China Temples

Posts about China, 2 of 7.

Temples

One thing that I find amazing is the number and quality of temples.  I realize that the Chinese people have been very religious in the past but after the Cultural Revolution and the current philosophy, I would not have expected the high role temples play in people's lives.  Part of this is more tourist points rather then religious.  Now is probably a good point for a tangent, the impression that I get of Chinese tourist is they would like to get to a certain point, take a picture, then travel to the next point.  The idea of exploring or going off the path tends to be foreign to the older generation, maybe the younger ones will be different.  (And yes I drove the tour guides batty since I was always wondering off, aka tours that they expected would last 1.5 hours lasted 3.)

Here are a set of Beijing temples with their parks.


Art work; some of which is being restored or rebuilt.


Here are the temples of the inland China when we visited there.  The cities are Kunming, Dali, Lijiang and Shangri-La.

Here in Kunming we found this temple with the city built right up to it.  There is now regret about letting development come so close to it.  This shows the changing attitude in China.


Confucius's home town.  This was a change of pace.  Most of the other temples have either been rebuilt, restored or redone in some fashion, here things have not really changed as much.  It was nice to see the faded and chipped paintings.


Confucius's cemetery.  Here only descendants of Confucius can be buried.  There are many tombs and this last picture is Confucius's tomb.