华林寺禅寺

This guide to Hualin Temple in Guangzhou starts with a puzzle: why do vendors pay thousands of yuan a month for a stall barely wide enough to stretch your arms in, wedged into the lanes beside a shrine an Indian monk is said to have raised in the year 526. It follows the temple through a seventeenth-century rebuilding under the monk Zongfu, who renamed it Hualin, and a later hall of five hundred arhat statues copied from a Hangzhou temple, before turning to how traders selling bracelets and pendants set up along its outer wall and never stopped multiplying. Vendors caught passing off fakes here are punished by the market itself, a code that has outlasted the temple's own upheavals.