Jing'an Temple

This guide to Jing'an Temple in Shanghai traces roughly seventeen centuries of history on one of the city's busiest shopping streets, from its founding in the Three Kingdoms period through a Song-dynasty flood, and into the twentieth century, when the grounds became a plastics factory during the Cultural Revolution and then burned in a 1972 fire. Reconstruction did not begin until the 1980s, and the temple reopened to the public in 1990. Somewhere inside sits a Buddha carved from a single block of white Burmese jade, nearly four meters tall. Step into the Jade Buddha Hall to see it up close.