Fuguo Temple
Rebuilt Ming-era monastery whose famed five-eave wooden tower was dismantled and moved across town.
This guide to Fuguo Temple in Lijiang centers on the building that made it famous, and the fact that it isn't here anymore: a three-story wooden tower with twenty-four curling eaves, dismantled beam by beam in nineteen seventy-nine and carried thirty kilometers away. It traces the tower's origins as the Mu family's private shrine in sixteen oh-one, built by craftsmen fusing Bai, Tibetan, Naxi and Han carpentry into a single frame, and the temple's rough history since, burned by soldiers in eighteen sixty-four and gutted again during the Cultural Revolution. Walk the hillside grounds and picture the missing tower's outline against the gatehouse that alone survived.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.