Jade Buddha Temple

This guide to the Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai follows the monk Huigen, who crossed from Tibet into Burma with nothing but a walking staff and carried two solid white jade statues back to Shanghai by sea, a nearly two-meter seated Buddha and a smaller reclining figure. It traces the temple's rocky start: the 1911 revolution that forced the statues onto a cart for safety, and the decade it took to finish new halls by 1928. Look closely at the seated Buddha's robe as you stand before it, each fold carved from a single block of stone.