James Baquet

    jamesbaquet@gmail.com

    AFTER visiting three temples in a day, I was planning to sleep late, write up my notes, and slowly make my way back to Fuzhou and my flight home.

    But as happened before, my friend Venerable Deru had other plans for me. He had arranged for a friend to come pick me up and take me to Nanshaolin Temple. After he had nagged me about this for days, saying, “It’s very historic,” I told him that if I tried to go to every “historic” temple in China, I’d be dead before I finished!

    Anyway, I gave in, and the next morning his friend showed up with her friend — who had a car — and off we drove into the mountains to see the temple. Because Deru’s friend had studied in the Philippines for a year, her English was pretty good.

    To be honest, there was nothing “historic” about the place except its story. Every building and statue was shiny new. But the first Nanshaolin Temple was built in 557, just 61 years after its more famous brother to the north.

    Burned down over three centuries ago in the wars that deposed the Ming (1368-1644) and ushered in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), it has only recently been rebuilt. The ancient site was rediscovered in a historical survey in the 1990s, and reconstruction began in 1998.

    Like its better-known counterpart, it is a center for the study of wushu — martial arts — and frequently hosts demonstrations of kung-fu fighting.