Qinglong Temple

This guide to Qinglong Temple in Xi'an opens with a puzzle: the Japanese monk Kukai spent barely two years here, yet people in Japan later credited him with saving an entire valley more than a decade after he sailed home. It follows his arrival in 804 as one of six Japanese monks sent to study under the dying master Huiguo, who poured a lifetime of secretive Tang Buddhist teaching into him in a matter of months, while Kukai also watched how Tang engineers moved earth and tamed rivers around Chang'an. You'll hear how floods back on the island of Shikoku in 818 tore apart a century-old dam and how the Japanese court turned to Kukai for an answer. Walk past the bluestone monument raised to him in 1982 and the cherry trees planted to keep his bond with Huiguo alive.