Chongyanggong

This guide to Chongyanggong in Xi'an follows Wang Chongyang, a failed soldier and scholar who in the eleven sixties dug his own grave, climbed inside, and spent years testing whether a man could die to the world without dying. It traces the well-side encounter he claimed set him on this path, and how that pit and the mud hut built over it became the birthplace of Quanzhen Taoism. He died in Kaifeng in eleven seventy, and his disciples carried him all the way back to this ground. Look for the ancient ginkgo tree still standing near where the pit once was.