Tiexiang Temple Shuijie St SE Gate
Riverside commercial lane of tiled roofs and stone bridges built around a Ming-era temple housing a buried iron Buddha.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the southeast gate of Tiexiang Temple's Shuijie Street in Chengdu opens in 1590, when laborers digging in Ming-dynasty Chengdu hit a buried iron statue of the Buddha Shakyamuni and raised a temple around it instead of finishing their work. It follows that temple through rebuildings under Ming carpenters and the Qing Qianlong emperor, then jumps forward to the early 2010s, when a different crew spent roughly 350 million yuan raising an entire timber-and-tile commercial street around the old temple. Green tiles, white walls and carved wooden brackets borrow the old vocabulary on purpose, right down to the shopfronts.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Taikoo Li
Open-air, lane-driven shopping district of low tiled-roof buildings wrapped around a working sixteen-hundred-year-old temple.
锦里
Rebuilt Qing-style lane on the site of ancient brocade workshops that once bankrolled a kingdom's war chest.
Huaiyuanzhen
Nail-free timber-frame street of Qing shops and courtyard homes, joined only by mortise and tenon.
Jiezi Ancient Town
Riverside old town of Qing-era timber shopfronts, built around the legend of a poet's poems set adrift in a gourd.
Baoguang Temple
Ancient monastery with a leaning Tang-era pagoda and a hall of five hundred life-sized clay arhats.
南桥
Covered corridor bridge of glazed-tile eaves, lit nightly for photographers chasing its blue-hour glow.