Baoguang Temple

This guide to Baoguang Temple in Chengdu follows Emperor Xizong's flight from Chang'an in the winter of 880, as a rebel army led by Huang Chao closed in and the empire came apart around him. It traces his desperate ride into Sichuan and his arrival at a small monastery near Xindu, where something in the ground caught his attention. Centuries later the temple grew a hall of five hundred life-sized clay monks, each carved with a different face by one sculptor and his students over nine years. Stand at the pagoda's base, which still leans slightly from centuries of rebuilding.