly after the rooster crowed the next morning, Chen Yongbin stood there waiting, only to find an old herdsman leading a sheep with a rope and cooking taros down the hillside in an earthen pot with another pot as the lid. As he took a step forward to have a closer look, the old man disappeared all of a sudden and so did the rope-tied sheep. It suddenly dawned on Chen Yongbin that the two pots put together shaped like the Chinese character "Lu", alluding to the family name of the immortal. Besides, the character for rope is homonymous to the character for purity and the character for sheep is homonymous to the character for purity and the character for sheep is homonymous to the character for the yang. The immortal Lu Dongbin also styled himself as the Pure Yang. It was obvious that Lu was intentionally indicating to him that the scenery of Yingwu Hill was wonderful and that it was as good as an earthly paradise. Thereupon Chen Yongbin began to recruit workers to build an ideal temple here in the thirteenth year of the reign of Wanli (1602). As a result, the Memorial Hall of Immortal Lu, Taihegoing and Sangyuan Palace were constructed after the architectural style of Taihe Temple at the middle peak of the seventy two peaks of Wudang Mountains in Hubei Province. Since then this wonderland has become a famous Taoist shrine in Yunnan.