Temple of Ten Thousand Years (Wandian Si)
According to a Chinese gazetteer of Emei Shan compiled in 1887, there are 5,728 steps down the zigzag slope back to Jieyin Pavilion, where the cable car begins. At this point, you can catch a bus to the hotel, ate lunch, and then set out together back up the mountain on foot. Emei Shan is a long, intricate mountain of 90,000 stone stairs; trails wind for 811cm (50 miles) from the Golden Peak to the base town of Emei.
Your walk on Emei Shan can begin at a monastery converted to an elementary school for children who live on the mountain. There is a resident population of about 2,000 scattered across these slopes. This schoolyard is of packed dirt, a basketball hoop with a tattered net at either end; the yard was empty after lunch except for a half-dozen chickens. Vendors were showing their wares under awnings roofed in galvanized sheet metal.
According to the old book I had in hand, Omei Illustrated Guide Book (1891), it is some 1,258 steps up to the first great Monestery, Wannian Si, the Temple of Ten Thousand Years. Somewhere along here, 4,000 years ago, the legendary Yellow Emperor paused to inquire of a Daoist wanderer the way to the summit, and later the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai stopped to pen some evocative lines about these temple-infested terraces:
Bearing the Emerald Tapestry Lute,
A Sichuan monk descended the grand western peak.
With a brush of his hands on the strings
He made me hear a sound like the rushing of pines in deep caverns.
My heart was cleansed by the flowing waters;
The lute’s quaver mingled with the knell
of a temple bell in frost.
Wannian Si, founded 17 centuries ago, the oldest temple on the mountain. Although this temple complex is beautiful and in a luxuriant natural setting, most of its great halls, save the one housing Puxian and his elephant, burned down in 1946. Wannian Si is at an elevation of 900m (3,000 ft.), just above the jungle belt, thick with camphor and banyan, mulberry and banana. You could feel the steam rise and swirl into these highlands, a 24km (15-miles) walk below the Golden Peak.
The building that has survived the longest on Emei Shan, the mountain’s holiest shrine, is at Wannian Si: a squat hall of brick, 15m (50 ft.) square. Inside, under a beamless vault, is Puxian’s white elephant, cast in bronze in A.D. 980, now plastered over with painted stucco. Puxian, eldest son of Buddha, rides on top, his saddle a golden lotus. Modern pilgrims burn long sticks of incense outside the main doors.
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