5.0Houtu Temple(1 review) - Easily one of the most underrated places of interest in Shanxi Wednesday: 8:30 AM - 6:00 PM Architectural Buildings • Religious Sites
Not surprised to see that there's yet any reviews of this place--I was the only visitor there when I visited last month. Entrance is free, but you'd have to sign in at the gate. I entered the temple about 12pm, and the last visitor before me signed in at 10:30. But this temple is genuinely impressive, and being untouristed certainly helped. The scale of the temple easily trumps those in the inner cities of Taigu, Qixian and Pingyao. This is a Taoist temple dedicated to Houtu 后土, a deity of the land. Most of the buildings remaining today in the temple date back a few centuries, and unlike similar temples elsewhere in the country, it survived such things as the Cultural Revolution and other events of that time period quite completely. Most of the stone tablets erected in the Ming and Qing Dynasties survive (and not enclosed in glass boxes). The temple itself doesn't seem to have been restored too excessively. The main hall of the temple date back about a millennia (Song or Jin Dynasty, if I remembered correctly), and incredibly intricately decorated, and do pause a moment to admire the structure of its wooden roof, and the performance stage opposite the building. Some of the comparatively recent buildings surrounding them are all decorated to a similar level of intricacy. Jiexiu isn't much of a tourist city, but several of the counties it borders are. Thus, if you ever happen to travel between, say, Pingyao and Lingshi, I highly recommend a short stay at Jiexiu. This temple itself is well worth the detour, and while you're there, the Aoshen temple just a couple hundred meters to the east (not normally open to the public, though) is also very much worth seeing, that being the sole surviving Zoroastrian temple in China.See more..
